There’s a reason the media misuse the public airwaves to bathe us in rant disguised as journalism—it’s cheap. In every sense of the word.
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, et al, cost their bosses little more than their salaries, while decent journalism costs a great deal of money, proving, I suppose, [...]
The business of The New York Times, like that of any media company, is language, and as newspapers go The Times is the most literate. That is why I was disquieted to read this passage in a Times editorial yesterday:
“Mr. Bush’s father deftly managed the Soviet Union’s dissolution. President Bill Clinton did a poorer job [...]
In the August 8th Times Literary Supplement there is a piquant 1936 photograph by Alfred Eisenstadt of four ballet dancers in a window at The School of American Ballet. George Balanchine, cofounder with Lincoln Kirsten of the school, had a famous penchant for tall, lithe women dancers. One can’t tell from Eisenstadt’s photo how tall [...]
Read More...The news industry is worrying itself from its 19th Century decrepitude to the ether, but it needs to redefine the concept of news itself. What we read in our newspapers and watch on television is antiquarian. In some ways magazines, with their broader perspectives, are ahead of the curve.
What the news needs more than anything [...]
The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis keeps ambushing us. As I scan the world wide web I see another rogue wave rolling in as homeowners ask themselves why they shouldn’t be given property tax relief in light of declining market values.
Read More...Permitting the fox to police the chicken coop has not resulted in a significant increase in the production of eggs, but it has scrambled the once vaunted American Dream, fried our impulse to help each other and poached our collective brain.
We’ve tried a quarter century of free-market, trickle-down sleight of hand. It has done more [...]
Remember the blonde with the gold circle pin who was the standard of everything you couldn’t live up to in high school? She reminds me of the handmaiden of globalist greed that masquerades as our foreign policy.
We assume everybody secretly wants to be like us. But we never ask ourselves: does this mean that everybody [...]
If you watch too much television you start dreaming about the scorned ex-lover of a victim’s fiancé and soon realize your life needs a continuity editor. Not that it matters because your advertising support is weak and your Nielsens are in the toilet. There’s no chemistry between you and the beautiful people whose misfortune is [...]
Read More...The New Yorker magazine’s incendiary new cover caricatures Barack Obama in Osama bin Laden head dress. Michelle Obama is seen sporting an afro and an AK47, and they’re fist-dapping in the Oval Office. The cover article is favorable to the couple, the cartoon’s defenders say, being intended as satire. It’s meant to drum up attention, [...]
Read More...The ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes is as rare and precious in our private lives as it is in the affairs of nations. Word that young Muslims are flocking to the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan to take up arms against the West has Washington beltway insiders beating the war drums [...]
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