Now that Mel Gibson has received at least his first dose of punishment, maybe it's time to reduce the piling on to second gear for a moment.
Oh, for the good old days, when William Randolph Hearst's papers, teeming with spirituality, helped people find meaning in life and good in the world.
My friend Gavin de Becker has written an open letter to Ari Emanuel which appears in today's (Friday's) Hollywood Reporter. Since only people with ab...
Much better news about the music scene than it could have been. What's left out: music education, the way the tradition of the city gets passed on to young people.
Why does the profession of reading the news on TV require a post-graduate education?
Trying to answer the question, who are the terrorists?, should be the first step in deciding whether the advocates for a more "muscular" Middle East policy should finally be replaced by the advocates of a more brainy one.
If we were at war with Islamic fascists, according to the Administration's own well-documented legal arguments, we would have killed them or detained them and thrown them in Gitmo.
EDINBURGH--This is a special moment. Emboldened as usual by failure, the neocon cohort is still cohesive and aggressive, not yet arrived at the neces...
EDINBURGH--Thursday's NYT carried a Susan Saulny story about John McCusker, the TP photographer so depressed he tried to commit "suicide by cop" in Ne...
Christiane Amanpour, one of the few grownups left at CNN, tells NYT.com (via TVNewser): "I reject and try to hold the line -- my line at least -- aga...
Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, has been taking bows for catching a Reuters free-lance photog Photoshopping extra smoke into a Beirut scen...
No paragraph better sums up this style of journalism--why bother to speak to the guy when you can look him in the eye and detect what he's feeling?
This Times-Picayune photographer found his particular breaking point in a place that used to be known as "the city that Care forgot", but is now known to locals as "the city that America forgot".
Iran's President tried his hand at clumsy media manipulation Sunday night, but a cannier ploy, were it more widely noticed, seems far more likely to put the Bush administration in an embarassing light.
A lot of commenters to my "Charles Johnson" post earlier this week thought I was attacking CJ and Little Green Footballs for nailiing Reuters on the P...
EDINBURGH--Last week, as noted in the "journalist becomes the story" post earlier here, a somewhat prominent New Orleanian cracked under the pressure ...
It's understandable that media emphasis should be on what government spokespeople are telling us. It's equally reasonable to expect that the media seek out responsible voices for skepticism.
If the centerpiece of the push for a democratic Middle East is to be consigned to "alternatives other than democracy," that would seem to be big news.
EDINBURGh--Apropos of my post earlier this week about the paucity of volunteer psychological services for the heavily traumatized population of New Or...
Twice in one sentence may be a record for "Katrina-ing" the story of what happened to the Crescent City. But wait, there's more.
EDINBURGH--Stephanie Grace in today's T-P summarizes the state of New Orleans--the stasis, the paralysis, the underlivered promises--and acknowledges ...
If it isn't the continuing battles with insurance companies or the periodic power outages, New Orleanians can depend for a dose of daily anxiety on their old friends, the Army Corps of Engineers.
Large-scale city planning stopped being a panacea for urban problems around the time Jane Jacobs wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
If the state's leading political figures treat the Corps' "catastrophic failure"--Corps' own words--as an unmentionable, it leaves people around America still thinking this was a natural disaster.
Tivo the emotional stories if you want, but the best thing you can do for New Orleans is to get past the "natural disaster" myth.
