It's not personal, or indeed political. But just as David Cameron, my country-of-origin's current prime minister, has crossed the Atlantic and come to my adopted hometown of New York, I have bolted in the opposite direction, over to the UK.

It's in fact just a coincidence. But it has...

The terrorist attack brought out some of the worst, but also much of the best in American journalism. That was true of 9/11/2001. I wish it were true of 4/15/2013 as well.

But sad to say, among all the other aching distress caused by the Boston bombing, its coverage in...

"South By," to use that rather flat, familial nickname habitués have given their annual festival here, South by Southwest, contrived to be in itself a somewhat flat event this year.

I'm thinking of the Interactive (with all things geeky being considered) and the film parts of the festival, and not...

THE MAN HAS earned two big pictures on The New York Times' front page ... the lead-story position on the BBC's World Service, persistently ... not to mention endless acres of tabloid coverage in print, on TV and online.

Such is the fate of the once-gloried Olympian Oscar Pistorius, the...

From London, BBC World Service Radio is promoting, world-wide of course, a forthcoming special devoted to a quintessential bit of American history.

It's the story of Rosa Parks, the now-famous anti-segregationist who at the early point of 1955 boosted the Civil Rights movement toward being a major national force...

I get to tell a little-known story on TV this weekend.

Just ahead of the centenary of Rosa Parks' birth, when she will be feted throughout the nation as "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," I report for PBS on a terrible injustice being done to her memory.

If columnists want to follow tradition, they'll face a binary choice at this time of year. Look back over the 12 months just gone -- or look forward to those to come.

I've generally tended to avoid trying to predict the future. (Last year, when I gave in...

An inter-media transfer is in place that celebrity-chasing reporters have been eagerly awaiting.

Movie star Katie Holmes (movie star, and still newly-divorced wife of a movie mega-star, of course) takes to the boards of a Broadway live-action theater. The play is Dead Accounts, by Theresa Rebeck, opening officially tonight (Thursday,...

He was, as we've all noted, a much-changed Barack Obama during last night's second debate. But it was a familiar setting for him -- something many in the assembled media teams would not remember.

He debated John McCain there, in the Sports and Exhibition center of Long Island's Hofstra University...

Candidates' debates have since 1960 become indispensable media elements in a presidential campaign -- and so too have the full dress-rehearsals held in secret before them.

Last night's first-of-three prompted me to tally up how many role-playing exercises, across three continents, I have engaged in ahead of such broadcasts.

Dateline: Lancaster, England - The whole world's eyes, as they say, have been on Britain. And Britain's own scrutiny of itself has also been intense - encouraged by an orgy of self-absorption by the British media.

The conclusion it has reached has proven somewhat unexpected, at least for this supposedly...

Life after power has its inevitable fascination for journalists. The study I've been making of Tony Blair since he left the UK Premiership in 2007 hits the air this weekend on the PBS show Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

The work of his Tony Blair Faith Foundation --...

A lot of words -- many of them just too easy -- have been applied to Gore Vidal since he died on Tuesday.

Adjectives have proliferated that evoke eras long gone by -- like "patrician"... "aristocratic"... even "Augustan" (though I'm skeptical that John Dryden or Alexander Pope would have...

Once in a great while, an individual will cross the media landscape, maybe not leaving scorching headlines in his wake, but certainly making an indelible mark on our consciousness.

One such remarkable if understated individual was the dogged and sharp sportswriter Linton Baldwin (1926-2012) -- pictured here in a recent...

I got to renew a familiar connection during my summer hiatus from the weekly column THE MEDIA BEAT.

I recorded an interview for PBS with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. We taped in London, where he's still a very divisive figure, mainly because of...

LONDON -- For a reporter who has chronicled the long bloody struggle by Irish nationalists to break free of British domination, it's been an almost freakish time to visit the UK.

England -- and perhaps most of all London, the biggest magnet for overseas visitors -- is still engulfed in...

So it's possible. This week's news tells the world that a criminal head of state can be made -- eventually -- to pay for his crimes.

It inescapably felt historic to take in the live feed from The Hague as Presiding Judge Richard Lussick read in his matter-of-fact Australasian...

Three media behemoths -- all threatened by small snippets of information. And brought low by the discovery of that information. Or not, as the case may be.

The difference in outcomes, so far at least, is key to a telling tale about today's media landscape.

Facebook, News Corporation and Google...

Amid the Murdoch empire's many and multiplying hard knocks -- now for instance, police charges on obstruction of justice against the former Chief Executive of all its British newspapers, their Head of "Security," and others -- it's easy to overlook intriguing items in the empire's actual editorial output.

But the...

Two media talkathons grabbed me this week -- each very different, though their messages chimed together in an intriguing way.

One was veteran film, TV and theater director (oh, and one-time improv comedian) Mike Nichols showing up to talk at the New York Times. Not for an article in the...