Recently in the Journalism Category

A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism.  Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV -- not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are pressnted to the public. (Armond White, New York Press, via)

In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers' own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood's deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.

The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications' void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with "democratization"--almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don't necessarily bother to learn or think--that's the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to--or need to--match opinions with other amateurs. That's Kael's "layman" retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is "conversation" (as when The Times saluted Ebert's return to newspaper writing as "a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation"). But today's criticism isn't real conversation; on the Internet it's too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart.

A good example of new media journalism, in which narration and animation weave short video clips into a coherent analysis. Via the Washington Post.

Our partners at Slate.com created a seven-minute satirical depiction of the Democratic primary season thus far. It covers Sen. Hillary Clinton's "cackle," Sen. Mike Gravel scowling at the camera, debates, former Sen. John Edwards staying in the race and Sen.Barack Obama in traditional Somali clothes.

The Weekly Standard does not like The Newseum.

Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum.

Imagine that, since childhood, you've been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you've kept a weblog.

Imagine that, since 2003, you've taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). 

Recently, after about five years of on-and-off research, you published an article that included archival material about the first interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave Adventure.  Thanks to the kindness of innumerable e-mail contacts, you have been able to study the source code -- recovered from a 30-year-old backup tape -- that had been considered lost. 

Imagine that you're now in the middle of teaching a unit on the materiality and persistence of digital culture, to a class that consists mostly of upper-level journalism students who have been blogging academically for years.  You've recently assigned Espen Aarseth's close reading of Infocom's interactive fiction work Deadline, and you just finished going through Matt Kirchenbaum's detailed forensic analysis of a 5 1/4 floppy disk containing the interactive fiction game Mystery House. 

And imagine that someone (not you) gets ahold of some archival material from Infocom. More than just some archival material, a complete copy of the company's networked hard drive, bristling with e-mails, production notes, source code, and demo files.

I'm always a bit nervous about reading any news article with "said to consider" or "possibly" or "just might gonna be" in the headline, but the NYT reports:

Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who were granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews.

Already, newspapers that compete with each other in local coverage use the same wire copy for national or international news. And already, local TV reporters read word-for-word the first few paragraphs of stories from the same wire services. But this is something new.

The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the  non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named "Joe" and left-handed people died in the last three months?   OMG -- a trend!

Once you get past that tabloid silliness, you find a thoughtful exploration of the world of bloggers who are paid by the post.

New York Times:

"Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break," he added. "But that's never going to happen."

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled -- by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

Here's a "glass is half full" headline that makes me proud to work at Seton HIll:

Seton Hill U Students Step In, Help Officer Being Attacked By Man

Here's a "glass is half empty" headline that makes me go "oops":

Seton Hill student turns Taser on Greensburg police officer

Here's a more neutral headline that went out on the state news wire:

Westmoreland Co. university student turns Taser on police officer

Here's what seems to be a mistake:

According to the news accounts I've read, Spisak was the one who assaulted the officer, so I don't know why this image has the label "victim."

The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news:

Philip Meyer, in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper" (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls "that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose" is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to "Abandoning the News," published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation.

The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change:

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

The other day I was listening to NPR and heard someone (a scientist? activist? somewhere in between?) discussing differences in satellite photos taken in about 1997 and 2004 (or something like that -- I didn't catch the details), and using the differences in these photos to illustrate the effects of global warming. I didn't keep listening long enough to find out whether the reporter asked the guest whether it made good scientific sense to make draw conclusions from two isloated data points. It would be a very different thing if you looked at photos taken every year on the same date over a period of 10 years, and the photos showed a consistent change (with some variation for the typical random fluctuation one expects from the climate).

I've been following climate change politics for some time, mostly because it's a good example of a meta-narrative that all news stories seem to have to fit -- along with "your children are in danger from strangers they meet on the internet" (when the vast majority of perpetrators are family members).

This article from Politico poses some interesting questions.

The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe. The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

One reason is fear of embarrassment. In its zeal to avoid predictive reporting of the sort that embarrassed journalists in New Hampshire, the media -- including Politico -- have tended to avoid zeroing in on the tough math Clinton faces.

Avoiding predictions based on polls even before voters cast their ballots is wise policy. But that's not the same as drawing sober and well-grounded conclusions about the current state of a race after millions of voters have registered their preferences. --Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen

Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's new report:

Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day's newspaper, Rosenstield said. "The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online," he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to a large degree, embracing the changes being thrust upon them. A majority say they like doing blogs and that they appreciate reader feedback on their stories. When they're asked to do multimedia projects, most journalists find the experience enriching instead of feeling overworked, he said. The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business, the report found. Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he's even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times' Web site.

Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response.

Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue "wing" on the left, and the number of conservative inlinks as a red "wing" on the right. The emotional charge of the discussion around the news link is shown as a "heat indicator" on the outside of the wings. Emotional charge ranges from a single orange square to four white-hot squares. Clicking on the wings produces a dropdown of the individual blog posts linking to the news article. In the dropdown, emotionally charged posts have a fuzzy border, while emotionally neutral posts have a solid border.

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (Steve Salerno, Skeptic)

The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events does not a "disturbing new trend!" make -- but that doesn't stop journalists from finding patterns in happenstance. Take lightning. It kills with an eerie predictability: about 66 Americans every year. Now, lightning could kill those 66 people more or less evenly all spring and summer, or it could, in theory, kill the lot of them on one really scary Sunday in May. But the scary Sunday in May wouldn't necessarily mean we're going to have a year in which lightning kills 79,000 people. (No more than if it killed a half-dozen people named Johanssen on that Sunday would it mean that lightning is suddenly targeting Swedes.) Yet you can bet that if any half-dozen people are killed by lightning one Sunday, you'll soon see a special report along the lines of, LIGHTNING: IS IT OUT TO GET US?

Of course I don't know what kind of back story there might be between these two, but keep it off camera, okay, boys? Comically unprofessional.(I'd never heard of this site before... at first I thought it had something to do with journalism, but it seems to be a random assortment of clips.)

From Michael White, of Adaptive Complexity:

There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the 'oppressed underdog' narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it's usually wrong.

The narrative goes like this:

1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.

2. X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.

3. This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.

We love stories like this; in our culture we love the underdog, who sticks to his or her guns, in spite of heavy opposition. In this narrative, we have heroes, villains, and a famous, brilliant scientist proven wrong.

I'm sure you could pick out instances in science history where this story is true, but more often it is not.

The general public prefers to get its science, or indeed information on any advanced subject, in the form of narrative, while scientists themselves (who already know how to interpret scientific data) often find the narrative a distraction. Everyone can identify with people, so the thinking goes, so it makes sense to emphasize the narrative so that non-specialist audiences will keep reading for long enough to absorb a few facts.  The nitpicky details that are exciting to specialists are too abstract for the casual reader, just as the narrative that appeals to the intelligent general reader (a rare breed in today's culture, to be sure) bores specialists to tears.  White hits the nail on the head when he explains why our culture perpetuates these myths.

I don't mean to suggest that oversimplification is the only way to report on science, but scientists themselves can help the process along by recognizing that journalists thrive on conflict, character, and emotion. There are of course straight news stories that might present the scientific background to an timely issue, but unless there's a direct economic or political impact, or a tie-in with a movie or some other event from popular culture, chance are that a writer will have to pitch a story about a scientist as a feature or profile -- hence the focus on personality over science.

Times Online:

In December 2005 a study in the journal Nature offered the observation that the circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, which sustains the Gulf Stream, had weakened by up to 30 per cent over the previous few decades. This figure and its juxtapositioning alongside the melodrama of films such as The Day after Tomorrow were amplified through the cooperation of scientists and media to result in headlines such as "Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream" ( The Guardian, Dec 1, 2005). The urban myth that emerged from this episode was that we were closer to a mini Ice Age in the UK than had previously been thought. Eighteen months later, however, and unremarked by the media, two studies in equally reputable journals pointed out that such a trend was within the range of natural variability and may signify nothing at all.

A second example concerns the claim that, "by the end of this century, climate change will have killed around 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa" (Christian Aid, May 2006). This number - 180 million African dead - has become one of the most widely cited numbers in the litany of doom that accompanies talk of climate change. In this case, however, the number 180 million was sexed-up science. Christian Aid took the worst-case climate scenario, the highest population scenario and the scenario with the least public health intervention and conjured the number into being. And here it has stayed, a number detached from its receding scientific origins in which assumptions were overlain on scenarios that captured uncertainties.

So... according to the headline, we should only *sometimes* accept exaggerated and bogus numbers as scientific fact?

Chronicle (subscription)

Each year Ms. O'Connell, a former dean of admissions at McDaniel College, in Maryland, gives between 35 and 40 presentations, during which she urges parents to stay calm despite the "scary headlines" they have seen in newspapers.

Ms. O'Connell often tries to reassure students by telling them that if they have conducted a thoughtful search, they need apply to only four or five colleges.

Sometimes that's a tough sell. "You don't see people nodding," she says. "They'll say, 'No, I've got to apply to 12 schools, or else I won't get in anywhere.'"

Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management at DePaul University, encounters the same perception. He has spent a lot of time, he says, talking to reporters who want to know why applying to college is so "awful for everyone," or how "nobody can afford it."

"I feel like I'm sort of a buzzkill," he says, "because after I finish talking to them, I've told them they don't have a story."

An excellent article that I'd like to be able to show my journalism students. It isn't common that the story is "there isn't much of a story here." But articles that work against the accepted trends suggest a journalist is thinking independently, rather than following the herd.

Krages.com (PDF)

In the event you are threatened with detention or asked to surrender your film, asking the following questions can help ensure that you will have the evidence to enforce your legal rights:

1. What is the person's name?
2. Who is their employer?
3. Are you free to leave? If not, how do they intend to stop you if you decide to leave? What legal basis do they assert for the detention?
4. Likewise, if they demand your film, what legal basis do they assert for the confiscation?

Greg Costikyan on Play This Thing!

A review is a buyer's guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it. A good review goes beyond that, and suggests who should buy it, since not everyone enjoys everything. (E.g., A romance novel may be very fine of its kind, but is quite unlikely to appeal to me, since it is not a genre I enjoy.) 

Thus, Ebert is, ultimately, a reviewer; the net result of his discussion of a work is a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Mind you, he is also an informed and intelligent watcher of film, and his discussion of a movie frequently veers in the direction of criticism; but he is not being paid to write critical works. Pauline Kael was. 

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn't intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers' purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work. Criticism is, in a sense merely "writing about" -- about art, about dance, about theater, about writing, about a game--about any particular work of art. How a critical piece addresses a work, and what approach it takes, may vary widely from critic to critic, and from work to work. There are, in fact, many valid critical approaches to a work, and at any given time, a critique may adopt only one, or several of them.

One of the first things I do in my Video Game Culture and Theory course is have students compare a games magazine review with a "new games journalism essay" (in order to get them to realize how much else there is to write about besides simply reviewing the game for a person who has never played it).  I then introduce games scholarship, and have students write their own academic research paper on games.  The first time I taught this course, in 2006, there was plenty of scholarship of the kind Costikyan calls for, and when I taught it again in 2008, there was so much that perhaps next year I will demote the importance of "new games journalism" and jump right into the criticism.

Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed:

What plays into coverage of violence, both on campus and elsewhere? The answer, most experts agree, is a confluence of factors.

The obvious starting point -- and one that media analysts say weighs heavily on the minds of editors in all tragedies, not just school shootings -- tends to be the number of victims. Look at the math in the three recent college cases: Virginia Tech (33 dead, dozens injured). Northern Illinois (6 dead, 16 others injured). Louisiana Technical College (3 dead, no injuries).

It's also a matter of the news cycle. The Virginia Tech attacks took place during a period of relative calm. These latest shootings occurred in the midst of the busy election season. Some also point to the fact that Virginia Tech came first and with the descriptor "worst shooting rampage in modern United States history." Since then, school and store shootings have become somewhat regular occurrences.

"This has now become, sad to say, a genre of news story -- the crazed gunman in the school or work place or mall," said Roy P. Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute.

The BBC appended this to its coverage of the Mexico City explosion:

Are you in Mexico City? Were you in the area when the explosion happened? Send us your comments using the form below:

Send your pictures to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or text them to +44 7725 100 100. If you have a large file you can upload here. Read the terms and conditions

At no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe any laws.

From the AP:

Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago.

Amanda Cochran, who was a student in my freshman composition class not too many years ago, went on to be the editor-in-chief of the student paper, and is now in grad school at NYU. She writes about taking on an assignment on short notice.

I was nominated to cover the story yesterday by one of my professors, and just on a whim, I said yes because the press credential online option was closing down and I was one of the only people in my class available to sign up.

So I did.

It wasn't just any assignment... she was to cover Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday campaign party, and then report live on the NYU Tonight broadcast.  Minimal time to prepare; a chaotic environment; a pressing deadline; competition with a pack of dedicated professionals; then the added pressure of delivering the report live. What did she have to say when it was all over?

God, I love journalism.

Update: added screenshot via this entry.

Wired:

A leading general and former top military spokesman in Iraq is pleading with the armed services to let troops blog and post to YouTube.   Too bad the video site is banned on military nets, and Army rules squeeze military bloggers, hard.  Greg Grant notes, politely, that Caldwell's "recommendation that appears to run counter to Pentagon policy."

Great satire from The Onion.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

When steampunk was speculative fiction, not charmingly retro... Edgar Allan Poe pulbished this mock news story in the New York Sun.

The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty -- without any great apparent danger -- with thorough control of the machine -- and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S.C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage...

Times Online:

On the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, the internet gossip merchant Matt Drudge posted a story that opened the most sensational scandal season in the history of the American presidency. He reported that Newsweek magazine had killed a story about President Clinton's sexual relationship with a former intern. The next day he had her name: Monica Lewinsky. The mainstream media were slow to catch up, but by the following Tuesday they were reporting that Clinton was being investigated for encouraging others to lie to cover up the affair.

An opinion published in the Robert Morris University student newspaper:

The purpose of a university newspaper is not to depict students or the school in a negative light, but to talk about positive stories, current events, campus activities etc. Now imagine a high school kid looking to come to RMU, a parent wishing to send his/her daughter here...they decide to pick up the December 12th edition of the sentry...front page..."RMU Student Faces Multiple Drug Charges." What a great way to promote the school! This was in very bad taste for a front page article... Speaking for myself and other students I have spoken to, this is our school and we don't want articles like this on the front page of our school newspaper.

I'm the adviser of Seton Hill University's newspaper, and I don't tell the editor what to publish or where to put the stories. I do confess that I have encouraged them to save their heavy-hitting, critical stories for the issues they publish during the regular semester, and to treat the Summer Orientation issue as an opportunity to build community and recruit new staff members.  So the editor does need to exercise tact. Yet, recently the students published an issue with a front-page article about drug abuse on campus, and the university president said she was proud to distribute it to the board members.

Here's the comment I left on the RMU Sentry's website:

A very important function of a university newspaper -- something that a PR office cannot supply -- is giving students the opportunity to practice journalism. And students cannot practice journalism unless they have the editorial freedom to publish stories that will make some people uncomfortable.  Surely RMU already has a venue for publicizing all the positive stories.

Because the student faces a felony charge, and had already been suspended from classes and kicked out of the dorms as per RMU policy, the event seems newsworthy. I would like to have seen evidence that attempts were made to get the accused student's side of the story, but the article does include a quote describing what will happen if the student is found not guilty -- a clear reminder to the public that the courts have not yet heard the case.

Perhaps the author of this letter (Jason?) should join the staff of the Sentry and work his way up to being on the editorial board, where he can help make decisions such as where to place stories, whether to name names, and whether to publish critical letters to the editor without fully identifying the author.

If the students do their jobs as journalists, they will end up publishing stories that upset some people. Reporting that police have charged someone with a crime is not a violation of the suspect's privacy -- it's a matter of public record. Let's imagine that a student paper published a photo of a student being led across campus in handcuffs, when the police ended up realizing they had the wrong person, or for some other reason they released him without filing any charges. That would be ethically questionable.

John Hockenberry, a former NBC journalist who now works at MIT, reflects on what he says is the increasing irrelevance of TV journalism. Some of my most promising "New Media Journalism" students are interested in a broadcast journalism career, taking on internships and entering graduate school, and they all know why I prefer to get my news from the internet.  So I read this article with great interest.

The specific anecdotes about what got aired and what got spiked, such as how the decision to air a particular news item depended on whether the item had anything to do with the plot of a TV drama that led into the news show -- wow.

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

In the years since my departure from network television, I have acquired a certain detachment about how an institution so central to American culture could shift so quickly to the margins. Going from being a correspondent at Dateline--a rich source of material for The Daily Show--to working at the MIT Media Lab, where most students have no interest in or even knowledge of traditional networks, was a shock. It has given me some hard-won wisdom about the future of journalism, but it is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant. Disappointed veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather blame the moral failure of ratings-obsessed executives, but it's not that simple. I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC's news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. "It's such a great gadget. It changed my life," one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.

Philip Kennicott (Washington Post) reflects on what we might learn about ourselves when we notice that the photographer who snapped the iconic image of a young girl crying in terror after a napalm attack in Viet Nam 35 years ago also snapped the iconic image of Paris HIlton weeping in the back seat of a police car.

They are both photographs. They were both taken by Nick Ut. They are both images of someone in pain. There, with the word "pain," you feel the powerful forces of repulsion. The pain of a little girl burned by napalm (dropped by our South Vietnamese allies) can't be equated with the pain of a silly goose who doesn't have the basic maturity to face a well-merited and laughably mild punishment with any dignity. The photograph of Kim Phuc is about a pain that is real and compelling to the conscience, not just because it was physical but because it was inflicted on an innocent child. The tears of Hilton were due to a court order that returned her to jail to complete a 23-day prison term after repeated probation violations (stemming from a drunk-driving arrest). The vision of her weeping just doesn't feel real. Hilton's pain was fodder for the national pastime of schadenfreude -- an ugly use for celebrity that often borders on sadism -- but at the same time, her pain could have disappeared in an instant, if she were capable of a single philosophical thought.