The Media
Held by the Taliban
David Rohde’s extended account of his hellish seven-month-plus captivity in Afghanistan and Taliban-held Pakistan is running this week in the NYT. Part one is here. It’s about as gripping a narrative as you can possibly imagine, and a testament to the man’s extraordinary bravery and sacrifice. Rohde took a risk in interviewing a Taliban commander because he felt duty-bound as
New new media
I haven’t had to time to sit down and absorb the proceedings from today’s National Summit on Arts Journalism, but thought I’d highlight their five featured new media projects: Departures, Glasstire, FLYPMedia, San Francisco Classical Voice and Flavorpill. I’m glad to be surfing the last wave of old media at the Inquirer (will have a Christian McBride feature there soon).
Polanski and etc.
“Do successful artists get a pass for their moral failings or crimes?” asks the NYT Room for Debate blog in regard to the Roman Polanski affair. Gee, ya think? Not only do they get a pass for their moral failings — they’re often celebrated for their moral failings, which are too easily mistaken for virtues. At the most recent Oscars,
Pacifica death spiral
Marc Cooper on the continuing nosedive of “alternative media” bastion Pacifica Radio, and what this disaster says about the “media reform” movement. “If it can’t bring itself to scrutinize the squandering and trashing of the $500 million Pacifica network (the market value of its licenses), then why should we trust this movement to offer serious analysis of the rest of
Amy Goodman, hack
Protests are heating up again in Iran, so comment on the following is timely. In June 2007 I remarked on Amy Goodman’s fawning interview with left extremist John Pilger, a declared supporter of the Iraqi insurgency, an admirer of Hezbollah and apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers, and a Balkan genocide revisionist to boot. (Pilger considers himself part of the “peace
The call of conscience
Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader, has been gunned down by assassins on motorcycles. Steve Coll has published a long, extraordinary statement from Wickramatunga in anticipation of his own death: It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a
Project Censored PS
Peter Phillips of Project Censored has responded to my critique, in which I point out that the director of an entity nominally devoted to fighting censorship actually supports censorship, as long as it’s done in Cuba. You’ll find Phillip’s largely boilerplate response, which fails to engage any of the points I made, at the bottom of the original post. He
Herbert on Project Censored
While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship… I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list