From all the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, you'd think the story the news media missed was one of huge consequence, like going to war on fabricated grounds. Instead, it was an affair involving a once-viable presidential candidate, ex-U.S. Sen. John Edwards, and a videographer who worked for his campaign.
PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Apparently, Barack Obama sells. According to The New York Post, the July 21 New Yorker magazine issue with the satiric cover cartoon of Barack as an Islamist and wife Michelle as an armed militant sold 75,000 newsstand copies, compared with an average 43,000. Time magazine, the leading newsweekly, says its five covers this year featuring Obama, Hillary Clinton or both sold either ''significantly'' above average or above average. (Its single John McCain cover sold below average.) Time's 2006 Obama...
VOLTAIRE
FERNEY-VOLTAIRE, France -- In a park near the center of this serene town on the Swiss border is a glass-and-concrete community center named for Jean Calas, an 18th century merchant who was put to death for hanging his son.
MEDIA
Amid the dismal reports of cutbacks, layoffs, fear and trembling in the country's newsrooms, the birth of Pro Publica has been reason for cheer. It's the dazzling new investigative reporting outfit, a nonprofit venture funded with $10 million a year from a California philanthropy to hire two dozen top-dog journalists to 'focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with `moral force,' '' it says.
MEDIA
David Sedaris is a hugely successful humorist who has been pushed into a revealing literary mini-scandal after The New Republic ran a long article that concluded that his best-selling books, which he characterizes as factual, make notable use of fabrication.
MEDIA
I was abroad when the memoirs of Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, hit the news, so I missed his first disclosures about administration lies and the early attacks his book triggered. I've since caught up on several interviews -- he's an affable guy, like his ex-boss -- and read up on what his book says.
MEDIA
Faced with advertising declines, the news media are scratching for alternative revenue sources. They want their new money to have the same features industrial countries want in their alternatives to oil: That it be clean and renewable.
