:: Media Times Review Blog ::

J.D. Lasica, Nieman Reports

The transparency of blogging has contributed to news organizations becoming more accessible and interactive.

Journalism is undergoing a quiet revolution, whether it knows it or not. Readers will always turn to traditional news sites as trusted, reliable sources of news and information — that won’t change. But the walls are cracking. The readers want to be a part of the news process.

Suggest to an old-school journalist that Weblogs have anything to do with journalism and you’ll be met with howls of derision. Amateur bloggers typically have no editorial oversight, no training in the craft, and no respect for the news media’s rules and standards. Does the free-for-all renegade publishing form known as blogging really have anything to do with journalism?

Anthony D. Smith, Axess Magazine

The nation endures. Many have predicted that national identity will be replaced by global identity. But this is true only for a small global elite that most closely resembles a pre-national aristoricracy. For most of the world’s citizens national identity has maintained, and even strengthened its grip. But what do we now mean by terms such as “nation” and “state”?

Rob Mitchell, Business Week

The charities we choose to support say a lot about us. Consciously or not, we prioritize and decide which charities mean the most to us, just like we do with a consumer brand.

Occasionally a single cause captures the public imagination, as Make Poverty History (MPH) has; its symbolic white wristband has become as ubiquitous as iPod earphones or the latest Harry Potter book, and is in itself a fashion statement (or as Richard Curtis, one of the UK charity’s patrons, prefers to call it, a “passion statement”).

In mid-July, 1962, Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall came for a BBC television interview to Zermatt where I happened to be collecting that summer. The lepidoptera lived up to the occasion, so did the weather. My visitors and their crew had never paid much attention to those insects and I was touched and flattered by the childish wonderment with which they viewed the crowds of butterflies imbibing moisture on brookside mud at various spots of the mountain trail. Pictures were taken of the swarms that arose at my passage, and other hours of the day were devoted to the reproduction of the interview proper. It eventually appeared on the Bookstand program and was published in The Listener (November 22, 1962). I have mislaid the cards on which I had written my answers. I suspect that the published text was taken straight from the tape for it teems with inaccuracies. These I have tried to weed out ten years later but was forced to strike out a few sentences here and there when memory refused to restore the sense flawed by defective or improperly mended speech.
The poem I quote (with metrical accents added) will be found translated into English in Chapter Two of The Gift, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1963.

Farah Nayeri, Bloomberg

Karl Marx was a closet capitalist.

So writes French author Jacques Attali in “Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde” (Fayard, 504 pages, 23 euros.)

Attali argues that the theoretician widely blamed for the rise and fall of the Soviet Union was actually a free-marketeer who favored capitalism as a stepping stone to his communist ideal and predicted globalization as we know it today.

Leland de la Durantaye , Boston Globe

Stated somewhat differently, the most brilliant American novel of the 20th century, now a round and ripe 50 years old, tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words–and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words.

IN THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family’s first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country’s best butterfly hunting.

Jack Jordan, Spiked: online

When the spotlight of the Western media was last on Ukraine, optimism was in the air. ‘Our man’ was in, the oligarchs were out and a new era in Eastern European politics was being predicted by journalists and politicians alike.

The so-called Orange revolution – in which the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko fought his way to the presidency despite electoral fraud, the state-controlled media and an attempted poisoning – was hailed as a shining example of the New Europe in action. It made for a good Hollywood narrative: the dioxin-scarred Yushchenko finding the strength through ‘people power’ to take on the dark forces of the post-Soviet world. With the colourful occasion of his inauguration ceremony and the party afterwards on Kyiv’s central square, the story was given a neat climax, and the attention of the world turned elsewhere.

Arnold Kling, Tech Central Station

Economists support the idea of health insurance. However, many of us believe that policies that pay for all health care services are not real health insurance. Insurance should protect people against catastrophic loss, but it should not insulate them from the cost of all health care. As an economist, I believe that the law of demand applies in health care. I believe that if patients are insulated from the cost of health care, then they will err on the side of obtaining unnecessary CT scans, MRI’s, and visits to specialists. They also will “err” on the side of obtaining useful preventive care.

Paul Farhi, American Journalism Review

Philip Meyer, who has studied the newspaper industry for three decades, can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. “I use that as an attention-getting device,” says Meyer, whose latest book, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” spells out the bad news in elaborate detail. “It’s shocking, but that’s what the numbers say.”

Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek

Browsing through the August 15th issue of Time, I came across an insightful quotation from the brilliant Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker is quoted in Time’s cover story on the role of religion in schools. Pinker says, defending the theory of natural selection against the idea of “intelligent design,” that

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

Indeed so.

I don’t here write to enter my two-cents in the debate between Darwinians and creationists (although, for the record, I am solidly in the Darwinian camp). I write to record that Pinker’s insight applies to society no less than to biological beings.