MERCIFULLY, THERE ARE SOME media outlets that don’t always, with big stories, merely plow on ahead heedlessly to the next big story.

These more thoughtful news organizations will moderate their innate devotion to utter novelty, and stay awhile with already familiar news … in order to analyze it, ponder it, and even more gratifyingly sometimes, dig deeper into it.

Continue reading “TORTURE: American Horror Story that Won’t Go Away” »

A REALLY ODD THING once happened to my journalism. And then, equally oddly or more so, it happened again.

I never really had anything like a real specialty as a reporter or as a TV producer – “Generalist!” was my proud boast. But suddenly back in the early 1980s I was unaccountably put in charge of network programs (for Britain’s commercial television service, ITV) that concentrated entirely on religion and ethics.     Continue reading “Amazing Story of a Church’s 2,000-Mile Journey” »

ONE MEDIA RITUAL that’s a reliably renewable resource is the post-election poring over pollsters’ data.

Who got the results most right ahead of time naturally preoccupies the industry most of all, but so do more arcane, and often really quite useful analyses of detail. Like demographic breakdowns of the voting population … the chief motivating concerns of voters … relative turn-out by party, gender or age … and so on.     Continue reading “Dissecting Polls Data: Yet More ‘Plus ça Change’” »

IT’S VERY HARD TO BELIEVE. At least for me it is. I have been writing THE MEDIA BEAT for a full ten years.

It began in October 2004, in the midst of that year’s US Presidential campaign. I was assigned by the then-editor of the still fairly new, and free, New York paper AM New York, to provide a weekly critical commentary on the mass media.    Continue reading “A Decade of Media Monitoring” »

AS A MEDIA-GRABBING STORY, the surge of juvenile immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them unaccompanied as well as undocumented, seems to have gone off the boil.

We’re left with the ongoing, indeed saddeningly repetitive saga of undocumented adults making their desperate efforts to find a livelihood north of the border.

But one grim aspect of that struggle — the continuing deaths of such adults in Arizona’s unforgiving desertland — remains under-reported at the national level, though it thankfully does get considerable local media attention.     Continue reading “Underreported: Reuniting Families With Dead Migrants’ Remains” »