News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has issued a public apology for the News of the World scandal, which appears in several British national newspapers this weekend. The final text is available here. For those unfamiliar with the exciting world of public relations, these kinds of official statements often go through a rigorous process of draft, revision, review, more revision, show
Read moreThis morning, a pop quiz. One question. Compare and contrast the following two videos. First video (the money shot begins around 0:13).
Read moreA few days ago, Phoenix Suns president Rick Welts revealed that he is gay. And the whole sporting world exploded yawned. Okay, that’s not precisely true. There has been a bit of comment and analysis. But so far, no controversy. No homophobic ranting, no athletes stepping up to say that Jesus doesn’t approve, none of that. This is a wonderful
Read moreI’ve never much cared for the musical genre broadly known as Americana, and lately I’ve been thinking about why this is. I suppose it’s acceptable to say hey, I’ve listened to a lot of these artists and most of them just kinda bore me, but that seems unsatisfactory for a guy who thinks about music like I do. After some
Read moreI could go a lot of different directions here, but I decided to be straight-up about my self-interest. I’d like to hear Fiction 8‘s “Hegemony” on the radio, partly because I just love the song, partly because I’m good friends with front man Mike Smith, and oh yeah, partly because I co-wrote it. (More on that process here and here.)
Read moreI know that there’s no such thing as a band that everybody likes, and I’m fine with the idea that some people can’t stand my favorite band, U2. I don’t always understand the objections, but so what. I am puzzled when people flat-out misunderstand fairly obvious poses, like Bono’s Macphisto or The Fly characters, which were explicit Pop Star parodies
Read moreI think we’d all love to live every phase of our lives in happy accord with high moral and ethical principles. We’d love it if we were never confronted by logical contradictions and cognitive dissonance, by cases where our walk was at odds with our talk. But the truth is that we live in a society that’s complex, at best,
Read moreA few weeks ago I asked a question: is the Huffington Post a force for good or a liberal sweatshop? In the wake of HuffPo‘s megamillion-dollar sale to AOL, it struck me as appropriate to question the ethics behind an allegedly progressive business operating in a fashion that was indistinguishable from the greedmongering corporate entities it professed to oppose. I
Read moreI promised myself that I’d hold fire for a few days when the AOL/Huffington Post deal was announced. My initial reaction was that the sale shone a bright light on some dysfunctional dynamics within the “progressive” media sphere (and this was even before I read Dr. Denny’s outstanding take the other day on how we’re all just serfs in the
Read moreBack in August, the University of Colorado proposed the discontinuance of its School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Since I hold a doctoral degree from the SJMC, I was more than a little bit interested. The move stood to affect people I know and regard highly, and I couldn’t help wondering how badly shutting the doors would devalue my degree.
Read moreIn a recent discussion on one of my political lists Sara Robinson (easily one of the brightest folks in the blogosphere) made an important point about what often causes people to migrate from socially conservative perspectives to more progressive points of view. In describing her experiences with a particular activist group that helped people leaving fundamentalist religions (something that can
Read moreOne of my lists is currently engaged in a fairly dynamic discussion about “what is a progressive?” In thinking about the issue, I realized that it might help to ask the question a slightly different way: what would a progressive society look like? Maybe I can better understand what it means to be progressive in 2010 if I reverse-engineer the
Read moreA few days ago Ted Koppel uncorked on the “partisanship” of today’s broadcasting news in an op-ed at the once-proud, once-respectable, but now utterly reprehensible Washington Post. In doing so, he attracted a great deal of praise from all kinds of people, including at least one or two of my highly respected colleagues. As I argued in a perhaps ill-tempered
Read moreIt was Sun Tzu, I believe, who first suggested that in order to win the war, you sometimes have to lose the battle. This precept has been on my mind quite a bit since the results of the recent election began rolling in. For instance… Earlier today one of my political lists was discussing the aftermath of the elections and
Read moreIn September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger jets. They flew three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The fourth was retaken by the passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. These things we know. Since then, much has transpired. For example: The US invaded Afghanistan, the nation that had harbored the terrorists
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lullaby pit 