The rhetoric was heated this week on Capitol Hill, as the two parties neared a high-stakes showdown over the President's judicial nominees. Perhaps not as heated, though, as last Sunday, when several conservative Christian groups staged a telecast that was broadcast nationwide via a vast Christian media infrastructure that has been building for years. Religion writer Jeff Sharlet tells Bob about the many ways in which mainstream media are blind to the story of what many see as the coming spiritual war.
It's election time again – in England. And fresh from watching the political strategy employed during our elections, Tony Blair is facing many of the same criticisms that Bush did. But the similarities stop there. Chief among the differences is that the kind of deference afforded to the president here by the media is notably absent in the U.K. So does a critical national press result in a more informed electorate, a more engaged voter? Bob speaks with Michael Goldfarb, senior reporter in Britain for WBUR.
Silvio Berlusconi has been Italy's prime minister for the past four years. He's also the man who owns and controls 90 percent of Italy's television stations. And a major publishing house. Plus national papers and magazines. For the most part, Italians, and journalists, have quietly put up with this near media monopoly. Until now. As Megan Williams reports in Rome, the political tide may be turning for Silvio Berlusconi. And it seems this time, TV isn't keeping him afloat.
Just before 9 o'clock Thursday evening, CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer offered a typical post-news conference wrapup of the president's remarks on Iraq, North Korea, education and, especially, Social Security. Except that it wasn't a post-news conference wrapup. It was a mid-news conference wrap-up. Bob reflects.
In October 2003, after an internal review triggered by the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times hired Daniel Okrent to the new post of public editor. Okrent agreed to take the job for 18 months only, and since then he's written a lively and widely-discussed column investigating reader complaints. Nearing the end of his tenure, he's taken on what he rightly calls the hottest button: Times coverage of Israel and Palestine. Okrent joins Brooke to reflect on his term and saving the best for last.
When On the Media last covered what then-Secretary of State Colin Powell called "genocide" in the Darfur region of Sudan, some 50,000 people were dead. That death toll may now be close to 400,000. So where is the television coverage? It's on mtvU, an offshoot of MTV. mtvU executive, Stephen Friedman, tells Bob the coverage is having an impact among students. Georgetown activist Nate Wright agrees.
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The State Department has abruptly stopped publishing its annual report on international terrorism. The move follows news that the number of terrorist attacks in 2004 represented a 20-year high. U.S. officials say the report's methodology needs retooling. But others accuse the State Department of squelching information that contradicts the President's message about progress in the so-called War on Terror. Bob talks to Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay, who broke the story.
If politicians learned anything from Watergate, it’s that the best way to manage a scandal is to be forthcoming, and that the coverup is often worse than the crime. But in today’s polarized Washington, crisis management is changing. Witness the case of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is waging an aggressive counter-attack against a range of ethics charges. Brooke talks strategy with Washington Post staff writer John Harris.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
