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President Bush’s description and defense this week of U.S. standards for interrogating terror suspects put the issue of torture back in the news. In 2003, Abu-Ghraib caused a flurry of attention. But much of what we know about U.S. torture policies is the result of dogged reporting. Eric Umansky surveyed post-9/11 torture reporting for the Columbia Journalism Review, and tells Bob what the coverage teaches us about the press.
Erstwhile CNN anchor Aaron Brown anchored much of that network’s coverage of the September 11th attacks and their aftermath. Five years later, he joins Brooke to reflect on the moment when media earned unprecedented good will from the American people…and the intervening years when they lost it again.
Watching TV used to be a purely passive experience. But these days, viewers are sitting up, voting, playing along, and in many cases taking control of the script. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, MIT professor Henry Jenkins examines the new media landscape from the point of view of advertisers, networks, and audience members. He converges with Bob to discuss.
As long as citizen journalism proponents have been pumping its merits, skeptics have been bothered by one question: Where will the funds come from? NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen thinks he has an answer, and is launching a website to test it. He tells Bob how NewAssignment.net will attempt to harness the experience of ordinary people to mount investigative projects that mainstream media just aren’t up to.
Last spring, blogger Ze Frank decided to try his hand at video blogging. He launched “The Show,” a two-minute daily webcast in which he riffs on whatever happens to be on his mind. And people are tuning in –at the tune of more than 100 thousand of them a day. Frank tells Bob that it’s not necessarily because of what they see there, but rather what they can do there.
In September 1966, Gene Roddenberry dispatched the crew of the starship Enterprise on its maiden voyage through space and time and into the American living room. It was an inauspicious start, but forty years later the Star Trek universe is still expanding. Brooke explores the various television incarnations of the franchise and the infinitely powerful engine behind it all: the fan.
Highlights from Past ShowsYet another shoe dropped in the Valerie Plame saga this week. It seems the original source for columnist Bob Novak’s scoop wasn’t Karl Rove or Scooter Libby. According to a new book by two beltway reporting vets, it was Richard Armitage, erstwhile Deputy Secretary of State and early critic of the war plan. Which would seem to dispel the malicious intent that many journalists had ascribed to the mystery leaker. Brooke speaks with Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism about whether the media have done the story justice.
The view from here is that Iran is a closed society with no outside (aka Western) news, information, or entertainment slipping in. Is it true? Or, are Iranians offered a variety of global views via satellite television and the internet? As America’s diplomatic stalemate with Iran becomes increasingly prominent in the headlines, Bob asks Tehran-based Time reporter Azadeh Moaveni about the perceptions, and misperceptions, across the cultural divide.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
