This month, the Pentagon contracted an American company, Harris Corp., to run the much-criticized Iraqi Media Network, now called al-Iraqiya. Harris Corp.'s partner will be the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International. It's not surprising that the respected and well-rounded LBCI was chosen for the project. But some have wondered why an Arab media outlet would cooperate with the reconstruction effort in Iraq, considering how much that effort is scorned by much of the Arab public. Brooke speaks with Michael Young, opinion editor of the Daily Star in Beirut.
Over the past 20 years, media mogul Conrad Black amassed the biggest newspaper holding company in history. Mostly, he bought struggling papers that were traditionally conservative…and reinvented those that were not in his own political image. This week Lord Black was charged with misallocating funds, and was forced to step down from the helm of his media empire, Hollinger Inc. Bob gets the scoop from Black biographer and Sunday Telegraph reporter Richard Siklos.
The New York Times has created a new, post-Jayson Blair, ombudsman-esque position that they call Public Editor. Daniel Okrent is the first up to bat in taking on this brand new role. He talks with Brooke about being the voice of the people at the paper of record.
This week, The New York Times startled many of its long-time readers with a comprehensive typographical facelift. For decades, the Times has been known as the paper with five or six different typefaces on a given day's front page. But the editors decided that less was more, and so they commissioned several variations of a century-old typeface - Cheltenham - for use as its sole headline type. Bob chats with Matthew Carter, the renowned typographer called in to make the changes.
In the city where celebrity and politics collide in a dazzling extravaganza of 24-7 gossip, all the gossipers are gossiping about one of their own. Last week, former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove was transplanted to The New York Daily News, where his Lowdown column has already generated its own share of buzz. Grove, it seems, has successfully tapped into the age old art of success-stripping. Brooke goes inside the world of professional dirt-dishing in the gossip capital of the world.
The Daily News, Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper, was shut down by President Robert Mugabe’s government several weeks ago. The paper is forging ahead, online where they are now publishing, and in court where they are challenging the constitutionality of the very laws that are being used to silence them. Bob talks with Gugulethu Moyo, the legal representative for the Daily News, about the state of journalism in Zimbabwe and the danger she faces personally.
After a summer of intensely scrutinizing the Bush Administration's selling of the war in Iraq, many media outlets seem to be backing off. But not the Washington Post. More and more, the paper that expressed editorial sympathy for the war has relentlessly pursued government misrepresentations of the Iraqi threat. Bob talks to Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie.
The media is frothing with every development in the Kobe Bryant story. It has all the elements of an American scandal - money, celebrity, sex…and race. Long before jury selection and the first utterance of defense, the media have begun to speculate on the role of race in the case. Bob talks with Leon Wynter, author of American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America, about whether the media can afford to play the race card with the prince of the NBA.
