“Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: Reinvent yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change.” Leonard Sweet, cultural historian.
A rather colorful (watch the language) email to a local TV station ripping them apart on the poor quality of their news (and therefore why the number of viewers continues to decline).

Interesting article by writer Eric M. Johnson, a Marine Corps Reservist on the Washington Post’s Iraq coverage (if it can be called that).

Don’t take my word for it that the Post?s reporting is substandard and superficial. Take the word of Philip Bennett, the Post’s assistant managing editor for foreign news. In a surprisingly candid June 6 piece, he admits that “the threat of violence has distanced us from Iraqis.” Further, “we have relied on Iraqi stringers filing by telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation.” Translation: we are reprinting things from people we barely know, from a safe location dozens of miles away from the fighting.

UPDATE: The article was also published in the NY Post on Saturday, 7.3.2004.

James Cramer writes about Old Media Giant Viacom’s difficulties:

Viacom SOS. No, to find out why Viacom?s stock sank to the 52-week-low list, all you need to do is look to the 52-week-high list, where the winners are: video games, satellite radio, video-on-demand, and Internet search engines. Those are the companies with the better models, the better technology that has, in an incredibly short period of time, stolen massive amounts of the fuel that powered Battleship Viacom: the viewers themselves.

OnPoint’s Tom Ashbrook interviewed NBC’s Tim Russert last Wednesday. I listened to a bit of this interview while running errands.
One segment, stuck: Russert described a recent Oval Office visit where the President hosted some baseball greats, and invited Russert and his son to participate. Ashbrook correctly asked Russert if this was an example of a cozy insider relationship (I’m paraphrasing) and therefore, can one be objective in covering politicians. Russert insisted that he of course, can……
This is a great example of a major problem today: the cozy relationships between major media and the political establishment. There’s also this: Meeting the press and surviving it; which describes Russert’s recent interview with Colin Powell. Powell’s press aide pulled the camera away when Russert evidently broke the interview’s ground rules.

Columbia Journalism Review has a very useful tool: Who Owns What? Locally, Wisconsin State Journal owner, Lee Enterprises, owns a myriad of small regional publications, including 50% of Capital Newspapers, an entity shielded from monopoly concerns by the no longer necessary Newspaper Preservation act of 1970.