New MediaTheory

A pet peeve of mine has always been the editorializing that newspapers routinely get away with when they publish a photo of a politician or other well know person along with a negative story that depicts them as troubled or discomforted by the news.  But the Internet is a slightly different.  I almost fell out [...]

I’m not at all sure that blogs will replace journalism as we know it.  I am sure that the best independent journalists provide a view that has become institutionally difficult or impossible for ‘professional’ journalists to supply. I think of how war reporter Michael Yon allows emotion to enter into his reporting in a way [...]

Conservatives have been celebrating the extraordinary popularity of Fox News in the era of Obama. A recent example is In From the Cold’s description of drastic cutbacks at ABC News and the continuing struggle for ratings at CNN. For me this raises the question of whether or not the shrinkage affecting traditional print journalism is [...]

This post by Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz argues in The New York Times of Cable News that Fox’s dominance of the cable news business is driving news content similar to the way the New York Times has long determined what stories will be reported on. I’m not at all sure it is that simple, [...]

 In memory of my son Lorenz who died 10 years ago this day. He asked no quarter.

Librarian Emily Walshe’s Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought in the Christian Science Monitor, argues that the Kindle’s access without ownership is dangerous. Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls “the landscape of the [...]

Linux caught my attention from the time is was a command line only operating system. The idea that a free operating system could be built by volunteers on the Internet led by Linus Torvalds fascinated me. I was no programmer, just an observer – a fan even. It was like discovering a Cinderella team and [...]

For those of us following the reporting of the Iraq war in the American press Michael O’Halloran and Kenneth Pollack’s article in the NY Times earlier this month entitled A War We Just Might Win represented a major change in the reporting of the war in the MSM. I believe it was a watershed event [...]

Note: a second foundation post explaining the kernel or core of my proposed new media theory is still ‘under construction.’ Like many before me attempting to put forward a new theory, the need to specify assumptions and context is proving a bigger task than first imagined. I can report that I have made considerable progress [...]