Nike Inc., while offending people on almost as many continents as it has shod them, has lately been skimping on P.R. My e-mail inquiry to the eponymous Mr. Vada Manager of Nike’s public relations office recently got bounced back with a note saying that Mr. Manager’s mailbox was full with no fewer than 1,000 messages. Read More
Two weeks ago in this space, I chastised ABC, CBS, and NBC for dereliction of journalistic duty for neglecting to shed light on disturbing conditions in factories making Nike and Reebok shoes in Vietnam–conditions made visible in an hourlong documentary in early April by ESPN that put the big three TV networks to shame. The Read More
ESPN, the cable sports network, has proved itself far more serious about reporting labor conditions than the so-called big three, those magisterial dinosaurs whose news divisions have been awfully busy lately exposing Monica, Kathleen, Linda and the Oval Orifice gang. You give them a keyhole, they’ll give you a whirl, but when it comes to Read More
In the same week that S.I. Newhouse Jr. dumped Random House into Bertelsmann’s maw, the news that someone in power cares a hoot about books was faintly heartening. Of course, the someone in question was Kenneth Starr, and the way the independent prosecutor cares about books is to conduct surveillance of them, specifically by subpoenaing Read More
Those who thrill in anticipation of a disgraced President leaving the White House under a cloud might cast their thoughts back 30 years to an actual, not fantasized, abdication.
The evening of March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson took to national television and spoke in a voice both pious and wheedling about the ways in Read More
Whoever said that in the era of gilded info-glut, news magazines are no longer needed? Who else can be relied upon to perform the conspicuous collection of celebrities? What occasion other than Time’ s 75th anniversary cavalcade of self-celebration on March 3 could have seated Mikhail Gorbachev beside Sophia Loren, Joe DiMaggio beside Henry Kissinger, Read More
Go back a year to the moment when Kenneth Starr announced he was leaving the independent counsel’s office to take up the deanships of law and public policy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. As widely reported at the time, the new public policy school was partially funded by Pittsburgh’s leading crank billionaire publisher, Richard Read More
As my mother pointed out the other day, soap opera characters rarely phone each other to say, “Come on by.” Folks just drop in, as in Dostoyevsky. It’s as if feet were not yet vestigial organs, as if Alexander Graham Bell had never lived and the befaxed, bemodemed, bewebbed world had been aborted before its Read More
There is a moment in Jim Sheridan’s incandescent The Boxer that reveals, in a single, perfectly timed edit, what a movie can do. It is a tiny moment, but a moment of truth nevertheless, and it is worth all the goggle-eyed reaction shots, all the cartoon gestures and music-soaked shtick of a Spielberg. It comes Read More
Television journalism, ever slipping toward the edge of oxymoron, is teetering fast. A decade ago, CBS News was in the habit of proudly proclaiming: “We Put America on Top of the World.” Then, along with the jingoist ring, there was at least curiosity about what goes on beyond these borders. Today, shame must have discouraged Read More
