World News Center
DreamWorks Deal a Fantasy Made True
September 9, 2010There was something heartwarming about the sale of DreamWorks for an irrationally exuberant $1.6 billion to Viacom's Paramount Pictures this week instead of to its longtime suitor, General Electric's NBC Universal. It proved all over again that even if Hollywood looks overrun with corporate suits and marketing drones, it's still activated by emotion and perception.
The Future Face Of Network News
September 9, 2010Joe Gillis (William Holden): You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Anonymous Sources And a Known Quantity
September 9, 2010Media life seems to have turned into one long cannibal feast, a fratricidal Thanksgiving dinner minus the giving of thanks. No sooner have we finished dining out on roast Judith Miller with stuffing than we are ready for a nice, big slice of Bob Woodward pie.
The Ambassador's Undiplomatic Maneuver
September 9, 2010 LONDON There's a new catchphrase in London: Are you a skier? And it has nothing to do with winter sports. It's a quasi-acronym for Are You Spending the Kids' Inheritance? In the age of celebrity culture and instant news, cash is not the only fast currency. Former pillars of the establishment are shorting their Reputation, too.
Long Out of the Kitchen But Still Taking the Heat
September 9, 2010It's been an unsettling few months for women of a certain age. Between the flameouts of Judy Miller and Harriet Miers, the frantic reentry of Martha Stewart and the sight of former CBS News producer Mary Mapes shaking her gored locks on ABC's "Good Morning America," everywhere you turn there's a power woman either in extremis or declaring she's indestructible, which are usually the same thing.
The Late-Blooming Prince
September 9, 2010Most people don't have to wait till the age of 56 to come into their own, but you can't help feeling that the Prince of Wales has finally caught up with the zeitgeist. Or maybe it's the zeitgeist that's caught up with him.
This Time, the Prosecutor's a Corker
September 9, 2010It's one of the ironies of our media culture that the mystique of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case, grew to mythic size simply by virtue of Fitzgerald keeping his mouth shut until he has something to say.
Seeing Right Through The Times's Transparency
September 9, 2010 The age of the blogosphere has produced a new genre of mainstream journalism: fake transparency. The New York Times has become its foremost practitioner. The paper of record has been arraigned for arrogance so many times in the past three years that it has forgotten how useful arrogance can be. The Gulliver of West 43rd Street has gotten so spooked that now it preemptively lies down, affixes bonds to its wrists and ankles, and invites the Lilliputians of cyberspace to walk all over it.
You've Come a Long Way, Ladies
September 9, 2010The healthiest aspect of the Harriet Miers nomination is that women haven't rallied to her cause. Ten years ago, there would have been a lot of reflexive solidarity about keeping the Sandra Day O'Connor spot on the Supreme Court from reverting to male type. But every female lawyer I've spoken with in the past week skips right past the sisterly support into a rant about Miers's meager qualifications or her abject obeisance to power. The good news is that for women, it seems, Miers's nomination is like the moment for blacks in Hollywood when it was suddenly okay to cast an African American actor as something other than a perfect hero. The Sidney Poitier phase is definitively over.
Lips Bearing a Presidential Seal
September 9, 2010You would think one of the side effects of the president's slide from Top Gun would be an eruption of disloyal memoirs. Since the outbursts of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and terrorism czar Richard Clarke, there's been a lack of literary lava out of Washington's Mount Vesuvius.
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