It's been two months since Congress narrowly passed a major overhaul of Medicare, and initial indications are that many seniors are less than clear about its details. And so this week, the government launched a 12.6 million dollar advertising campaign targeted at seniors who still have questions about the new program. No sooner had the spot hit the airwaves than critics denounced it as election-year sloganeering by the Bush administration. Bob speaks with William Pierce, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, which is overseeing the ad campaign.
After President Bush released his budget plan this week, the online community went into overdrive, picking apart not just the budget, but the coverage of the budget. Bloggers complained that though the numbers didn't add up, critical analysis was noticeably absent from the front pages of many newspapers. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agrees, and tells Brooke why.
The year is still young, but computer hackers are already hard at work, crashing our hard drives and clogging the net with worms and viruses. The latest outbreak, "Mydoom," has already penetrated some half million computers worldwide. For an article in this week's New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson traveled through Europe in search of the masterminds behind the worst computer viruses. He tells Brooke what he found.
While there are basic things computer users can do to avoid virtual virus infection, stopping the viruses at their sources is proving to be a much more daunting prospect. As law enforcement agencies struggle to combat hackers worldwide, President Bush is calling on Congress to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime. But others are criticizing the measure as an affront to civil liberties. Bob talks to the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt about the treaty.
A free forum of ideas suggests a back-and-forth exchange between individuals with various perspectives. But what happens when people are sequestered to separate discursive spaces on the basis of their ideas? As we're seeing all over the Internet these days, debate breaks down, and in its place we find simply a multiplicity of "echo chambers." Brooke talks with University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein about the metaphorical reverberations of the phrase.
The British Invasion might have been presaged on the radio, but it was consummated on TV. February 9th marks the 40-year anniversary of the Beatles’ first live appearance on American television. Few events these days garner the kind of audience that tuned into the Ed Sullivan show that evening. 73 million Americans - nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population - saw it, making it one of the most watched broadcasts in history. OTM's Paul Ingles takes us back.
Janet and Justin won't be the last TV performers to be accused of treading the line of decency. And they certainly weren't the first. There are several candidates for that honor, among them the man known as Soupy Sales. In the early sixties, Soupy hit the airwaves with his (supposedly) child-oriented program. What ensued was more than a decade of goofy songs, flying pies, and hassles from suits in the control room. Brooke reflects on TV censorship, then and now.
Highlights from Past Shows
In the face of mounting evidence that Saddam's Iraq posed no imminent threat to the U.S., the Bush administration continues to insist that Operation Iraqi Freedom was justified. White House officials are reverting to linguistic obfuscation, emphasis on certain talking points and the omission of others, and of course, blaming the media. Brooke talks to New Yorker senior editor Hendrick Hertzberg about the White House's efforts to gradually shift the terms of the Iraq debate.
After the votes were tallied this week, pundits continued to debate how much the Iowa caucuses really matter. But if there's any lesson we take away from Iowa, it's that the media love a winner, and love to hate a loser. And according to National Journal media critic Bill Powers, the theatrical coverage of the rise and fall of candidates follows the same predictable stages as celebrity tales of triumph over adversity. Bob parses the coverage with Powers.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
