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This week, journalism's most mysterious anonymous source, Deep Throat, revealed himself to be former G-man W. Mark Felt. Media portrayals have cast him, alternatively, as a crusader driven by affection for the Bureau or a disaffected bureaucrat with an axe to grind. Bob reflects on the media's final installment of the "kind of crazy &$!#@ story" that imbeds itself in the psyche of a nation.
And so an end to the quest for the true identity of the shadowy figure with a penchant for parking garages and an eye for potted plants. But Slate.com senior writer Tim Noah says, knowing what he knows now, that there was never a level playing field in the Deep Throat sleuthing game. As he tells Brooke, Woodward and Bernstein have been dropping misleading hints for 30 years now.
A new media project is underway in South America. Frustrated by years of U.S.-centric TV news, the creators of Telesur say the network will present Latin American news from a Latin American perspective. They also say they'll be editorially independent, even if they depend on Venezuela and other governments for funding. Bob discusses Telesur's prospects with Nikolas Kozloff of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
Five years ago, some media investors saw a big opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa. With the help of the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC), they created TV Africa, a pan-African entertainment and education network. But a mere three years later, the plug was pulled on TV Africa. Brooke talks to IFC senior investment officer Darren Massara about the difficulties of building transnational media from scratch.
It's clear that pan-Arab satellite channels have had a huge impact on Middle Eastern politics. But American University assistant professor Marwan Kraidy says it's not just the explicitly political programming that's contributing to political upheaval. It's entertainment programming too. Kraidy tells Brooke about one example - the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation reality show "Star Academy."
For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers. In Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, J.D. Lasica explores the realm in which so-called pirates operate - slicing, dicing, and sharing media to their hearts' content. Lasica talks to Bob about how Hollywood is driving consumers further into the shadows and under the radar.
At any given hour, the BBC's website is the most visited news site in the world. So it was quite a surprise when the organization announced last month that it's relinquishing some control of its online content in order to harness some of the energy of internet innovation. The only condition of the new arrangement is that content sharers explain their intentions. Tom Loosemore, co-creator of Backstage BBC, tells Bob why it's better to share.
Last month, Infinity Broadcasting gave its listeners control of the airwaves, at least on one money-losing AM station in San Francisco. It renamed the station KYOU, and switched its format to amateur-submitted podcasts. KYOU calls it "open source" radio. Meantime, in another part of the broadcast universe, Christopher Lydon is giving voice to his own version of open source radio. He joins Brooke to explain the vision behind his new public radio show.
Highlights from Past ShowsPhotographs of American soldiers killed in Iraq are a window onto the cold reality of war there. Does that mean we should see those images in our morning papers? So far, the answer from editors seems to be no. LA Times media writer Jim Rainey surveyed eight major newspapers, and joins Brooke to discuss what he found.
Newsweek lied, people died. At least that has seemed to be the shorthand adopted by many news organizations in the aftermath of Newsweek's retracted item about alleged abuses at Gitmo. Cable news pundits have gone apoplectic over what they see as the latest in a long line of media indiscretions, even while it remains unclear how responsible Newsweek was for the violent protests. Media war... or culture war? Brooke weighs in.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
