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This week's arrest of the Khmer Rouge's second-in-command seems like an opportunity for Cambodians to reconcile with the past. But, as Megan Williams reports, a skeptical generation has come of age - too young to remember and unwilling to believe - the horrors of the Communist regime.
During a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention last month, President Bush invoked a host of historical analogies to buttress his case for sticktoitiveness in Iraq. But what can we really learn from looking at Vietnam or Cambodia or Korea? Brooke dwells on the past.
If you were one of the 227,000 paying subscribers to TimesSelect … well, you are no more. Paying, that is. Sometime early Wednesday morning you received an e-mail stating that the pay wall would be dismantled, effective immediately. Vivian Schiller, senior vice president of nytimes.com, explains why.
While many media outlets hope that web advertising will provide a much-needed new revenue source, web users have already found a way to nullify ads' value - by making them invisible. C-Net's Declan McCullagh explains that new ad-blocking plug-ins raise serious problems for websites and maybe even legal issues for those who use the software.
Spanish-speakers in the U.S. have for decades endured clichéd advertising in their native language, that is when targeted by admen at all. But New York Times Magazine writer Cynthia Gorney says that a marketing sea-change occurred seven years ago when the national census revealed a Latino demographic boom.
The most recent tale of journalistic fraud features Washington D.C. insider and former ABC News consultant, Alexis Debat. Debat has claimed many affiliations and accomplishments (notably an interview with Barack Obama published in Politique Internationale) which have since been discredited. Mother Jones national security correspondent Laura Rozen tells us more about this flim-flam man.
When folks at ABC News learned of Debat’s embellished resume in May, they asked him to resign immediately and investigated his work, but did not inform their audience. Now, in light of news this week of Debat’s faked interviews, ABC is conducting a second internal investigation. Senior vice president and spokesman, Jeffrey Schneider explains.
In the late 1990s Joyce Hatto, a septuagenarian pianist with remarkable virtuosity and range, blazed onto the classical music scene. Critics and the public adored her, but as Mark Singer documents in a recent New Yorker, Hatto had staged an elaborate con. Singer says her skill was in knowing just what the audience wanted to hear.
Highlights from Past Shows
Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg observed last week that Guantánamo has become a recurrent pop-cultural trope throughout the world – in memoirs and novels, visual arts and theater, and even song. Rosenberg, who has visited the prison many dozens of times, believes that Gitmo has long since left the island of Cuba and taken on a symbolic life of its own.
The celebrity endorsement is not exactly new to politics, but then there’s never been a celebrity quite like Oprah Winfrey, who, until now, has never publicly backed a politician. USC history professor Steve Ross says that Barack Obama may have won over the most influential voter of all.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
