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As the terrorist attacks in Mumbai unfolded last week, Indian news channels went into crisis-mode with non-stop coverage. But many Indians are now expressing outrage, saying that coverage was so detailed that it aided the terrorists. Arnab Goswami, chief editor of the English-language network Times Now, says the criticism is misguided and that India's young news networks rose to the occasion.
The Western media had few reporters on the ground in Mumbai during the three-day siege so many turned to services like Twitter to make sense of what was happening. Gaurav Mishra, an expert in social media, says a new ecosystem for crisis reporting emerged when western journalists mined twitter posts for details and twitter posters in turn linked to the best reports from the newspapers and TV networks.
Last week, a jury in the MySpace suicide case found Lori Drew guilty of violating the site's "terms of service agreement" and that, they said, made her a hacker. The Berkman Center's Christopher Soghoian says according to the agreements on many popular sites (you're supposed to be 18 to use Google!) many of us are hackers.
So one of the jurors in the MySpace trial reads every terms of service agreement she encounters, but does anyone else? And if not, why not? New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann explains why companies have them and why we think we can ignore them.
In James Boyle's new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of Mind, the "sealed crustless sandwich" is just one example of patent law gone awry. Boyle argues that current law is making it harder and harder to share information and ideas to the detriment of the culture at large. His book is available for free online here.
The John Birch Society turns 50 this week. Yup, they're still around. Historian Allan Lichtman takes us back to the beginning and JBS president John McManus says the Society is as relevant now as it was during the Red Menace.
Every so often there comes a study with findings that simply cannot be conveyed adequately in words alone. These occasions call for a musical journey, an exploration of the destructive impact of media consumption habits through the irrepressible power of song. This is one of those times.
Highlights from Past Shows
What are the rules that govern journalistic portrait photography? Wide-angle lenses, nonstandard lighting, shooting from below – they’re all fair game and frequently employed by photogs working for major publications. But what obligation is there to the subject? Bob searches for answers.
***NOTE: Follow along with our slide show to view the photo portraits mentioned in this piece.***
For financial journalist Michael Lewis the desolation emanating from Wall Street is all too familiar. He’s edited a new book Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity that returns to five of the most recent market meltdowns and analyzes what reporters thought was happening before, during and after each of them. Lewis explains why the past isn't really past.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
