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The week, The Lancet formally retracted a deeply flawed study that suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The 1998 study has provided fuel for the anti-vaccine movement for years. The Lancet's editor Richard Horton describes how this debacle has forever changed the way the journal will deal with the scientific community and the media.
The H1N1 virus hasn’t proven as deadly as first feared. A German epidemiologist named Wolfgang Wodarg says the WHO intentionally overstated the threat. Others blame the media. We asked The New York Times health reporter Donald McNeil, sociologist Eric Klinenberg, and the CDC's Glen Nowak whether the media overstated the threat or helped contain the virus.
In an attempt to bypass the pesky media and get news directly to the fans, sports leagues have been creating their own television networks. Case in point: the admission of St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire last month on the MLB Network that he used steroids during his playing days is "a historic, seminal event in the evolution of sports media in America,” says Tim Franklin, director of the National Sports Journalism Center.
For years, the remarkable accuracy of video game football was the closest armchair quarterbacks could get to actual NFL play-on-the-field. The actual game inspired the virtual one. But increasingly, according to Chris Suellentrop in this month’s Wired Magazine, the trend has reversed. A generation of actual NFL players, raised on games like Madden NFL, are bringing the influence of video games into their real play.
The typical televised football game lasts about three hours. But according to a recent study by The Wall Street Journal, only 11 minutes of that time is actually devoted to live play. Bob Fishman is a game director for CBS Sports, the person who decides what home viewers see and when they see it. He explains how he spends the other two hours and 49 minutes of a broadcast.
When we think of journalists experiencing trauma, we often think of war correspondents and yet trauma can happen in one’s own backyard. Two years ago, a shooting rampage in the small community of Kirkwood, Missouri left local journalists covering the murders of their friends and neighbors. Don Corrigan, editor of The Webster-Kirkwood Times, says he’s never seen journalism in the same light since that day.
JD Salinger died last week, nearly 50 years after publishing his last short story. The reclusive author claimed to have been writing novels in private over the last half century. Slate columnist and devoted Salingerophile Ron Rosenbaum talks about what might be locked in Salinger's safe, and when we might get to see it.
Some unpublished Salinger writing has already found its way into the world. For instance, the Firestone Library at Princeton University has a collection of never-published stories by the author. While patrons aren't allowed to check them out or even to photocopy them, that hasn't stopped obsessive Salinger fans from making the pilgramage to see the stories. OTM producer PJ Vogt is one such fan.
Highlights from Past Shows
For over a century, politicians trying to rally their base and refocus voter anger have relied on a durable rhetorical tactic - populism - the framing of virtually any issue as us vs. them. President Obama used the strategy in his State of the Union address. Historian and author Michael Kazin describes the tradition and tactics of rallying the masses.
In Haiti this past week, American networks featured their medical correspondents acting as both reporter and doctor, often simultaneously. On CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC, newsmen and women became part of the story, raising ethical questions both medical and journalistic. A former television news producer, a former medical reporter and media ethicists weigh 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.
