Last weekend's coverage of Irene proved that a hurricane isn't just a meteorological event, it's also a huge media event. The most dire media predictions for the storm's impact didn't come to pass, causing some to say the storm was over hyped by the media. Brooke talks with the New York Times' Nate Silver, who says the numbers show that Irene may have actually been under-hyped.

Song: Walla Illa

Artist: Tinawiren

Al Jazeera reaches hundreds of millions of homes around the world, in spite of facing fierce opposition by the governments of the Middle East and the United States. Wadah Khanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera, explains how the organization continues to expand, and how their mission continues to evolve.

Tea partiers complain that most media outlets (except Fox News) either ignore them or portray them as a bunch of crazies. We wondered: is the coverage biased? The Washington Independent's (soon to be Washington Post's) David Weigel, who's been covering the tea party movement since it ...

TV coverage of the health care reform process focussed mostly on the political gamesmanship surrounding the bill, with very little time spent on what was actually in the bill itself. According to Slate's Dan Gross, the irony of the horserace coverage was that for all the prognosticating the pundits did, ...

Health care dominated the media recently, and this past week was no exception: a survey by the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that health care coverage accounted for a staggering 37 percent of the newshole. But despite all the coverage, more than half of Americans ...

Slate editor-at-large Jack Shafer has been covering the plagiarism beat for some time and he's found that throughout every scandal the excuses remain the same. On the heels of two plagiarism scandals last month, he talks about a list of ...

On March 18th, a public auction will be held in Midtown Manhattan. On the block? Sex.com, one of the most coveted pieces of internet real estate, ever. But be warned. Sex dot com comes with a long and troubled past. It’s all chronicled by Kieren McCarthy in

This week, an Italian court handed out half-year prison sentences to three Google executives. Their crime? Violating privacy law by hosting a video. UV Media Studies and Law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan says it’s a decision that challenges basic assumptions about whether internet companies can be liable for their ...

Last Wednesday, a committee of British lawmakers met to discuss reforming the country's libel laws. As it currently stands, libel law is so friendly to plaintiffs there that foreigners frequently visit just to sue other foreigners in British court. John Kampfner, head of Index on ...

In recent weeks Toyota has struggled with the mechanics and the mea culpas of a successful product recall. What’s a global company to do when faced with a high profile consumer crisis-of-confidence? Veteran PR crisis manager Gene Grabowski says look no further then the ur-successful ...

The National Enquirer has gotten a lot of mainstream press recognition recently for singlehandedly breaking John Edwards’ affair with Rielle Hunter. On the heels of last week's admission by Edwards that he is the father of an illegitimate child with Hunter, the tabloid has announced

Some OTM listeners following the coverage of the earthquake in Haiti have written us to point out the sheer numbers of reporters who had made their way to the stricken island. In a commentary for The New Republic, senior editor Noam Scheiber ...

Time was journalism school was touted as the first step to entering The Industry and making a living. But The Industry is quickly collapsing and j-school is scrambling to adjust its training accordingly. Jeff Jarvis, professor and new-media evangelist, argues that the future lies in teaching ‘entrepreneurial journalism,’ where every ...

Journalist Paige Williams wrote a profile of Dolly Freed, a reclusive author who'd been briefly famous in the 1970s after writing a book about her years spent living off the grid. When Williams couldn't find anyone willing to publish Freed's story, she decided to publish it herself ...

Last week, Comcast moved one step closer to acquiring NBC-Universal when the two companies reportedly agreed on a valuation of NBC-Universal at around $30 billion. The idea of combining distribution and content has always seemed like a good idea to media moguls, but Craig Moffett, analyst at Bernstein ...

This week, the Associated Press fired a shot across the bow of news aggregation sites like Google and the Huffington Post. Without calling any site out by name, the AP said they would take legal action against websites that use their content without paying. Business Week's media columnist ...

This week, On the Media is re-airing a show dedicated to one of our favorite topics – books. From Oprah's Book Club to the Google Library Project, the way we buy, search, read and even discuss books is changing. And so we begin with a look at some of the ...

Michael Kinsley is a longtime columnist and editor, mostly of non-fiction. He also happens to think there’s much too much of the stuff and even he has trouble staying afloat in the sea of new books each year. Kinsley explains his predicament.

This week, On the Media is dedicating the entire show to one of our favorite topics – books. From Oprah's Book Club to the Google Library Project, the way we buy, search, read and even discuss books is changing. And so we begin with a look at some of the ...

How do you raise the profile of a devastating Nebraska drought? Give it a name, like David? Carl Ganter, of the non-profit group Circle of Blue, says that as climate change increases the threat of droughts, we need new stories and images to raise awareness.