PressEthic

Today Air Marshalls shot and killed a 44-year-old man on an American Airlines flight at a gate at Miami International Airport. It was the first time Air Marshalls have used their guns since 9/11, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle confirmed in the Times.

The presence of Air Marshall's on domestic flights has steadily increased since 2001 amid concerns from some groups that guns on planes is a plain bad idea.

Point being, big news. Front page news.

One of the interesting things about Google News is what sources they use for their lead stories. They give you hundreds of choices if it's a big story like this one, but they lede with one news source for the headline.

I disagree with him. The Times shouldn't have run it.

No seriously, it's important.

US courtship of Iraq running short on cash.

Ad in latest edition of the Village Voice

And Bill Keller doesn't like you.

A foreign tourist couple approached me today on E 12th St. and asked how to take the bus to Harlem. The bus to Harlem?

I said I didn't know, and that it was faster to take the train anyway.

"Yes, but you have heard the announcement?" the woman asked. The announcement? Oh, the announcement.

"You don't want to take the train, do you?" I asked.

Her eyes widened. "Nooooooo. No!" she barked.

Ok, that's one for Bloomberg's announcement keeping people off the trains.

Ultimately, I don't know if these terror announcements should be made. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Extreme Makeover?

I spent part of last week talking to military recruiters in Queens. The intention was to have them talk about the current state of recruiting.

Four of the guys I spoke with had come directly from Iraq into recruiting and what they wanted to talk about was media coverage of the war.

They're not happy.

In a nutshell, all we see is the bad stuff, they said. All we see are the bodies.

We don't see the hospitals and schools being built, we don't see the lights coming on for the first time in months, we see the bodies.

They all wanted the news to reflect more of their personal experiences. Understandable.

Christopher Hitchens

The JetBlue flight that was forced to make an emergency landing at LAX yesterday was fascinating as an example of the advent of "real-time" news coverage, for lack of a better phrase.

"Many of the 140 passengers watched live coverage of their plight on television monitors embedded in the backs of seats," the Times article said.

Wow. That's a stark crystallization of the character and power of television media today - watching the news on tv as it happens to you.

It's a case study of how the 24-hour television news cycle has made broadcast reporting a kind of stream of consciousness event, with little or no division between the event and it's delivery to the public.

If they only serve 8, is that enough?

A new identity for the broadcast press?

President Bush is addressing the General Assembly at the UN today, where he will press member nations for a unified resolution on Iran's nuclear ambitions - specifically, a threat to send the issue to the Security Council where sanctions could be imposed if Iran does not stop its nuclear processing activities.

After agreeing last November to suspend tests at uranium-conversion facilities, Iran last month announced that it would resume testing, despite its earlier indications that it would consider a long-term agreement with France, Britain and Germany that would trade suspension of its nuclear activities for substantial economic assistance. The US was largely absent from these initial negotiations.

Is it ethical?