PressEthic

I'm sitting at Bobst now, reading bunch of magazines from OUT (a gay magazine) to the Advocate (a gay and lesbian magazine) to the Vanity Fair (seemingly hetero-sexual) to Islamica (Muslim magazine) to the Newsweek. I swear I would change my last name if I buy the Newsweek again. (Changing one's last name is a big thing for Confucians like me.)

I'm a big fan of Oriana Fallaci's. She died in last September in Florence, months after making the world mad at her with her blunt criticism against the radical Islamism. This month’s issue of Vanity Fair carries Christopher Hitchens’ account of what made Fallaci Fallaci. Hitchens explained, in other words, what made her interviews worth reading.

The New York Times ran a story about an Al Qaeda member today under a headline saying, "British Muslim Sentenced in Terror Attacks." Should they put the word, "Muslim," there?

Another story about how newsrooms are getting smaller and how inevitably the industry's going down.

Has everyone seen the latest annual press freedom index released by Reporters Without Borders? The result is, well, startling.

Rush Limbaugh's comment on Michale J. Fox's ad was worse than stupid. It's easy to hate Limbaugh, yet there's more to it.

I’m half serious. Ever seen him on magazine covers and on television? He’s not the kind of person you would like to sit next to at a party. He’s short and fat and it kind of makes it so much easier for us to hate him rather than to try to understand him.

However, there’s something scary about U.S. media demonizing him. I told you guys in the class I had a growing problem with Newsweek. Particularly with the magazine’s covers. Well, they topped their previous covers this week with a new one which shows Kim with two small mushroom-shaped red flames on his sunglasses under a long headline three sentences long saying, “For 50 Years, North Korea Plotted to Go Nuclear. Now Kim Jong Il says it has. The long, strange history of how rogue scientists, black marketeers and a Stalinist regime have changed the rules of the Nuclear Club.”

Guess who said it?

The number of Americans who publish a book will outnumber those who read one (per year) in 2052, an American print-on-demand books supplier forecasted. Anyone surprised? I guess not.

How often do we read an honest confession on unethical conduct? (Other than in Press Ethics classroom.) Well, here’s an outrageous one.

The Atlantic and the Harper's ran in-depth stories on the war on terror. The Atlantic story is headlined "We Win" and the Harper's story "American Gulag." I believe these two stories are, at the core, talking about the same thing.