A LOT OF WORDS – many of them just too easy – have been applied to Gore Vidal since he died on Tuesday.

Adjectives have proliferated that evoke eras long gone by — like “patrician“… “aristocratic“… even “Augustan” (though I’m skeptical that John Dryden or Alexander Pope would have embraced him in their circles).

The truth is that Vidal was — for all his elegant door-stops in print, many of them instantly vintage and lauded as superior American historical novels — absolutely a creature of popular mass media. Of television most of all, I’d say.     Continue reading “The Precision of Gore Vidal, Broadcaster” »

Continue reading “Ulster Image of Emnities Buried — While Other Hatreds Live On” »

THEE MEDIA BEHEMOTHS — all threatened by small snippets of information. And brought low by the discovery of that information. Or not, as the case may be.

The difference in outcomes, so far at least, is key to a telling tale about today’s media landscape.

Facebook, News Corporation and Google are the behemoths involved. Facebook’s ignominious Initial Public Offering, and its stock-price slump that followed, have revealed that secret (and (suddenly more realistic) information about its financial prospects was allegedly hoarded misleadingly by Morgan Stanley, its banker for the offering.     Continue reading “Google Beats All at Keeping Secrets … So Far …” »

SO IT’S POSSIBLE. This week’s news tells the world that a criminal head of state can be made — eventually — to pay for his crimes.

It inescapably felt historic to take in the live feed from The Hague as Presiding Judge Richard Lussick read in his matter-of-fact Australasian tones (he’s from Samoa) the sentence on Liberia’s ex-President Charles Taylor — 50 years’ imprisonment. Lussick spelled out that it was for — still no vocal inflections from the judge — “some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history.”     Continue reading “Message of Accountability for Murderous Leaders?” »

AMID THE MURDOCH EMPIRE‘s many and multiplying hard knocks — now for instance, police charges on obstruction of justice against the former Chief Executive of all its British newspapers, their Head of “Security,” and others — it’s easy to overlook intriguing items in the empire’s actual editorial output.          Continue reading “Rupert’s Grip on Output Getting ‘Wobbly?’” »