ACCORDING TO MEDIA LORE, thanks principally to the vintage series The Naked City on ABC television, “there are eight million stories” in New York.

But one of the great untold stories of this metropolis is the high-quality art on its walls. Not just hanging on them, but literally on them; and therefore a very part of those walls themselves. Continue reading “Walls Can Talk: Stories of New York Murals” »

HALF-CENTURY COMMEMORATIONS of major civil rights events are now studding the calendar of our nation’s media — inevitably, since 1963 was such a fateful year.

Last month the media rightly celebrated the March on Washington and Dr Martin Luther King Jr‘s resonant “I Have A Dream” speech — a broad wedge of an event that began to prise open overdue changes in our society. And now this week, by contrast, the media have had a poignantly sharp event on which to tightly focus — the Ku Klux Klansmen’s murder of four young girls by bombing Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th. An event that lasted just a few, but interminable seconds.   Continue reading “Church Bombing Horror: Memorial’s Unreported Sidebar” »

CABLE TV NEWS got its biggest enlivening jolt since the invention of CNN, enthusiasts are arguing, when the new channel Al Jazeera America (AJAM) was finally launched this week.

This newest service to emerge from the deep pockets of the Qatari royal family was also supposed to deliver a strong, hard news-based corrective to the partisan rhetoric that typifies Fox News and MSNBC.     Continue reading “Al Jazeera Goes Ahead — But in Reverse” »

CASCADES OF COMMENTARY still course through the airwaves and cyberspace about the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin – a legal process that in its end last week achieved the very opposite of settling matters.

So much has been written and said — much of it aimed at influencing Attorney General Eric Holder into deciding now on the exercise of federal powers over the killing — that I’m simply stepping back. No more words, surely, are needed. Instead (but still kind-of related) let’s consider terrorism.

Continue reading “Next Big Media Debate: “Home-Grown Terror”” »

A GLOBAL PUBLISHING PHENOMENON has long fascinated me. Ranking number three among the world’s best-selling poets — after Shakespeare and Lao Tsu — is Kahlil Gibran.

The most famous and most-quoted work — certainly in the English-speaking world — from this avowedly mystical writer and artist is The Prophet, and it has never been out of print, ever since a sharp-eyed Alfred Knopf took a flyer on the young Lebanese immigrant in 1920s New York, publishing a first run of 2,000 copies.    Continue reading “Publishing’s Mystical Miracle – Enduring Legacy for Gibran” »