Eye-opening for news consumers, and useful for journalists hoping to understand the changes sweeping the profession.
Protestations by Fox News and the White House notwithstanding, the “liberal media” is a fiction. And what’s killing the news business, writes New Yorker media critic Auletta (Three Blind Mice, 1991, etc.), is that most cherished of capitalist emotions: lust for profit.
Independent newsgathering is increasingly rare, as documented in this collection of New Yorker pieces (augmented by one for the American Journalism Review) over the last ten years. Witness, the author offers as one bit of evidence, the bid CBS made to score an interview (presumably exclusive) with celebrity POW Jessica Lynch: an executive wrote to her family to promise exposure on several programs. “But the executive didn’t stop there,” Auletta writes. “She noted that Viacom, the corporate parent, owned Paramount, which could make a movie of Lynch’s heroics, and Simon & Schuster, which could offer a book, and MTV, a popular cable network, which might make her a cohost of a video show, and Infinity Broadcasting, the second largest radio network.” Thus the ascendancy of “synergy,” which increasingly lowers the long-protected wall between the editorial and business sides of news organizations and dumbs the news down to reach a mass audience. Auletta’s pieces include a careful account of the rise and fall of New York Times editor Howell Raines, whose regime collapsed in the wake of scandals involving Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg (who, as if to illustrate that synergy has no shame, has signed on to write Lynch’s memoir); a lively sketch of New York’s “tabloid wars,” whereby its lesser organs of news and opinion scrambled to dominate the market in “a bar fight that . . . is aimed at one overriding goal: to be the last man standing”; a look at that wall-lowering phenomenon as it played out, dramatically, at the Los Angeles Times under a new management that apparently valued news integrity less than double-digit returns; and a juicy dissection of the Fox Network, which has turned television news into an even louder and more ignorant version of all-talk radio.
Eye-opening for news consumers, and useful for journalists hoping to understand the changes sweeping the profession.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2003
ISBN: 1-59420-000-9
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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