Transparency
: The news business demands transparency of the world it covers and now has to learn to be transparent itself. They're not taking to the lesson easily.
After Rathergate, CBS should be opening all its doors and drawers to rebuild its credibility. But RatherBiased.com reports that some execs do not want to release the full investigative report on Rathergate being done now. That' would be numbnutty in the extreme.
And Dan Okrent writes in today's NY Times Public Editor column that Times editors are having problems learning that they should be talking about the paper with the paper's public.
Here's an idea: if the editors did the explaining themselves, maybe I wouldn't have to do it for them.
For decades, the Fraternal Order of Falsely Modest Newspaper People has marched under an indelible banner: "We're not the story," it says. "The story's the story." ...
I suppose the speak-for-itself trope made sense back when the image of the American newspaper was embodied in a freckled newsboy tossing a rolled paper onto a porch hung with geraniums. But in an age when the press is so widely regarded as a predatory and uncontrolled beast, the failure to allow readers a view inside the cage can only aggravate their worst suspicions.
No sex, please, we're American
: Frank Rich has another good column on the prigs' and prudes' war on sex and popular culture -- and free speech and the First Amendment and the Constitution and democracy, while they're at it.
No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact.
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