Author: admin

Many a time and oft have I written in days of old of the media’s lack of self-awareness, their apparent blindness to their own dishonesty and corruption. Like King Lear, they have ever but slenderly known themselves; and, like King Lear, they have finally been brought to the point of self-destruction through the want of…

As recently as March 21st, The New York Times  was joining in the chorus of disgust and ridicule at the bad taste and self-importance of a gaggle of celebrities, led by Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, who had recorded John Lennon’s “Imagine” in a version of what the ancient Greeks used to call stichomythia, each…

When everyone was making fun of Mara Gay and Brian Williams last week for saying on MSNBC that, for the $500 million Michael Bloomberg had spent on his failed campaign for the presidency, he could have given everyone in the country a million dollars, I felt a bit sorry for her — a bit less sorry…

Everything that’s wrong with our media can be summed up in a headline from today’s Politico: "‘Really shocking’: Trump's meddling in Stone case stuns Washington: Alarmed veterans of the Justice Department said the legal system was entering uncharted territory." The headline, to an article by Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman, refers, of course, to the…

Like so many other monuments of bygone art and artistry, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield would seem to be, to the artists of today, no longer a work of art but no more than a mirror in which they can see only themselves. In today’s Times of London David Aaronovitch celebrates a new cinematic version, by Armando…

Max Beerbohm said that history doesn’t repeat itself but historians repeat each other. I wonder if the latter repetition doesn’t give rise to the former? Those lucky baby boomers who, like me, have managed to make it to the half-century mark since they were college-age revolutionaries will have grown used to the sense of déja-vu…

We already know from Dean Baquet’s "Town Hall" meeting of the New York Times staff last summer who has the final say on what headlines the paper publishes — and it’s not Dean Baquet, though he is nominally the editor. So there should be no surprise that this morning’s headline to a story about President Trump’s…