Todd Gitlin

To hear American television networks talk about documentaries — well, there’s a self-canceling sentence. If they did talk about documentaries, they’d say that they’re like bomb threats: they clear the room. Those eye-glazing, ad-killing relics of a stodgier age might be good for awards, but they’re bad for thrills and therefore bad for business. It’s […]

David Brooks is having an excellent decade. As he might have put it in his breezy, best-selling Bobos in Paradise, he’s the Restoration Hardware of conservative punditry, the Starbucks of insouciant moderation. Indeed, with his frequent appearances in Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines, not to mention his regular TV gig, Brooks might seem […]

I noted in the June Prospect that while the bombs were bursting over Iraq, America’s TV networks were so excited about embedding with troops that they declined to subject the war’s rationale to serious scrutiny. How could hype, hysteria, wishful distortion and rank deception in high places be news when there were no — well, […]

In a standard supplement to their regular war package, mainstream media now occasionally feature — what else? — mainstream media criticism. This time around, the two prime subjects were (1) embedded reporters and (2) bombastic cable networks. Easier targets have never presented themselves. The cheerleaders of FOX News are surefire objects of scorn for networks […]

What’s the role of an op-ed page? Echo chamber for a newspaper’s editorials? Ping-Pong table for both sides of the story? Or supplier of third, fourth, and nth sides and angles of the polyhedral truth? The reader might guess that this writer prefers a lively page that improves the debate, makes new arguments and surveys […]

After months spent diligently not noticing — or belittling — the anti-war movement, mainstream news media are suddenly listening up. But their sluggishness and incapacity illustrate a more general flaw: the inability of journalists to connect dots and put together big pictures. The movement’s sudden arrival on media radar screens comes about partly because the […]

“FOX NEWS ALERT,” screams the screen, in red. “FOX NEWS LEARNS OF POSSIBLE THREAT TO NY HARBOR.” Do we have your attention now? Who cares if FOX’s reporter goes on to say that the New Year’s Eve threat is “uncorroborated, noncredible [sic] and suspect”? Attention will be paid. Attention is television’s everyday grail — its […]

The pregame show is ticking toward the opening kickoff. The networks are up- dating their SHOWDOWN and COUNTDOWN logos, upgrading their drumrolls and trumpet snippets, cueing their cruise missile videos and maps of hitherto obscure regions. The color commentators and military consultants are sipping their coffee in the green rooms, getting pumped. War is the […]

Work is the dirty secret of contemporary life — to judge by the movies, at any rate. Although work is where people experience roughly half their waking hours over the course of four or five decades, working life is not considered glamorous or electric enough to hold the attention of audiences. Filmgoers, after all, treat […]