Jerry Falwell was right: the Teletubbies are insidious, but not because they’re insinuating dubious ideas into the minds of one-year olds. The program is the culmination of PBS’s long drift toward commercialization.
Books, Arts and Culture
Read reviews and commentary on books, movies, video, tv, radio, podcasts, streaming, documentary, media, religion, history, sports, arts and entertainment, social media, Hollywood
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Can TV Improve Us?
We’ve heard it for years: television is bad for us. Maybe instead of fighting against it, we should be trying to make it better. Some public health groups have had surprising success in using television for positive ends.
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Art: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Account Executive
Economic impact studies can demonstrate a return on public investments in the arts. This is a handy tool for arts advocates, but also a dangerous one that reduces art to commercial calculus.
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Essay: Look at Me! Leave Me Alone!
Which is stronger, the craving for publicity or the desire for privacy? The Truman Show demonstrates how tightly married these impulses are.
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How Low Can You Go?
YOUR NAME HERE As public broadcasting has long shown, there is a thin line between philanthropy and advertising that is well on its way to being completely erased. Consider the recent proliferation of corporate logos on endowed professorships, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Stanford has a Yahoo! chair of information systems technology; […]
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The Myth of the Supermayor
A new breed of supermayor is supposed to be revitalizing the nation’s cities. So let’s visit the city and mayor often held up these days as a model for America.
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Storylines: Tough Chat
A few years ago, people who thought liberals were too squeamish in public debate wondered how they could make it in the aggressive and strident forum of talk radio. [See Tom DeVries, “We’ll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?“ TAP, March-April 1996.] Today the same question has come up about another rough-and-tumble medium: political […]
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Essay: Age of Irony
Taking irony seriously may seem like missing the point. Today’s ironic sensibility is never serious. But the old masters of irony had serious fun cutting through cant and pretension.
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Comment: Brighter Prospects
A decade ago, in year nine of the Reagan-Bush era, Paul Starr, Robert Reich and I founded a new liberal journal. The Prospect began as a quarterly, with 2,700 subscribers. Longtime readers may notice a few changes in this, our forty-seventh issue, the first to be published biweekly. 1989 was not a liberal moment. The […]
