Category: media

How many Americans listen to public radio? National Public Radio says almost 30 million. But it really depends on how you crunch the numbers…

“It is strange that while we worry about literacy and the need to read, an entire generation is growing up in complete ignorance of a rich and varied part of its own cultural heritage. How many teens could name one film by David Lean, Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Powell – or even explain, with any degree of accuracy, what their involvement with that film actually was?”

Jerry Bruckheimer has made about $5 billion for Disney over the past 15 years. But his movies are expensive, and they don’t seem to fit Disney’s new direction. So who blinks? Will Disney lose one of its biggest, most-bankable stars?

“It’s not just TV ratings anymore that affect network decisions, and shows aren’t being produced just to appear on the air. Soon – probably very soon – everything that runs on the networks will just be the simple, economy versions of shows.”

“Meta-fiction is an umbrella term for works that are self-conscious and self-curious, and includes non-linear exercises in structural experimentation. As a way of translating the world into visual and narrative art forms, meta-fiction is probably as old as self-awareness. Today, however, it has become the blossoming byproduct of increasing introspection and accelerating technology.”

The internet has promised a great liberating democracy of content. “So great has this belief been that the power of user voting has become the central organizing principle of an entire genre of websites such as YouTube and Digg. Well, sometimes newborn democracies become Poland or Argentina and sometimes they become Iraq, and the Web’s system of government suddenly looks precariously balanced between those models.”

TV viewers are using dramas to educate themselves. “Science is invading scripts. Disease is increasingly a backdrop to plots. The woes of the nation’s healthcare system are punch lines. Heroic characters have mental diseases or incurable neurological disorders. And behind the scenes, a body of communications research and an eager network of health and policy advocates are working with writers and producers to get the facts right.”

“Despite the fact that ‘kids’ movies’ have never been more financially profitable, artistic bankruptcy has rarely seemed so rampant. What a relief, then, to discover that many young audiences crave something different.”

Sometimes it seems, like they let anyone vote for the Oscars. Besides actors, directors and producers, casting directors and makeup, design and other technical teams all get votes. Even publicists. But not agents. “As they prepare to argue their case yet another time, agents note that their role has changed from the days when they simply got actors to sign on the dotted line.”

It’s a well-known fact that African-Americans are terribly underrepresented on American television, but what about the black shows that do make it on the air? First of all, they’re all comedies, mostly playing to tired stereotypes and milking laughs out of borderline racist gags. “As for African-American-centric dramas, they are non-existent on the small screen, and there is little indication that will change any time soon.”