Category: media

The BBC is undergoing significant cutbacks. “The changes to the BBC’s professional services divisions will result in the loss of 980 jobs through a combination of redundancy and staff turnover. A further 750 posts will be outsourced, resulting in 1,730 job losses in total – a 46% reduction in headcount. Overall cost savings across the BBC are expected to reach £355m – £35m more than the original £320m target.”

Algerian musician Rachid Taha says there’s more censorship in Western radio than in the Middle East. “Censorship is actually stronger in the West. Western leaders lead us to believe we are free to express our views – when actually we’re not. Radio stations have become like dinosaurs,” said the star, who sings in Arabic and French.

“Ten years ago, the federal government created a program to harness the teaching power of public television… to help preschoolers get ready for elementary school. But Ready to Learn remained a largely unknown federal program until recently, when a flap over a lesbian-headed household shown in a Postcards From Buster episode sparked a political backlash from conservatives.” The controversy has caused lawmakers to take another look at the funding program, and to suggest that the dollars flowing from Ready to Learn ought to be applied to programming that teaches academic skills, rather than social skills.

The vitriolic battle over which film festival will rule Montreal has escalated to a new level in the last week, with the supporters of one festival taking out an ad to attack the organizer of another. The head of yet a third festival has begun filing lawsuits against “everyone in sight,” and nobody seems to have any idea how it will all end.

Video game designers come in for a great deal of criticism for the ultra-violent games they seem devoted to creating. But an annual challenge put to programmers at the Game Developers Conference has yielded an unexpected trio of games based on the life and work of poet Emily Dickinson.

Veteran art-news reporter David D’Arcy has been taken off the air by National Public Radio (NPR) after the Museum of Modern Art complained about his report on the long-running controversy over the ownership of Egon Schiele’s painting, Portrait of Wally. Though the painting was stolen by the Nazis from Viennese dealer Lea Bondi in 1939, its present owner, the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, refuses to return it to Bondi’s heirs, and a contentious court battle has raged ever since the painting turned up in a 1997 MoMA exhibition.

“David D’Arcy is one of only a few reporters who understand and have been covering the complex Nazi era art restitution story and he is a respected arts reporter. No print media have yet reported the story that appears below; Artnet News is the first to report publicly. You can read who has rallied in support of David, and it’s stunning that NPR has refused to reconsider its very weak and unsupportable position.”

The BBC3 radio interviewer is refreshing, writes Gillian Reynolds. Tusa’s series, monthly interviews with people significant in the arts, regularly restores my faith in the media in general and radio in particular with its honesty, directness, seriousness and sensibility. In other words, it is not pegged to some new volume or show and therefore not part of that promotional circus whose noisy parade daily fills the airwaves.”

Th Oscars are about more than just entertainment, writes Michael Wilmington. “Citing the need for even higher numbers for one of the world’s top-rated programs (41.3 million viewers in this “off year”) would be an idiotic excuse to wreck its meaning. The Oscars, of course, are a show producers hope will draw huge numbers. But they’re also a great communal binding event for the industry itself: an annual celebration of the fact that it takes many different talents and many kinds of artists to make great movies.”

“At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of “snitches” and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school – promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job – is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.”