Category: media

Appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Hank Azaria said, “I think the most important thing is to listen to Indian people and their experience with it. Listening to voices means inclusion in the writers room. I really want to see Indian, south Asian writers in the writers room, genuinely informing whichever direction this character takes. … I’m perfectly willing to step aside. It just feels like the right thing to do to me.”

“Six news awards were bestowed, with BBC News winning for its reporting on Rohingya refugees in Myanmar and Bangladesh. Among the winners was a Vice News episode on HBO, ‘Charlottesville: Race and Terror.’ Al Jazeera won the sole public service award, for a documentary by Fatma Naib about female genital mutilation in Africa. S-Town, created by the makers of Serial and This American Life, was one of five radio or podcast winners.”

“Netflix leads with three honorees – A Series of Unfortunate Events starring Neil Patrick Harris, which won for children and youth programming; mockumentary American Vandal about a high school prank; and stand-up special Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, which touches on the comedian’s struggles as an immigrant. HBO follows with two wins for Issa Rae’s Insecure and late-night show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Rounding out the list of winners are AMC’s Better Call Saul, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Even though the technologies are new, the horror and despair of the current informational carnage are not unprecedented. Since the beginning of the Internet, the unintended consequences of its arrival have been routinely compared to the fallout from the invention of the printing press. The comparison has always been problematic. A more precise historical analogy—though itself as incomplete as any historical analogy—can be found in the pamphlet culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England.

Amazon, Netflix and multiple Hollywood studios (including Disney, Fox, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.) have sued SET Broadcast over allegations its SET TV service is used expressly for piracy. While there is a dedicated set-top box, the centerpiece is a $20 per month subscription service that offers access to over 500 live TV channels and “thousands” of on-demand shows, including Netflix shows and movies that are still officially limited to theaters.

The Alphabet (Google) subsidiary “says it removed 8.3m videos for breaching its community guidelines between October and December last year as it tries to address criticism of violent and offensive content on its site … amid growing complaints about its perceived inability to tackle extremist and abusive content.”

I believe the CBC should make a big push to fill the yawning gaps in local news and cultural production created by the decline of private sector providers. I think it should do so even though it will harm some of its competitors because doing nothing won’t save them. Local news is too important to the functioning of our local democracy and our local communities.

The writers are from Iowa, of course. One of them says: “We just knew inherently those were dangerous. They were always things that farmers and parents said to stay away from, because you can easily drown in those. Combining that within the world and the context of what ‘A Quiet Place’ was, felt like a natural fit — but obviously, a very, very terrifying fit.”