Post by Rebecca Adelman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The day after the photos of Aylan Kurdi appeared online (and everywhere), I typed a “d” into my Google search bar and its first auto-complete suggestion was “drowned syrian boy.”  Coincidentally, or by the eerie prescience of the algorithm, that is actually what I was looking for.  The speed with which the search engine guessed my intention and the minimal effort subsequently required to access these photos—I didn’t even have to finish typing, just hit “Enter”—is representative of the simple spectatorial task that they set up.

I am not suggesting that the story the photographs tell isn’t wrenching (it is); but the difficulty of the image is the very thing that makes spectatorship of it easy.  Certainly, spectators far removed from the Kurdi family’s suffering might genuinely experience the photos as painful.  But the experience of feeling bad about the photos is accompanied by a range of sentimental rewards that ameliorate this discomfort.  In part, the hyper-visibility of Aylan Kurdi is a function of the vacuous efficacy of social media, but the clicktivism it inspired is more a symptom than a cause.

Compared to other images begotten by the ongoing war in Syria, the photos of Aylan Kurdi demand relatively little of their viewers, cognitively or emotionally.

This war has been illustrated by photos of dead and dying children from the outset.  In the autumn of 2013, activists uploaded scores of photos and videos documenting the casualties of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.  Many of the victims were children, and many of them died in the presence of desperate parents and watchful cameras.  The resultant pictures, however, did not provide unequivocal evidence of atrocity to viewers expecting to see the bloodier forms of injury and dismemberment that dominate familiar depictions of wartime casualties.  Instead, the photos captured large-scale mortality caused by invisible trauma.  This is, of course, the signature of a chemical weapons attack, but in order to fulfill their documentary function, the photos required expert interpretation and credulous spectators.

Seeking to galvanize popular and legislative support for his plan to intervene militarily in Syria, President Obama implored Americans to view the images  and the Senate Intelligence Committee compiled 13 of the most explicit  for review by its members and, presumably, the public.  These images failed to persuade lawmakers or their constituents that the situation warranted U.S. involvement.  Of course, there were many reasons for this reluctance and we cannot know if different pictures would have garnered different results, but it remains significant that these photos never achieved the iconic status that Aylan Kurdi’s already have.

Two years later, the more abstract photos of the truck abandoned on an Austrian highway with the bodies of 71 refugees, Syrians among them, decomposing inside, pose a different spectatorial problem.  The photos do not show the corpses, so spectators can only peer at the truck and imagine its contents.  News coverage of the story has been largely forensic in its orientation; this perspective risks objectifying the victims, a temptation grimly heightened by the advertisements decorating the sides of the vehicle.  While European officials are compelled to infer the identities of the deceased from travel documents, mobile phones, and meager personal effects, curious spectators get only a hypothetical composite of anonymous dead.

The photographs of Aylan Kurdi, full of pathos and without gore, set up a more straightforward spectatorial project.  Unlike the photos from the chemical weapons attacks, these do not require speculation about the mechanics of his dying – there is no mystery to drowning.  And unlike the photos of the truck, these present a victim and a sanitized vision of death. Claims about the singular potency of the Aylan Kurdi photos rest on an implied comparison to the images that preceded them.  An article in the New York Times made an explicit distinction between these and those of the truck, asserting that the photo “personalized” the migrant crisis for a public that had merely been “shocked” by the previous story.

That comparison hinges on the presumed power of the Aylan Kurdi photos to disturb or inspire viewers, as does the editorial debate about whether or not to reprint them.  Framing the issue in this binary way, however, obscures the complexities—the emotional contradictions, the ethical instabilities—inherent in any act of looking at casualty photos.  Ultimately, the argument collapses a range of spectatorial positions down to two, apparently mutually exclusive, possibilities: ‘good’ spectators who look at the photos and feel outraged or sad, versus ‘bad’ spectators who look at the photos and do not.

Such ‘bad’ spectatorship is often attributed to emotional laziness, an inability or unwillingness to be moved.  But ‘good’ spectatorship here requires only minimal emotional ambition; it is largely a matter of channeling the cultural, historical, and political forces that instruct and condition our sentiments, predisposing us to grieve for deaths that look like this.  Adhering to those codes by feeling appropriately bad might feel automatic or right, but it can also feel good.

I am not suggesting that those feelings of sadness are untrue or unreal, only that ethical spectatorship of these photos requires candor about the costs, benefits, and gratifications of looking at them.  Aylan Kurdi’s small, carefully dressed body is poignant but also intelligible.  Less decipherable pictures might leave spectators confused or adrift.  His photos are frank documents of mortality, but characterizing them as ‘graphic’ overstates the difficulty of the spectatorial task they set up, and overshadows the extent to which the act of looking at them is facilitated and softened by its emotional rewards.  An affective auto-complete.

I should preface this column by saying that I felt particularly hailed by Serial, the new hit podcast from the producers of This American Life. I have been an avid listener of TAL for more than a decade, shifting from weekly appointment radio to can’t-miss podcasts. I even remember the very first time I heard the program, as I was visiting a friend in Chicago in November 1998 and she suggested we tune in this fairly-new local public radio show on my car radio as we drove across the city—fortunately, the first story we heard was the unforgettable “Squirrel Cop,” so I was instantly hooked. Podcasts are my favorite thing to listen to while driving, mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, so it’s easy to fit a new one into my daily rhythms. And given that I have spent the last ten years focusing my academic research on understanding contemporary serial storytelling, this new podcast felt like it was made particularly for me.

And now that three episodes have “aired” (or whatever verb we use for a downloadable audio file), I think it’s great—each episode adds a new installment in the true crime tale of a high school murder in 1999 and the convicted killer who might very well be innocent. The structure maximizes intrigue as to what happened 15 years ago, and what might happen to potentially clear Adnan Syed from the murder charge. The production is as tight and smooth as TAL, making it sound like an established project that hits the ground running, rather than the typical startup choppiness of most new podcasts trying to establish a voice. So it’s definitely worth all the attention it’s been getting and you should certainly become a regular listener.

And yet…

I have some reservations that stem from its formal innovations. Serial’s titular use of seriality raises some interesting narrative wrinkles, as it applies the serial form to journalistic nonfiction in seemingly unique ways. There have certainly been journalistic series before, where a reporter stretches a story over multiple days or even weeks, but in such cases that I know of, it feels like the reporting is ongoing rather than segmenting a single story to maximize suspense and engagement. Likewise, documentaries like the 7 Up series or Paradise Lost’s sequels return to the story after new information or revelations develop during the serial gaps. And of course reality TV serializes nonfiction stories, but typically such narratives are contrived by design, rather than the high-stakes matters of murder and a life sentence. Serial producers report most of the story ahead of time, and serial their presentation of the material. (According to interviews, they are still producing episodes and doing more reporting as the podcast rolls out, but the bulk of the reporting was completed before launch.) And this creates some genre trouble.

Serial’s storytelling owes to other genres besides journalism, with an embedded murder mystery at its core. In exploring this murder, the program functions as a crime procedural, detailing investigations by both the police and the lead reporter, Sarah Koenig. In television, we tend to equate “procedural” with “episodic,” as the bulk of crime programs that highlight investigations focus on stand-alone cases each week in a tradition dating back to Dragnet. But the serialized procedural has emerged recently as a hybrid, tracing the investigative process over time on police dramas The Killing and Broadchurch (innovated importantly by Twin Peaks, which I recently conversed about on this very site). I’ve studied the use of the serial procedural model on The Wire, which dramatizes and serializes procedures not only for police, but also for drug dealers, unions, politicians, teachers, and reporters. This last one is the vital link to Serial, as The Wire creates an interesting intertext: Koenig, like Wire creator David Simon, was a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun before moving into electronic media, and this crime story takes place in Baltimore County. When I am visualizing the scenes described on Serial, I reference the visuals of The Wire to help set the milieu.

Koenig’s role is crucial here, as I would argue that she is the main character of Serial, and this is where my reservations emerge. Obviously there is the highly dramatic material around the murder case, but the podcast’s narrative arc is Koenig’s own process of discovery in investigating the case. The first episode highlights how she learned about the murder, why she began investigating, and her growing reservations about the conviction. I figured that we would trace her investigative process as it unfolds, providing the vector which the series would follow. However, the episodes are structured more topically, with each exploring a particular aspect of the case in depth—thus far we have delved into Adnan’s alibi, Hae and Adnan’s relationship, and the discovery of her body. This last episode raised my concerns about the podcast’s structure: the whole episode centers on “Mr. S” and his unusual stumbling across Hae’s body in Leakin Park (which is visited and referenced on The Wire as “where West Baltimore brings out its dead”). It’s an engaging episode with great twists—he’s a streaker?!—but I’m left wondering how it fits into the larger narrative arc. Is this just a red herring? Does it help us learn more about the core case of Adnan’s conviction, or is it just a colorful digression to flesh out the whole story? And most importantly, what does Koenig know when she’s presenting this facet of the story?

Since Koenig is both Serial’s lead character and the lead authorial figure (or more accurately, functions as the inferred author), her knowledge is crucial to our narrative comprehension. If we were following her process of discovery chronologically, we would share her amount of knowledge about the case—even though there would obviously be a delay in the production process so that the real person Koenig would know more than her radio character would in a given week, we would at least share a linear process of discovery with her. Instead, each episode compresses the discovery over the past year of reporting into a presentation of that aspect of the case. This is much easier to follow than the messy procedures of reporting, where she was certainly investigating multiple facets all at once and only could make sense of certain bits of evidence in retrospect. But by structuring it for both clarity and engagement, I feel like there is a bit of betrayal to the journalistic enterprise, as Koenig and her production team are seemingly presenting information that they know is not crucial to the case, or that later revelations will problematize.

What is their responsibility in telling us what they know upfront? As storytellers, withholding information about a story to maximize dramatic engagement is essential. As journalists, withholding crucial information about a story seems problematic at best, unethical at worst. This conundrum of narrative journalism is compounded by the serial form, as the structural need to withhold and defer story seems to run counter to the journalistic responsibility to inform listeners. While I do not think Serial aims to deceive or mislead us, it does strategically refuse to give us the full story—thus far, we have not been presented with any other viable suspects in the case, any exploration of the crucial witness Jay and his potential role in the crime, or considerations of alternative motives, all of which have been teased as still to come. And yet I assume that Koenig knew of such information and possibilities long before she investigated the burial scene and dived into Mr. S’s odd history. Such deferments make for truly compelling storytelling that I am enjoying, but they make me uncomfortable with the ethics of this format. I get frustrated that Koenig is keeping something from me, feeling like she’s not playing fair—even though I often feel similar frustration about a compelling serial fiction, that’s part of the game for fiction while it violates the rules of journalism. How will this strategy play out over the course of Serial’s many weeks? Will my feeling that information is being withheld get in the way of connecting with the shared experiences and conversations that makes TAL and other long-form audio journalism so powerful? Can I resist researching the case to discover yet-to-be-revealed details certainly lurking online as spoilers (a.k.a. real life)?

These issues are still to be resolved—and that is my motivating question for this series of commentaries on Serial. I’ll post to Antenna on a semi-regular basis (e.g. when I have something more to say), and analyze this new form of serialized audio journalism in terms of narrative, medium, and other issues as they arrive. I also hope to land an interview with Serial’s producers to get a sense of their own procedures and goals in crafting this experiment. Just as Serial represents a new form of serialized journalism, I’m going to try to serialize an essay about the series here, publicly drafting and revising arguments as the source material rolls out. Both are experiments with unpredictable ends. Stay tuned and join the conversation to discover where they might lead.

While the criticisms of CNN’s approach to Malaysia Airlines 370 are by now familiar, I want to explore the possibility that CNN’s coverage is actually—albeit unintentionally—meaningful. With its reliance on speculation, dependence on simulation, and occasional swerves into absurdity, it indexes the incomprehensibility of this disaster, marked by the failures of so many systems that seemed to promise safety, visibility, and order. To be clear, I do not mean to exonerate CNN, which is rather unabashedly utilizing this as a ratings grab. Nonetheless, their coverage vividly captures the essence of this disaster.

Some measure of qualified guessing is expected, even necessary, in any coverage of an unfolding disaster; CNN’s coverage is distinguished by its continued recourse to hypothesizing, but also the amount of latitude it gives to conjecture, as when it reported, in a way that many found insufficiently incredulous, that some people believed zombies had hijacked the plane. Criticizing such reportage is important, surely, but also eclipses its significance, as CNN’s speculation starkly illuminates the enormous epistemological gap created by the plane. It also reflects the failure of the rational and technologized systems designed to track aircraft during flight or locate them afterward. The imagined world governed by those devices (organized into grids of latitudes and longitudes, synchronized time zones, and orderly networks of predictable flight paths) cannot countenance the possibility of something like this.  But CNN’s coverage shows us how far we have strayed from that map.

This departure is amplified by the visual elements of its coverage. The now-infamous use of a toy plane as a prop surely risked trivializing the disaster; likewise its reliance on flight simulator cockpits and computer-generated images that hover around its “virtual studio.” Even as it spectacularizes the disaster, however, simulation also resonates uncannily with it. All the visual modes of searching have failed to locate the plane: satellite images, aerial surveillance, maps of ocean topography. The utterly perplexing and apparently absolute disappearance of the plane, whereby all that is solid does not melt into air but vanishes into the sea, is the sort of thing that we, with expectations that our most advanced machines will function perfectly and our acculturation to being monitored at all times, can scarcely imagine. In that context, a holographic plane is only marginally more unreal.

The only signature element of CNN’s coverage that has not yet been widely lampooned is its attention to the stories of bereaved families and friends, many of whom give interviews in which they profess hope that their loved one will be found alive. Stories like that of the daughter who has been devotedly tweeting her crew-member father, steeped in poignant absurdity, would not find much purchase in a more staid outlet. One man, Pralhad Shirsath, in an April 23 interview, asserted that the paucity and poor quality of the information from the Malaysian government indicates that they do not have enough “data” about what happened, and, by extension, to convince him that his wife is truly lost. Necessarily, the journalist pressed him, citing conclusive evidence about the fate of the plane, but the potential widower remains undaunted. CNN, by creating this universe that defies the conventions of journalism (and the sometimes cruel boundaries of common sense), has provided these mourners with a space where their bewildering grief might be articulated. Given the likelihood that it will be months, or years, or longer before the plane is found (if it is found at all), CNN’s lingering on the story mimics the looping returns of sadness in the perseverating endlessness of grief.

Although CNN’s vigil is often self-interested and carnivalesque, the clamor against it is problematic, too. It endeavors to sanitize our visual field by expunging the traces of the logically unknowable, the empirically invisible, and the affectively unpalatable in defense of all that they threaten to destabilize. To partake of CNN’s vision of the disaster is to acknowledge that it was, and remains, both tragic and incomprehensible, and to allow those two dimensions of the event to dictate the disorderly and unpredictable terms by which it appears.

But there was a second reason to celebrate for social scientists.  If Wednesday morning left both the electoral map and Republican politicians feeling a little blue, there was another occupational group in need of collective introspection: the class of political journalists, commentators and pundits, who in the cause of the campaign had increasingly wilfully disregarded the lessons of the academic disciplines that form journalism’s very foundation.

Obama’s victory was decisive, winning 332 votes in the Electoral College compared to Romney’s 206 (assuming Obama will hold his nearly 50,000 votes advantage in Florida). His margin in the popular vote will be around three million, taking eight out of the nine states news media had identified as swing states throughout the campaign. The clarity of this victory appeared to have been surprising to many. For months many news media had promised a nailbiter, talked of a race that was “too close to call.” Some predicted a Romney victory or even a Romney landslide, leaving Jed Levison to gleefully list 34 blown election predictions on Daily Kos. From Glen Beck to Newt Gingrich reviewing these predictions promises a great deal of liberal Schadenfreude, but they are unsurprising. They were attempts by individuals who had openly pinned their colors to the GOP mast to present the Republican ticket as competitive for obvious strategic reasons. And while I am aware of the dangers of taking Fox News blatant disregard of fundamental journalistic ethics in their entirely partisan perspective, few will disagree if I rank Fox News among these campaigners and lobbyists rather than among actual news media.

The denial of Republican activists and supporters upon learning of Obama’s victory which we could witness across Twitter and broadcast news alike the day after the election is as much an expression of the first stage of grief as it is of the fragmentation of the public sphere which has allowed audiences to construct textual boundaries in their engagement with news that limit the discourses they encounter to those that correspond with their own partisan perspective and horizons of expectation.

This crisis of public discourse is not a new insight. Yet, it is confounded by a failure of political journalism that includes the standards of many, though not all professional journalists. The most shocking aspect of the campaign coverage was that mainstream media’s staunch reluctance to indicate the way the race was leaning and developing. After the first debate between the candidates in Denver, the notion of “Mittmentum” captured the journalistic imagination. Predictions commonly identified all nine swing states as ‘toss up.’  As little as a week ago, the Washington Post moved Ohio back into this category. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, to the bewildered amusement of Obama supporters, continued calling polls showing the President leading by 2 or 3% a “statistical tie.” Right up to the election pundits from NPR to the BBC stressed how in such a close race any outcome was possible.

But was it? While the old hacks of the trait peddled the story of a “too close to call” election, those contributing to the debate from different professional backgrounds, often via the blogosphere, offered alternative ‑ and as it turns out far more accurate assessments ‑ of the state of the race. Nate Silver, economics graduate and baseball analysts, is only the most prominent exponents of the many who approached the polling data with the systematic approach that was not only absent among many political journalists, but that also proved entirely accurate.  On his blog Fivethirtyeight, licensed by the New York Times two years ago, Silver quantified the chances of an Obama re-election at 90.9% while many political journalists continued to resort to the old “toss up” line. In the end, Silver called every single of the fifty states correctly, including closely fought North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Ohio. Other’s such as the Princeton Electoral Consortium, run by Sam Wang, neuroscientist and regular contributor to the BBC’s outstanding statistics radio program More or Less, were similarly accurate.

Ezra Klein summarized the backlash against Silver by political commentators and politicians Silver’s model suggested were loosing last week in the Washington Post. Now that his predictions have been proven highly accurate again, those who rushed to his defense before have plenty of cause to celebrate the triumph of maths. Anthony Goldbloom in the Sidney Morning Herald echoes many such reactions when he claims “the ability to analyze large amounts of data is starting to replace expert knowledge.”

It is tempting to agree with Goldbloom’s claims. Too often during the campaign was political journalism lacking in basic literacy and numeracy. My personal highlight in this respect came early on election night with CNN’s Gary Tuchman exemplifying political journalism’s crisis in just three words: trying to compare the handwritten returns from three polling stations in Virginia to the respective 2008 results, Tuchman concluded they are “almost exactly similar” – a phrase that in its tripart oxymoronic denial of numerical and linguistic logic is a multifaceted complex of stupidity and ignorance reminiscent of an Escher painting.

But it is a false dichotomy. This is not about data crunching Wunderkinder with degrees in economics, sociology or statistics whose computer-powered precision faces off with the gut and intuition of aging political journalists. While Silver’s model (whose code he understandably doesn’t disclose) appears to be remarkably accurate and he is to be congratulated on his remarkable achievements, it does not spell the redundancy of political journalists. It doesn’t prove the supremacy of statistics over other forms of analysis. Rather it calls for something else: better political journalism and a thorough reflection on what political journalism is for and how it ought to be conducted.

The accuracy of Silver’s predictions is not a triumph of maths and statistics, it is an illustration of the need to reflect on methods and epistemology. What much of political punditry over the past months failed to recognise are the basics of methodology that any student on our undergraduate courses in sociology or Media Studies will learn in their first year: there is no universally accurate method, and different research questions require different methods of study. If we are interested in question of “how many?” and “who?” (which tend to be fundamental to predicting election results), political commentator’s gut feeling or “having talked to the people here in Ohio” are a poor substitute for systematic analysis of different polls and polling average. And while no one asks for the bulk of political journalists to share the depth of statistical literacy that mark Silver’s or Wang’s work, asking about sampling strategies of different pollsters – who was being interviewed and by what means – is no prerogative of experts but are questions that our said undergraduates seem to have rather greater confidence in answering that many professional journalists across major networks and national newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The point is that it is not the job of political correspondents, pundits and commentators to sit around tables and predict elections in the same way that retired athletes get to make a living by speculating about the outcome of sporting competitions. They are, evidently, no good at it. Instead, we need commentators and journalists who understand the nature of evidence (be it statistical or otherwise) and focus on the questions they are better equipped to answer ‑ not the quantitative, but qualitative questions of the campaign: the “whys” and “hows”, not the “who” and “how manys.”

There are two possible explanations for their failure to do so, both of which I believe are contributing factors. Firstly, broadcasters have a double incentive for portraying a close race. Again, much like sporting contests that are billed as epic battles full of suspense and surprise, covering a closely fought presidential election is likely to attract higher ratings than a foregone electoral conclusion. Yet, even more importantly, portraying the contest as close is the premise for sustaining the enormous influx of revenue from campaigns buying airtime with donors on both sides being much less likely to contribute the cash that ultimately ends up in media organizations’ pockets if there appears little to play for. Someone like Nate Silver only spoils the party here.

Beyond this institutional failure, however, also lies a failure of journalistic integrity and competency on an individual level, as many professional journalists fail to approach their work in a systematic and indeed scientific fashion; a failure to question the empirical basis of their assumptions and conclusions and to engage with the plethora of information and knowledge from the academic community and other expert citizens that via the world wide web has become easily accessible to journalists and the general public alike. This failure is reflective of a disengaged, complacent and lazy attitude towards the nature of knowledge. I am not quite, like Judith Lichtenberg, raising the spectre of positivism here. But in face of a cultural and political movement that has appropriated the lessons of deconstructionism to set out to construct its own reality, political journalists have to learn that the old party trick of ‘balancing’ won’t do. Truth is not the mid-point between Karl Rove’s opinion and that of a morally sane person. Instead journalists need to take the real lesson from the accuracy of Silver’s predictions: not that numbers beat words, not that quantitative research is inherently superior to qualitative investigation, but that whatever type of knowledge and information we deal with, not least professionally, we need to critically examine its empirical and epistemological premises.  From election predictions to reporting on social deprivation, global warming, and a range of other topics in which journalists seem unable to penetrate the fog of political spin through an almost hysterical reluctance to engage with the science behind the claims, leaving them to simply recycle talking points and poorly understood statistics, it’s logic, not balance that matters. Now that the election is over, those who make a living from creating and distributing knowledge, information and evaluation, shouldn’t marvel at the “magic powers” of maths – they should appreciate the indispensable need to critically reflect on the processes by which they do so. As the godfather of political punditry James Carville himself would have said: “It’s methodology, stupid!”

The Middle East Today (BBC News)

Two competing forces shape mass media. On the one hand, there is the creativity of writers, directors, journalists and editors who transform ideas into content. On the other, there is structure. Despite the infinite creative capacity of producers, their work is inevitably circumscribed by the economic imperatives, technological limitations and ideological biases inherent in the business of media. The careful media critic thus aims to give credit (or blame) when due, but also keeps a close eye on the factors that shape authorial control. It is an imperfect science, but it is also what makes the study of media so fascinating.

Thus, this series aims to provide a dual perspective on one of the most controversial areas of new media production. Focusing on blogs about contemporary Middle Eastern politics, The Middle East: Inside, Outside and Online pairs together a blogger with an academic critic. The bloggers have been charged with providing insight into the way they work.  The academics have been asked to analyze the site for which the blogger works, drawing attention to factors beyond the realm of pure authorship. It is not a point/counterpoint and the authors have not read each other’s pieces. Instead the two pieces are meant to provide distinct but intimately related perspectives.

This first pairing is one certain to provoke strong feelings in readers. Emily Hauser blogs for Open Zion on The Daily Beast. Professor Helga Tawil-Souri studies media in the Palestinian territories and Israel. Certainly there is much to say about the politics of each contributor. But, just as importantly, these two essays come together to help paint a deeper and more nuanced picture of Open Zion and online media.

Writing for Open Zion
By Emily Hauser

I’ve been writing commentary about Israel/Palestine since 2002, and while the world of opinion publishing has changed dramatically in the ensuing decade, I believe that the writing itself has not (or at least, not much). I was a reporter out of Israel and the Palestinian territories for a big chunk of the 1990s (having moved to Israel in 1984), and then pursued my masters degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, graduating in 2001. These facts had enormous bearing on the writing I did for the op/ed pages of newspapers, and continue to have enormous bearing on the writing I do for blogs.

There are, after all, a lot of opinions out there about Israel/Palestine, much of it ill-informed or informed entirely by ideology. While my blogging certainly reflects my politics (pro-two-state, anti-occupation, anti-settlement), I try very hard to make sure that I’m building a case and can source it, so that readers come away feeling not just supported in their own opinions (or angered by mine) but having learned something in the process.

I don’t believe, however, that it’s my job to convince my ideological opposite numbers, nor is it my job to prove them wrong to the n-th degree (two things I’ll never be able to do). My job is to advocate for the shared humanity and dignity of Israelis and Palestinians, support political solutions that I believe will promote that humanity and that dignity, and provide readers with a few more tools to reach their own conclusions and do their own advocating. What this means is that it’s not enough to say that occupation is bad – I have to provide facts and figures. It’s not enough to say that Palestinians are people, too – I have to sketch that humanity.

Likewise, it’s not enough to say “Israel is wrong” – Israel is many things (not least, the many Israelis who advocate for a just peace every day) and if I really want to have an impact on policy and behavior, I have to focus on the policies and behaviors that contribute to the conflict. It’s not enough to say “occupation is bad for Israelis, too” – I have to demonstrate why, and why that matters.

All of this largely because the audience I see myself writing for is primarily those American Jews who feel somewhat or mostly uncomfortable with Israeli policy, but don’t know how to articulate that discomfort, or feel unequipped to do so. This is where sourcing comes in, and it points to one of the changes that’s taken place in the actual writing process since 2002: Whereas once I essentially had to say “look, trust me on this, I’ve seen the numbers,” now I can embed links and folks can continue the discovery process on their own.

The other audience for which I imagine myself writing is Palestinians. Palestinians are so infrequently given a platform in the West, particularly in the Jewish community, that to the extent that I can channel their stories, I feel compelled to do so. Indeed, many American readers immediately discount any opinion attached to an Arab name – my hope is that with my by-line, a few more people will read a little more about what conflict and occupation mean for the Palestinian people. (And the fact that I’m Israeli-American who’s an active member of a Conservative synagogue and identifies as a Zionist doesn’t hurt).

Finally, the speed with which information now spreads and with which bloggers have to produce copy must, inevitably, have an impact on the writing itself. The challenge is to write quickly but not in haste, and to trust that the extra five or 30 minutes spent nailing down sources or clarifying language is ultimately more important than posting as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, commentary writers (which is what most bloggers are) are chipping away at the outermost edges of public opinion. If we want to be effective, we have to use best tools we can find. Facts and unabashed humanity are pretty powerful tools.

Open – and close – Zion
By Helga Tawil-Souri

Open Zion seems at first glance a clever play on words: in techno-legal terms it alludes to the shift towards open source software, creative commons, and invitation for non-expert digirati to share opinions. That is not the case however. Content is copyrighted and most conversation is between the blog’s editor, Peter Beinart, his commentators, and scholars who have written reviews or responses to Beinart’s publications. Perhaps the title alludes to an ideological opening of Zion and Zionism? Yet, as the site states, OZ seeks “an open and unafraid conversation” based on a belief “in a two-state solution in accordance with the liberal Zionist principles articulated in Israel’s declaration of independence.” Certainly Zion (i.e., the state of Israel) is not being opened here, and taking a two-state solution and liberal Zionist principles as axiomatic doesn’t strike me as openness either.

One way to understand OZ then is as an attempt on the part of journalism and a journalist to remain significant in a technological-media landscape which renders ‘traditional’ journalism’s future uncertain. OZ is part of The Daily Beast, the companion website to Newsweek, which will cease its print publication in 2013 and become all-digital. OZ underscores the challenges of maintaining profitability in an environment when news no longer follows a daily, let alone a weekly, cycle, and an environment in which news readers are likely to land on an article through a friend’s Facebook post or Twitter feed without necessarily caring where it is being published.

Politically, Open Zion is an echo of Beinart’s own perspectives – even if commentators come in different flavors. OZ does not add complexity to an understanding or a critique of Israel or Zionism or “the Jewish future” but simply – albeit fastidiously – describes their contemporary political landscapes from the perspective of an individual embedded in American Jewish political institutions. Thus OZ fails at an extremely important level: the recognition that neither the US’s, nor Israel’s, nor Palestine’s purposes and futures can be understood or decided through only an American Jewish lens. Yes, Israel as it stands is the state for the world’s Jews – and so American ones too – but that ‘borderlessness’ or openness (for only some) of Zion should itself be opened for discussion.

Beinart is most often labeled a ‘center-left’ American Jew; despite also being called a ‘radical’ by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren after Beinart argued that products from Israeli settlements should be boycotted. The moniker of ‘center-left’ however needs to be problematized and connected to an open and unafraid conversation about ‘liberal Zionism.’ I certainly recognize Zionism and liberal Zionism’s successes and appreciate their ideological borrowings from socialism, Liberalism, the valuing of human rights and freedom. There is nonetheless an inherently colonial and racist core to (liberal) Zionism itself and the creation of the modern state of Zion. The Israeli Declaration of Independence cannot be divorced from historical actualities of what happened to Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, and others – in 1948 as well as before then and thereafter. These realities, histories, narratives and perspectives should be what are opened to conversation. That’s what the notion of open(ing) Zion should suggest – and while we’re at it, we can also drop copyright and trademark notices.

When historical creations are framed as intrinsically liberal, without addressing their illiberal and oppressive aspects, the result is a closing off of new perspectives and futures – Jewish and otherwise. This sleight-of-hand is what allows Beinart, OZ, and others, to make a two-state solution axiomatic: Palestinian statehood is supported only insofar as it permits the sanctity of a Jewish democratic state. Such an equation does not in actuality rest on the belief of human rights and freedoms for all, and certainly does not open a critical conversation to be had of why democracy and Jewishness continue to be framed in sync. As such, OpenZion purports a kind of friendly Zionism, as oxymoronic as ‘compassionate capitalism’ and as self-righteous as ‘civilizing mission.’

If I end up at an OZ story through a Facebook post, so be it. But I won’t purposefully open OZ until real openness takes place. There’s much better analysis on the web already – whether you think the Palestinians never existed, or the threat in the Middle East is Israel, or a new state ‘Isratine’ should be created.

Glass’ celebrity is further influenced by fan engagement and productions such as Adam WarRock’s “Ira Glass” rap. Throughout all of this, we see Ira Glass very much constructed as a figure who has brought pleasure and entertaining aesthetics to broadcast journalism. Though the paratexts mentioned above arguably create as much meaning about Glass’ star text, his celebrity is always constructed in reference to TAL, and the program’s unique exploitation of the radio feature format. For this reason, we can see how TAL shapes our understanding of Glass’ radio pioneer public persona.

TAL‘s aesthetics make it markedly different from other television and radio journalism. TAL invites listeners to revel in a sort of postmodern opposition to mainstream journalism. The program weaves together informal conversation, first-person monologues, actuality field recordings, sound bites, music, and more into a hip, irreverent weekly radio show. Its self-reflexive style is one aspect that differentiates it from traditional hard news. The show’s commentary and reflection in its own production, usually heard via Glass’ conversation with a producer or participant, works in conjunction with its commentary on traditional journalism to sonically construct the show as self-aware. We see this in the first 10 minutes of Episode 455, “Continental Breakup,” which first aired on January 22, 2012.  This episode is about the European debt crisis, and is guest hosted by Alex Blumberg. Here we see TAL taking up a traditional “hard” journalism topic. Yet, the topic is presented in an informal and playful manor. Glass’ nebbish, high, nasally voice begins the program as if in the middle of a private conversation with the listener. He begins quickly by saying, “I think at this point even the most casual news consumer has run across a lot of stories like this….” Next, TAL edits in sound bites from recent news stories and we, the listeners, hear a serious sounding male news reporter saying “The focus of the European debt crisis move today…,” and other successive sound bites related to the economic situation in Europe. This informal, stream of consciousness opening is typical of TAL, as all TAL episodes begin without an introductory frame. This might give listeners the feeling that we enter the show already in the middle of a conversation with Glass and company.

Next in this episode, Glass does introduce the program, and turns it over to Blumberg. A conversation between Blumberg and Glass ensues, and includes several informal moments that convey naturalness and liveness. Before Blumberg takes over as host, Glass announces, “From WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Alex, I’m just going to hand they show over to you.” This is followed by an unpolished moment of confusion:

Alex Blumberg: All right and I say, like, “from WBEZ Chicago,” that thing?
Ira Glass: No, I just said that. So you don’t have to say that.
Blumberg: So I don’t have to say that?
Glass: So you can just proceed. Have you heard this show before?
Blumberg: No, you didn’t say “today’s program.”
Glass: All right, I’ll say – you can say “today’s program.”

Blumberg and Glass speak over each other, laughing in a light, friendly way. This unpolished exchange could have easily been edited out in post-production, especially since the trained ear will notice that besides laughter, all signifiers of the body (breathing, et al) have been smoothed out through dialogue editing. This apparently unscripted moment is, however, kept intact, and accomplishes the task of conveying an artificial spontaneous liveness to listeners.

Overall, Ira Glass is repeatedly constructed in TAL and other media as a charismatic, jovial, informal, self-reflexive, and playful radio journalist. This difference from traditional broadcast journalists who you might find on CNN or even NPR’s All Things Considered has contributed to Glass’ personality as a pioneer of the new age of radio journalism. This is further shaped by TAL’s experimental distribution via events like This American Life LIVE!, where the radio program is performed live onstage with dance numbers, animation, other video, and more. The performance is beamed to movie theatres across the country live. First done in 2009, a new This American Life LIVE! is being broadcast around the country on Thursday, May 10^th, and I know I for one will be attending it at a local theatre here in Madison, Wisconsin.

This blurring between storytelling, journalism, and media formats troubles traditional notions of ethical reporting and conceptions of truth. Glass goes to great lengths to distinguish himself as an untraditional journalist, and despite (or perhaps because of this) he has received countless major broadcasting awards for journalism.  The most recent coverage of the kerfuffle and drama surrounding the veracity of an episode aired earlier this year, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” and TAL’s subsequent retraction of the episode in the March 16^th in the TAL episode “Retraction,” points to mainstream journalism’s inability to reconcile TAL’s postmodern style of journalism. Having heard the original “Mr. Daisey” episode, I question TAL’s retraction, as the program was very clear that it was featuring portions of Mike Daisey’s one-man play “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” and even included a disclaimer at the end noting what Glass and his team were able to fact check and what they could not.

However, this controversy is significant, not because it questions or clarifies the “truth” of This American Life’s episode featuring Daisey, but rather it points to the significance of TAL within the American mediascape. Moreover, at the end of the day, it recuperates Glass’ integrity. In “Retraction,” Glass doesn’t just retract TAL’s previous episode, he interrogates the show’s fact checking process and interviews Daisey again, during which he is self-reflexively critical and idealistic about the boundaries of radio features. Thus, in his humility and self-awareness, Ira Glass is ultimately able to retain his persona as an unconventional, pioneering radio journalist.

On Radio is a new Antenna column dedicated to contemporary radio programming and other issues surrounding the medium in all its forms.

Hands down, Radiolab is the most interesting American radio program of the past decade. Although, that’s not a particularly bold claim, really, as there are plenty of people out there who have heaped similar praise upon the series, not least of all Ira Glass and the MacArthur genius grant folks. Produced by the New York City public radio station WNYC and distributed nationally through National Public Radio (NPR), Radiolab is a math, science, and philosophy show hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. The program deals with “big questions,” as their website puts it – things like life, death, knowledge, the universe – typically through broadly themed episodes on topics such as laughter, the human brain, race, time, deception, and randomness. Radiolab is a radio feature in that it is a (mostly) non-fiction program that mixes fairly traditional elements of journalism and news reporting with more artistic and dramatic elements. If non-music radio programming can be placed on a continuum with straight news talk placed at one extreme and the fictionalized radio drama at the other, then the radio feature (or “radio documentary,” as John Biewen and other radio producers refer to it) is situated somewhere in the middle, a mix of words, sounds, and music that merges the informational content of journalism with the form and emotion of art.

Just as standard NPR news programs like All Things Considered are often called “news magazines,” in that they consist of numerous stories reported more in-depth than standard “headline news” style broadcasts, the term “radio feature” insinuates an even more extended, highly focused examination of a story or topic, similar to a thoroughly researched and contextualized cover story in a print magazine. Often, as is the case with Radiolab and also This American Life, multiple stories may be covered within an hour-long episode, but they nevertheless all tie into an overarching theme or narrative. This is not breaking news, even though it is journalistic in the sense that it is informative, educational, and frequently timely and topical.

Emphasis is placed on characters – people – who the audience is invited to identify with through fleshed out, exceptionally visualized scenes. This is where the artistic and dramatic elements come in: the focus of a radio feature like Radiolab is on storytelling rather than mere reporting of events and facts, and this is often achieved through vertically structured and intimate, slice-of-life narratives. NPR’s news magazines regularly attempt to craft similar segments, but what really sets a radio feature apart is its meticulous attention to form – Biewen, in the introduction to his edited volume Reality Radio (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), calls radio documentarians “journalists/artists” who “use sound to tell true stories artfully.” This emphasis on form can range from simply playing with voice and basic narrative structure to experimenting wildly with actuality sound and music in a way that verges on sound art – it does not always need to be “complex” or affectedly avant-garde. Still, radio features are able to sidestep conventions and engage in a level of experimentation that standard radio news programming rarely, if ever, does.

Radiolab tends more toward the “wild experimentation” end of that spectrum, even though the core of its aesthetic is what host Jad Abumrad, in an essay he penned in Reality Radio, describes as “the pleasant illusion of ‘two guys chatting’.” He’s referring here to the back-and-forth dialogue that occurs between co-hosts Abumrad (pictured left) and Robert Krulwich (pictured right) – a loose, conversational style that is also extended to the discussions between the hosts and their interviewees. And indeed, there is an emphasis placed on voice and narration – the voices of the hosts and interviewees stitched together to recount experience. Still, the show is, at its most basic, “about curiosity and discovery,” to quote Abumrad again, and this inquisitive, innovative spirit is extended from the show’s focus on “big ideas” to the way it explores, through sound, those ideas.

Most notably, the producers quickly and often abruptly butt voices up against one another, as well as layer voices on top of each other and then layer atmospheric sound, sound effects, and music on top of (or underneath) it all. For instance, in the recent Radiolab episode “Patient Zero,” the hosts examine the concept of “patient zero,” meaning the case that can be identified as the starting point of an outbreak. They begin with the story of Typhoid Mary, the woman who has been commonly understood as the source of the first typhoid fever outbreak in the United States, in the early 1900s in the New York City area. But in fact, they begin the episode somewhat confusingly with a pair of producers randomly speaking to one another (“So have I said where we are? Am I on tape yet?”) in what is clearly an outdoor environment, a brisk wind creating loud distortion in the microphone. Abumrad quickly identifies the producers but does not otherwise introduce the story or the episode. Returning to the actuality sound, one of the producers explains from the field that they are on an abandoned island where a woman with an infectious disease was at one time quarantined, but the exact location and identity of the woman are still unnamed. Then, Abumrad and Krulwich begin their host narration, which takes the form of a conversational, improvisational-sounding dialogue. Krulwich asks, “This is a story that begins when?” to which Abumrad responds, “Well, actually, it starts in 1906….” The narration continues in this conversational back-and-forth mode for awhile, Krulwich playing the inquisitor to Abumrad’s more authoritative storyteller, though quickly a third voice joins the conversation, that of UW-Madison medical historian Judith Leavitt. This is clearly a storytelling style compared to news radio’s standard narrative flow of a host intro and hook followed by a reporter opening. Information is revealed quickly and yet incrementally, and much attention is paid to context and creating a visual image for the audience to imagine. Rather than the thesis, characters, and scene all being set immediately, it is two minutes into the episode before it is clearly established that they are talking about a typhoid outbreak, it is more than three-and-a-half minutes before it is announced that this is the story of Typhoid Mary, and it is not until after the four-minute mark that Abumrad and Krulwich announce the theme of the episode.

Radiolab is about exploring ideas – big, difficult, abstract ideas – and more than anything it achieves that through experience. Here, experience is meant in a double-sense: creating a fun, adventurous listening experience for the listener, as well as connecting, through intimacy and description, to universal thoughts and feelings that the audience will be acquainted with personally. For instance, the tone is loose, accessible, even fun, with digressions and moments of humor interjected. The dual narrator device functions to bring the audience into the story, Abumrad and Krulwich expressing amazement and asking each other questions in a way that often reflects what the listening audience is likely to be thinking. The banter also underlines the sense of discovery. For instance, when a startling point is revealed, the narrator’s stop and spontaneously declare, “Really?!” Moreover, the back-and-forth dialogue also functions as a kind of theater, more akin to a radio play than a news story. This intimate, first-person narration builds tension and draws the listener in, like a group of friends telling an amazing story at a bar.

Music is particularly integral to Radiolab’s aesthetic. Referring again to the “Patient Zero” episode, almost as soon as Abumrad and Krulwich’s introduction starts, musical stings begin to creep into the piece. At first, these are curious sounding, modern classical style piano and string arrangements that quietly stay beneath the voices, mostly solitary notes that sound as though they are searching for something. However, as the Typhoid Mary story begins to build with Abumrad, Krulwich, and Leavitt describing the typhoid outbreak of 1906, the music perks up, horn bursts and tense strings serving to underline the impending danger. The voices and music continue this way, emphasizing and building upon one another in a montage fashion. Pauses and silences are interspersed to highlight moments of confusion or revelation.

Indeed, these elements all work together to make Radiolab sound like the process of intellectual discovery – it is the research and problem-solving process manifested audibly.

Last week Moyers wrapped up his PBS program The Journal, this time, it seems, for good.  He has left and returned twice previously, but, at 76, Moyers seems done with weekly TV. He will be missed.  The Journal was, quite simply, outstanding public affairs television.  It combined long-form documentaries with in-depth interviews and, uniquely, it succeeded in discussing ideas without forgetting the people they impact.  This, more than anything, is Moyers’ true virtue.  He’s a public intellectual who places equal emphasis on both the adjective and the noun, a populist in the best possible sense.

Although moving from network to public television left him with a relatively small audience, Moyers’ recession from public life nonetheless marks a major loss for liberal America.  No, not every television liberal is either self-righteous or ironic bordering on nihilistic, but a lot are.  Moyers is never either. For him truly believing in things is neither a show nor a quaint old-fashioned gesture; it’s the only way he can make meaning out the endlessly complex times his life and career have spanned.

A minor example: during the Obama-Reverend Wright controversy, Moyers was the only interviewer and commentator I heard who really, truly cared to understand Wright’s theology and its related politics.  He thought that his viewers should understand what the man believed and why he believed it before making an evaluation.  It wasn’t enough to break things down on party lines, call the Republicans racist and/or make a joke.  He wanted us to really see the ways in which Wright’s Christianity and social experience shaped his controversial view of American life.  It was the part of the story that no one else seemed to have the forum (a commercial free hour broadcast into a huge number of American homes) or interest in pursuing.  The Stewarts and Olbermanns of the world have their places but I hope there is also room for another Moyers and that, sooner than later, we find someone to fill it.

[Note: This is an iPad news-free edition. If you wanted info on the iPad last week, you found it, and if you didn’t want it, it found you, so I doubt anyone missed any of it.]

1. Decency, piracy, and copyright: R-rated red-band trailers are getting more controversial, while the head of the MPPA’s ratings board speaks (a bit) about the board’s job and makeup. Piracy is getting worse in Europe; it’s on the rise in France, and running rampant in Spain, to the point where Hollywood might refuse to distribute DVDs there. The MPAA can cheer up a bit at winning a piracy-related lawsuit against a search engine, and (torrenters beware!) the industry is going after tens of thousands of individual downloaders. Related, The Economist offers an intriguing questioning of copyright protection, coinciding with the 300th birthday of modern copyright law.

2. Apologies, failures, and hedged bets: Battlefield Earth’s original screenwriter apologized for the film’s awfulness, while scribe Dan Harmon very thoughtfully responded to a parent’s Monster House issue. Uma Thurman’s Motherhood sold a grand total of eleven tickets on its opening weekend Britain; here are 10 reasons why that might have happened. Hot Tub Time Machine drew more than eleven bodies on its opening weekend, but still fewer than anticipated, so here are 5 reasons for that (plus some inside info on its financials from Nikki Finke). A new study claims that Twitter can predict these failures. If so, that would sure make it easy for the Twitterati to rack up dough on the proposed box office futures market. But it’s the potential impact on a film’s box office dough that makes the film industry hate the futures market idea pretty much across the board. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has delayed its ruling on whether to let this go forth until next week, so we’ll have to wait and see if anyone ends up having to apologize for causing a film to sell only eleven tickets on its opening week because of futures frenzy.

3. Audiences seem willing to pay for 3D movies, but some think Hollywood could be overestimating 3D’s appeal, foisting a gimmick on us, and buying into the “Avatar fallacy”, which could result in 3D fading away yet again or just being a niche, not a standard. Cinematical’s Scott Weinberg would be fine with that end result, seeing as he thinks 3D is ruining movies, while Wired’s Dave Banks is simply tired of seeing 3D suddenly appear in every medium, and even James Cameron is questioning the direction of 3D. Clash of the Titans doesn’t really put us any closer to figuring out where 3D could head, and it also leaves open the question of if we should be told whether we’re getting “real” or “fake” 3D in a film (we apparently need to be warned about subtitles, so why not this?). Finally, we can look forward to Bollywood in 3D.

4. Ah, the rites of spring: the snow melts, the trees bud, the birds return, and film critics announce that movie stars aren’t needed anymore (a pronouncement we’ll see again in summer, fall, and winter). To wit, Anne Thompson points to Matt Damon as one of the few remaining true stars, and Patrick Goldstein says that (if it sticks around) 3D could doom stars. After all, Sam Worthington’s not a star, he’s just a no-risk franchise occupant, like a seat filler at the Oscars. A.O. Scott assures us that Greta Gerwig is a star, though.

5. Sony and 20^th Century Fox joined with Warner Bros. to help stave off Blockbuster’s demise by offering DVDs to the rental outfit on the same day they become available for sale. Conversely, Netflix agreed to a 28-day rental delay with a few studios in exchange for getting greater access to studio titles for streaming. David Poland sees this as a smart move for the immediate future of theatrical and rental health. Long-term, some industry analysts see Netflix’s video-on-demand model as the future due to higher profit margins,  and due to the possibility that another dinosaur, the United States Postal Service, could put a crimp in the mailing option by ceasing Saturday delivery. Redbox is thus shrewdly sussing out the possibility of streaming films.

6. The indie film world has a few successes to point to, such as Breaking Upwards, which cost only $15,000 and made that back in one theater opening (Motherhood: take note!). And the future value of online distribution was on display with Hulu’s In the Darkness. Whether it’s screening at a brick-and-mortar theater or online, word of mouth is crucial for indie film, though digital raises the very question of what is a filmmaker. The studio world has a few embarrassments to ignore, such as the three less-than-hoped-for bids for Miramax, including one from the Weinstein brothers, with the low bids likely due to the questionable value of the Miramax library (in fact, Variety says the values of all studio libraries are declining). Meanwhile, the bidding for MGM drags on, and it seems as if nobody really wants either Miramax or MGM in the end. Nobody wants to be head of the MPAA either.

7. Quentin Tarantino’s apparently not much for video games. But has he heard about the Tactile Gaming Vest that lets you feel like your body is being riddled with bullets? Eye-tracking systems also sound very cool. Tarantino at least might want to consider producing some form of transmedia content for his films, since he can now win an award from the Producers Guild for it. This institutionalization of transmedia looks like a good thing, according to most.

8. Facebook and Google are in a battle for a billion of our social profile dollars. Facebook at least appears to be leading in the category of wicked cool infographics generated to summarize it: Exhibit A and Exhibit B. YouTube doesn’t need infographics to prop it up when it’s got “David After Dentist” going for it. Wired goes one better than an infographic anyway with this great exposition of the five secrets of YouTube success, while Mashable takes us inside the YouTube war room.

9. Random good links I have left (hey, they don’t always all fit together neatly, but how could I not include news of the Big Lebowski porn parody?): The Big Lebowski porn parody; Surviving in the Music 2.0 world; The latest music sales stats; Are puppet movies doomed by CGI?; Top ten works of journalism of the decade; This American Life infographics.

10. Links to the best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: Human Planet; Beck, Politics & Money; FX Mainstreaming; Behavior Placement; Comcast Net Win; Simon and Treme Profiled; Friday Night Ratings Fight; A Simpler Future; David Mills, 1961-2010; Peabody Awards; Cable in Congloms; Rebranding Guide.



1. In honor of Veterans Days (or Remembrance Day as the rest of the world knows it), a wonderful set of videos of dogs welcoming their owners back from military service. Get those tissues ready and enjoy.

2. The Daily Show skewered Sean Hannity for using footage from Glenn Beck’s “9/12” rally in DC to depict Michelle Bachmann’s much smaller rally. As departing White House Communications Director Anita Dunn pointed out, “Well that is where you are getting fact-checking and investigative journalism these days folks. It is a different media environment.” Nice to see the rest of the press prove their utter fecklessness once more. For his part, Hannity mustered the most pathetic of apologies, saying it was “inadvertent,” which led to this wonderful response from Stewart and his staffperson forced to watch Hannity daily:

3. Our own Liz Ellcessor offers two excellent posts on television’s encounters with people with disabilities, one a follow-up to her Antenna post on the Glee episode “Wheels,” and another on Brothers. Let’s hope it’s not another 300 years till American television offers us two shows with people with disabilities. Adding to Liz’s own links to other commentators on the episode, I’ll also note Myles McNutt’s piece at Cultural Learnings.

4. MediaCommons unveiled its new profile system, which is exciting and well worth reading about.

5. Jason Mittell continues his admirable process of discussing the job search at his department at Middlebury in as open terms as he’s probably allowed to. The job market scares people more than anything other than the tenure process, so it’s great to see someone opening up about it in something other than woefully vague terms.

6. In honor of Seth McFarlane’s bad week (Family Guy had its worst week in the ratings this year by 0.5 points, Cleveland Show by 0.6 points, and American Dad by a full point, while his Family Guy Presents Seth and Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show received poor reviews), here comes this explanation of how his shows get put together:

7. In the world of odd adaptations, it seems that Justin Halpern’s Twitter account, ShitMyDadSays, is being made into a sitcom by the Will and Grace creators and Warner Bros. TV. See here for more commentary, though I suspect I’ll discuss this soon over at The Extratextuals, cause it’s so wonderfully paratextual. Update: I’ve now done so here.

8. Annie Peterson talks about web traffic and star talk. I’m going to be very obtuse with details, since Antenna’s supposed to be under the radar right now, so we’re not ready to play with the fire she offers the kindling to build. But to see the evidence of her assertions, see her earlier post here too.

9. Timothy Burke discusses using Power Point in the classroom (though all PP haters should, as we learned at MCS colloquium on Thursday at Wisconsin, consult Kurt Squire for tips. Kurt, to be fair, credits Henry Jenkins with leading the way, a shout out that I’d echo).

10. Finally, in the blast from the past category, it’s old, but if you’ve never treated yourself to Real Ultimate Power and the wonders of all things ninja, do go here and enjoy.

Also, note that the new issue of Flow is out, and that it was Human Rights week on In Media Res