Talk is (no longer) cheap:

I confess to having become dependent on my morning headlines email from the New York Times, sticking with it even through such annoying foolery as audio ads that play as soon as an article loads. The ad for the movie ABBA roaring out the dismal bubblegum tune "Dancing Queen" still makes me shiver to contemplate. Now the Times wants cash American, in the form of a subscription to TimeSelect, in order to read--not the news, not the editorials--but the top Op Ed pieces.

In a workshop given by Truthout pundit Williams Rivers Pitt that I attended this past weekend, he said that overnight, the once-influential Times Op Ed columnists David Brooks and Tom Freidman have vanished from the forums of the blogosphere. Where once a search would find thousands of references to their most recent articles, now only a handful can be found, unless it is to make furious comment on the pay-to-read firewall.

So isn't it nice to announce four new forever-free news emails from NCPR, and a new Book by Email serial, also free. And I give my solemn word--I will never subject our gentle readers to any version of "Dancing Queen." I leave that to Radio Bob, for moments when he wants to tweak the station manager.

Must See TV:

Television has long been a small window on a distant world, providing after-the-fact glimpses of the horrors of the day mediated by the soothing voices of broadcasters who provide the context for catastrophe. But this comfortable insulation has steadily eroded under the lidless eye of 24/7 news. From the Challenger disaster to "shock and awe" in Baghdad to the suffering of Katrina victims, the right-now reality of events pierce through the glassy screen and the glassy eye. Along with millions of viewers, I watched the desperate landing of the crippled JetBlue flight at LAX last night. I happened to see it the old-fashioned way, on the news at 11, pre-packaged into a story. Gripping enough--the nose wheels burning away in a gout of flame that licked the underbelly of the plane all the endless length of the runway--but then I talked with a co-worker who watched the landing live on CNN. "I almost s__t my pants," was her candid review. The part of the story that keeps going round and round in my mind, however, is that the terrified passengers were also able to watch their landing live on TV, and wait to see if a fireball would melt the little screen above the seat ahead.

Stakes:

The week has provided plenty of scope for reporting at its finest and at its most frustrating. The Senate hearings on Judge Roberts' nomination to head the high court provided plenty of the latter. The careful parsing of terms, the dissection of arcane points of procedure, coupled with the high incidence of windy rhetoric, created an environment as opaque to understanding as a Japanese Noh play. Efforts to tease reportable information from the process reminded me of Cold War journalists who sought to divine Soviet policy from seeing who stood next to whom on Red Square reviewing stands.

The wake of Katrina, however, has provided some of the most stirring and disturbing reporting I have ever seen or heard. Not that narratives of disaster don't have their own protocols and cliches--but the immediacy and power of human suffering carries through regardless. A person staring into the empty cellar hole of his former life is fully transparent to our understanding. And, as with the storm victim who shouted out his rage to the vice-president, he is beyond the heed of protocol. This is a fact that has relevance to both the top stories of the week: the rules of the game are of concern only to those who are left with something to put on the table.

Span of Attention:
Some news observers see at least one serendipitous result from the Gulf Coast calamity--the US press corps seems to be regaining some spine and focus in the wake of the storm. And no one can miss the huge spontaneous outburst of generous concern from individuals, groups and communities all across the nation and the world (see below). But a recent interview with Marc Seigel, author of False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear, by Daily Show host Jon Stewart put its finger on a core problem with US disaster preparedness. It is increasingly difficult for the media, federal policy makers and the populace at large to differentiate between what is an immediate, likely and widespread threat, and what is a remote, unlikely and localized threat. For example, a resident of New Orleans listening to the news for the last few years might have been led to fear an anthrax attack just as much as a levee break. And disaster officials m ight have expended as much or more effort preparing to deal with one as with the other. As for the media, Stewart compared its response to these situations to the way eight-year-old boys play soccer: "There's the ball!"--everybody piles on and the ball squirts out the top--"No-there's the ball!"--and everybody piles on again. "Don't they have any memory?" he complained. This time, hopefully, we won't forget to remember.

Seeing the Works:
How do we ever delude ourselves that we are secure, or ever can be secure? Things explode. Stampedes begin under a clear blue sky. Ice starts to fall and then forgets to stop. The sea, sometimes, comes right through the front door. And we are changed. Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade tells a story in The Maltese Falcon about tracing a missing man. The man explains that he was walking down the street when a girder fell from a building and crashed down right next to him. A little chip of concrete cut him on the forehead. He said that it was as if "someone had taken the lid off the world and shown him the works." There being no way to account for such things in the life he had led, he just walked away and started over. Hammett, an early fan of irony, has Spade say that what he liked best about the story was that the man's new life was remarkably like his old one--that he had adjusted to a world where girders fell out the sky, and then, when girders stopped falling, he had adjusted right back. May the girders stop falling soon.