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Media
February 9, 2006
Scratch Cat Fever
PR people, take note: If you're willing to dress up a cat in a silly collar adorned with a police badge, you can get practically unlimited favorable press coverage. Even if said cat didn't do anything beyond getting handed from one person to another, it doesn't matter as long as this transaction was somehow relevant to catching a criminal. The cat's a hero! Schedule a news conference! Dress the cat in the cute cop costume! Call the New York Times! The headlines practically write themselves:
Media
February 9, 2006
BlackBerry, Our Enemies' Savior
Recently, gelflog noted the mother of all product placements for BlackBerry: used as a tool by heroic terrorism-fighter Jack Bauer on Fox's 24. But it turns out that technology can be used for both good and evil.
Media
February 8, 2006
We Spoke Too Soon
Among the highlights of this week's edition of Oops, Gelf's quasi-weekly round-up of media corrections: The press jumped the gun on Palestinian elections; a plagiarist and a fabulist; and college media problems. Here's one of our favorite corrections this week:
Media
February 6, 2006
Cursing Stones
When news breaks that contains profanity, it's always interesting to see how different media outlets cover it. (For example, Gelf compared how different news organizations dealt with Robert Novak's famous tirade on CNN's Inside Politics.) During the halftime show of the Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones omitted some lyrics from their song set because ABC decided that the words were too risqué. Here's how some popular news sites covered it:
Media
February 2, 2006
Dog Food Snafu
In this week's edition of Zooming In, Gelf's quasi-weekly roundup of undercovered local stories from around the world: A banned student magazine; an empty airline; and camel wrestling. One of our favorite stories this week concerns a controversial food donation to Kenya.
Arts
January 30, 2006
The Web's Frey Detritus
Memoirist James Frey has been exposed as a fabulist (Gelflogged recently), and, now that one-time Frey endorser Oprah Winfrey has turned on the best-selling author, the at-first-ambivalent media, including many outlets that carried glowing reviews and profiles of Frey, are rushing to bury Frey's rep. (Jon Stewart had a great segment Monday night noting the appropriateness—in light of sometimes-deferential coverage of government officials by TV news—of the press's tone of shock that Oprah would hold a liar to account.) Yet three weeks after the Smoking Gun started the controversy, some funny traces of Frey's erstwhile prestige remain online:
Media
January 30, 2006
BlackBerry, Our Savior
In the world of product placement, it doesn't get much better than this: On Fox's 24, heroic terrorism-fighter Jack Bauer needs to send word to a presidential advisor about an enemy agent working inside the White House. Word comes via an email while the advisor is in a meeting with Mr. President. The camera cuts to the mobile email device, with brand-name visible. Any device would have done just as well for some low-ranking official, but in the White House, only BlackBerry will do.
Media
January 30, 2006
Albert Brooks, an Acquired Taste
In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies—see breakdowns of blurbs for Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, TransAmerica, The New World, and more. This week's winner of the Bogus Blurb of the Week award comes in an ad for Breaking News:
Internet
January 30, 2006
Celebrity Face Recognition
Face-recognition software is cool, but regardless of what the feds try to tell us, they've still got a ways to go before it becomes the exclusive identification tool. In the meantime, though, some entrepreneurs have started using this new technology as the basis of their companies, for uses other than crime-busting. One of the first commercially available versions popped up on the internet a few days ago. MyHeritage.com promises to analyze uploaded photos and compare the faces in them to those in its archive, identifying long-lost relatives and determining previously-unknown genetic relationships. Gelf decided to test it out.
Law
January 26, 2006
America's Legal Isolationism
On Thursday's New York Times Op-Ed page, Felix G. Rohatyn, a former US ambassador to France, repeats a basic fallacy of the argument that foreign law should carry weight in American courts. I don't mean to pick on Rohatyn. I agree completely with his aims, and all he's doing is offering the best argument those frightened by American exceptionalism currently have. But that's the problem: The best argument sucks.
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