NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam had a great spot on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the disputes among social scientists over the impact of violent video games on kids. ["It's A Duel: How Do Violent Video Games Affect Kids?"] You won’t be surprised to hear I wholeheartedly agree with Texas A&M psychologist Chris Ferguson, who [...]
My thanks to Linton Weeks of NPR who reached out to me for comment for a story he was doing on the impact of the Internet and digital technology on culture and our attention spans. His essay, “We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore,” is an interesting exploration of the issue, although it is [...]
It was my pleasure today to debate the future of public media funding on Warren Olney’s NPR program, “To The Point“. I was 1 of 5 guests and I wasn’t brought into the show until about 29 minutes into the program, but I tried to reiterate some of the key points I made in my [...]
I’m not one of those libertarians who incessantly rants about the supposed evils of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcast Service (PBS). In fact, I find quite a bit to like in the programming I consume on both services, NPR in particular. A few years back I realized that I was listening to [...]
I sincerely hope it was a Washington Post editor, and not New America Foundation president Steve Coll, who picked the title for his editorial today, “Why Fox News Should Help Fund NPR.” After all, Coll certainly must be smart enough to know that there is no law or regulation on the books today that gives [...]
Just FYI.. Tomorrow’s “Diane Rehm Show” on NPRs local affiliate station (WAMU 88.5FM) will feature a debate about the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Plan, which is due out tomorrow. [Here's the executive summary.] The show airs at 10:00 locally, but you can listen to the show here online, and I’ll repost a link [...]
Every Tuesday, Washington, DC’s local NPR station (88.5 WAMU) carries a “Tech Tuesdays” program as a regular part of The Kojo Nnamdi Show. This week’s show, which was guest hosted by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, was on “Regulating the World Wide Web: A View from Abroad.” It was a wide-ranging and very interesting [...]
Free Press, the radical pro-regulatory media activist group, recently filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for the agency’s upcoming workshop on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” The Free Press comments provide an enlightening glimpse into the mind of how many on the Left now think about media policy in America. Their [...]
Last month, National Review magazine published a review that I penned of Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. Helprin’s book is both a passionate defense of copyright law as well as a mini-autobiography. Helprin is one of the great novelists and essayists of the past half-century, and his book A Soldier of [...]
There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too. Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of [...]