Media

There's an old newspaper expression: Stop the presses. But nobody in the business had in mind stopping them for good, or running them less because of slack business.

Social networking is like viral marketing on steroids. Companies can release a new product in the morning and have it talked about by millions of users on thousands of sites by the afternoon. But users can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on their experience with the product, a rumor, or whether they have had their morning coffee yet.

Comic book writer Stan Lee is the man behind some of the world's greatest fictional super-heroes. Today, at 84, the creator of the Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four and Spider-Man is still making his mark on popular culture. Mike O'Sullivan spoke with the writer about his legacy and his future projects.

From CNN to the Enquirer, from Larry King to Barbra Walters, celebrities are in the news constantly. This is intriguing, to a point, but it often changes from intriguing to just annoying. This is particularly true when it comes to certain celebrities, celebrities that are shoved down our throats whenever our mouths are even slightly open.

Merv Griffin, who moved from big-band crooner to television mogul, died August 12 of prostate cancer.

Thousands of humans can be slaughtered by genocide in Somalia or some other part of the world and we hear little of it, yet, a car bomb in England can be thwarted and we hear it on all the news media regurgitated for days followed up by the garbage can bomb idea. Let's spread more fear for the terrorist to gloat.

The non-coverage of Dirkhising's case and the implication that murders by gays aren't as newsworthy as murders by straights, led to an explosion of anger on the Internet and talk radio. Some of this came from haters. But a lot came from people who sensed the double standard: If Jesse Dirkhising had been a gay youngster tortured and killed by straight men, the story would have gone national in a heartbeat.

The fact of the matter is that Princess Diana is dead because of the media. She is not the only one whose life has been taken or destroyed in other ways by the media. Of course, the media didn't want the Princess to be dead. But they were hungry for what she had-her personal life-and they paid big money to the paparazzi for photos of Diane.

Many industry insiders point to the internet as the reason behind all of this; the growth of online news has eroded some of magazines’ reader and revenue bases. The public is moving towards the internet for their news.

Current, conventional advertising has been beset with problems from the very beginnings. Probably the principal problem advertising has is …accountability. Or rather the lack of it!

Beyond their obvious attraction for the torrid and sleazy, does the news media have a moral responsibility to honestly report? Does spinning and selectively reporting on events mean dishonesty or just disingenuousness? Since the press not only reports and comments but actually forms and affects events and legislation, should they be held to a higher standard?

Think you are getting the true election results when you watch the evening news? Think again. You probably already know that the networks report their "projections" long before the votes are counted, and sometimes before the polls are even closed. But what you may not know is that they don't report the true results of elections, even after all the votes are counted.

The fact that a politician's sexual activities can become headline news overnight, holds elected officials to ridiculously outdated standards. N. American society no longer operates within the moral codes celebrated in Little House On the Prairie or Anne of Green Gables. So why pretend it does? It's just out-and-out hypocrisy...

Talk show host, actress, publisher, reading advocate, activist and philanthropist, Oprah Winfrey has created a personal connection with people in America and around the world through the power of TV, earning her a place on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

American columnist Art Buchwald, who took humorous jabs at Washington politicians for decades, died Wednesday at the age of 81. He'd been in a hospice for nearly a year, having decided to forego dialysis treatment for kidney disease.