MaestroReviews

Deb and I are artists, painters actually. We go see films as often as once a week. That's right, we go to the theater and sit in a dark room with strangers to see movies. We rarely rent. We like "little" movies, foreign and documentary films. We try to stay away from mainstream and blockbusters whenever possible, but a couple sneak in each year. We seek out the obscure. We try to avoid violent movies, and that really limits our choices, most film makers seem to think violence makes a story interesting.
I try not to give anything away in the reviews, but offer an honest reaction.
We rate them 1~10, 10 being highest.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Page One: Inside the New York Times

Deb 4 Me 4

This is a look at a few folks and some of the things they face getting the New York Times out. I was struck by how movie star-ish the publisher and war correspondent were. The other main guy was very caricature-ish. The Times faces pressure from new media and they didn’t do a very good job of describing those new media or the pressures they apply to me. I get how the internet can make cutting trees down obsolete and how credibility is diminishing, but they didn’t talk about that a lot. They did talk about how print ads are falling off and how things like Twitter are a threat, but I don’t see how from what was provided in the movie.

I heard them talk about the news delivery system (web v. print) changing, but I didn’t hear them say anything about the news gathering (finding and checking sources) structure changes or remains. They did mention some of their huge guffaws, the guy who made up Pulitzer Prize winning stories and the gal who basically started the war by publishing unsubstantiated stories about enemy weapons build up. Sure these people got fired, and the boss too, but the fact that thousands of people have lost their lives and billions of domestic dollars have been spent on the basis of lies was pretty well shrugged off. Everybody makes mistakes, but they’re still the model for all newspapers.

The movie was lacking, and it got a low score. The Times, and most all news organization fail miserably. Maybe some documentaries that aren’t as self serving as this one might expose some of the inherent problems with the process and bring about some meaningful change.

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