entertainment media

Entertainment Media and Juvenile Violence

Over the years, crimes committed by minors are said to be in a way influenced by video games, tv shows, and movies they've had access to. I've seen a documentary on tv where the minor who was...

Video of Susan Jacoby on The Colbert Report

The Center for Inquiry's Susan Jacoby, author of the NYTimes bestseller The Age of American Unreason, appeared last night on The Colbert Report. As Colbert remarked, he prefers emotion over...

Indiana Jones Sequel to Focus on Aliens, Roswell, & Area 51

Vanity Fair has the clues and the reader is left to connect the dots: Film is set in 1957 (ten years after crash at Roswell), was shot in New Mexico, and in contrast to previous Indy Films that...

Frank Luntz's Tips on Navigating Airports

If anyone knows their way around airports, it's Frank Luntz. The language maestro estimates he logs 300,000 miles a year and stays in 100 hotels as he jets around the world consulting with corporate...

News Mags Ad Revenue Suffers; Celebrity Mags Thrive

Pew has posted advertising revenue analysis for major magazines over the past year. Not surprisingly, the "big three" news magazines continue to suffer, other mags such as The New Yorker hold steady,...

Why Thompson Launches his Candidacy on Jay Leno

Say what? Fred Thompson is launching his presidential candidacy on Jay Leno? In today's fragmented media world, it's a smart move. As the political scientist Matt Baum describes in a recent study,...

Understanding the Impact of Michael Moore's SICKO

"I think one movie can make a difference; I do believe that," says director Michael Moore. Indeed, speculation over the impact of his new documentary SICKO was the subject of a news feature in the...

Upstream/Downstream: Why The NY Times Should Understand the Nature of Inconvenient Truths

My quick summary reaction to Bill Broad's provocative NY Times article surveying a few scientists and social scientists' opinions on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth:1) Just like in politics generally,...

The Buffyverse and Incidental Exposure to Science

One of the great paradoxes of contemporary society is that Americans by way of the Internet and specialized cable TV channels have greater access to scientific information than at any other time in...

Indirect Truths: Understanding the Social Impact of Documentary Film

How much impact has Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth had on the global warming debate? More generally, how can we understand the range of influences that a documentary film might have on the public or...

Global Warming Concerts to Catalyze World Action

A series of concerts "bigger than Live Aid" are being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before a global audience of two billion, reports the Financial Times. The event,...