“AMERICA HAS SPOKEN!” So pronounced the re-elected George W. Bush, in a landmark quote for the year – one delivered in his best “Don’t mess with Texas” tones.  

JOURNALISM TOOK BIG losses this week. New York lost the greatly lamented columnist Jack Newfield; the world lost Anthony Sampson (left).

I didn’t know Mr. Newfield, regrettably; I am grateful I did know Tony.

YOU HAVE to be SOOOOO careful with these Latin American dictators. That applies even if they’re 89 years old, sickly, and out of effective power for eight years.     

General Augusto Pinochet has been freshly investigated in The New York Times‘ business pages, just as he faces charges of kidnapping and murder during his time as Chile’s head of state.

YOU’LL HAVE ADMIRED the Time Warner Center, of course. The communications giant doesn’t, you probably know, occupy that entire eponymous Center, but Chief Executive Richard Parsons was eager to get the company name emblazoned on the whole luxurious shebang of a building  …  top-notch restaurants, glitzy stores, pricey food market and all. 

THE REPLACEMENT GAME gains pace at Business Week. As longtime Editor-in-Chief Steve Shepard heads toward running the new graduate journalism school at CUNY, Mark Morrison, the magazine’s Managing Editor, might appear an easy shoo-in.

THOSE UNPREDICTABLE extensions of duty and the “Stop-Loss” measures dashed the hopes of many soldiers and their families – but some, at least, were home for Thanksgiving.

SURELY IT WAS ONE OF THE WORST public moments of private pain in the Iraq war. Tahseen Hassan (left), the husband of murdered aid worker Margaret Hassan, saying with quiet dignity to a TV camera: “Margaret lived with me in Iraq for 30 years. She dedicated her life to serving the Iraqi people. Please, now, please return her to rne.”

A BIG INFLUENCE ON THOSE MEDIA PUNDITS who yelp about John Kerry‘s loss has been Thomas Frank‘s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?

SO HOW GOOD A JOB did the mass media do covering the election? The voters’ choice, at least as defined by those media, was clear – but it had the clarity of an LCD. Not liquid crystal lighting, I’m afraid – but the Lowest Communicable Denominator.  

NIXON vs. KENNEDY was the first television election. Now Bush vs. Kerry has become the first Internet election.

CAN IT BE THAT RUPERT MURDOCH‘s support for the Republicans – once legendary in its rock-solidness – is starting to show cracks?

“SAY IT ISN’T SO,  Joe!” we all want to yell. But at Dan Rather (left).

That cry from a baseball fan to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, when the hero was exposed in the gigantic 1919 World Series fraud, seems about right just now for Rather, the tall-in-the-saddle truth-teller from Texas, and from CBS News as well of course.

NO-ONE EXPECTED it to end with killing. In 1972, I was a junior TV journalist assigned to watch events in Northern Ireland, which that weekend happened to include a protest march in Derry. At most, I figured there would be the customary low-level standoff between protesters and the army, some stone-throwing and tear gas. But once the shooting started, that day was destined to be known as Bloody Sunday.

LAST WEEK THREE anti-nuclear campaigners went to gaol in the small mid-California town of San Luis Obispo. They joined seven other colleagues already sentenced to periods of imprisonment ranging from 15 days to six months. All were gaoled for their self-confessed participation in a mass protest last month against the siting of a nuclear plant near an earthquake fault.  They are the first in a long line.

THE MASSIVE CABORA BASSA dam now being built in Portuguese Mozambique provokes some strong passions. For its many opponents across the world, it is a concrete symbol of white racialist determination to retain power in southern Africa.   South Africa has come north from her natural defence line to help build the dam, pay the lion’s share of its costs, and take most of the electricity it will produce, while Mozambique and Rhodesia will also gain much mutual benefit from the grandiose development scheme of which the dam is the vital core.