THE RECENT MEDIA EXPLOSIONS in the world’s two biggest economies could bear some clear-eyed comparisons.

It’s especially worthwhile to compare the American and the Chinese peoples’ vastly expanded access to digital media, both as consumers and increasingly as active participants and originators.

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, DC – It’s good for a Big Apple-based journalist to get out — even just to go south to the Federal District.

The Beltway may not be the best place to be reminded of opinion across the nation as a whole, but I find it a tad better listening post than New York.

ONE OF THE GRIMMER, more distressing declarations I’ve heard from a TV executive has come from Ben Sherwood, President of ABC News, just a year or so into his still-new position.

Sherwood said, in a recent interview with the New York Times‘ indefatigable Brian Stelter, that audiences themselves nowadays “pick what matters most to them, and we are trying to be adaptive.”    

AN UNEXPECTED CONTRAST in media modes — new and old — came through dramatically this week.

POSSIBLY THE BEST WORD for it, and it’s meant approvingly, is ‘farrago‘.

New York’s Lincoln Center, specifically its august resIdent The Metropolitan Opera, is currently wowing much of its faithful audience and enticing a newer public (which looked to me quite a younger one) with its decidedly multimedia — and multiply-sourced — confection known as The Enchanted Island.   

THIS WEEKEND BRINGS A PIQUANT moment for me — a telling anniversary in the chronicles of information-management, as well as a horrifying memory in itself. At 4.10 p.m. Sunday afternoon, exactly 40 years ago, I witnessed soldiers shooting innocent civilians dead, an atrocity that officialdom instantly lied about — and provoked a four-decade struggle to get the truth finally established.    I’m able nowadays to record how — thanks to great journalistic effort, a determined community’s campaigning, and in the end some responsible governmental and legal responses to pressure — the tangled story of Northern Ireland’s “Bloody Sunday” eventually reached a powerful and welcome resolution.

THEY LINED UP in familiar opposing ranks. On one side Rupert Murdoch, sounding crustier than ever now that he tweets … the Motion Picture Association of America (which of course includes Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox studios) … and other traditional media conglomerates like NBC Universal. On the other side, younger digital dynamos like Google, Mozilla, WordPress and Wikipedia.   

THANK YOU, DIGITAL REVOLUTION! You’ve given us many benefits, to be sure, but now this. We are living, apparently, at the mercy of people with the manners of a chimpanzee and the tongue of a Sicilian fishwife.

IT WAS GUARANTEED TO GET full media attention, President Barack Obama‘s unprecedented trip to the Pentagon to personally announce the US military’s mid-term future.

THIS MEDIA YEAR, WHICH IS closing with courtroom cameras covering Egypt’s deposed President Hosni Mubarak on trial for killing his own citizens in the streets, opened with those streets astir with protests.

WHAT IS THE MOST MENDACIOUS MEDIUM? We get an answer, in early word of a study to be published in next March’s issue of the Journal of Business Ethics. Did you know there was a Journal of Business Ethics? Well, there is — published by the long-established publishing house of Springer, founded in 1842 in Berlin and now a world-wide enterprise. I wonder how many businesspeople know there is a Journal of Business Ethics.

THIS DECLINING YEAR has been the centennial of Marshall McLuhan‘s birth — the man who was, if not the father or godfather, then at least our leading prophet of media-driven political and social change.

2011 LOOKS LIKE YET ANOTHER bad year for journalists. Bad once again in the most down-to-earth terms — getting killed.

PARIS, France – OVERSEAS CAPITALS DO SERVE to offer new perspectives. I was surprised early in my trip here to read in Le Monde the claim that Voltaire, a writer I already greatly admired, deserves an extra, and to me unexpected, accolade as “Father of Investigative Journalism.”

WITH THE LONGEST WAR in American history, and the third longest, now both in sight of ending, US media are scattered … you might say confused and conflicted … in assessing what happens next.

JOURNALISTS, EVEN WHILE EXHIBITING cynicism and world-weariness, can also be extremely sensitive. When they feel betrayed, they feel it extra-powerfully.

NEWSROOMS EVERYWHERE ARE are compiling their year-end lists. People of the year, movie of the year, gaffe of the year, all that sort of thing.