HE WAS, AS WE’VE ALL NOTED, a much-changed Barack Obama during last night’s second debate with Mitt Romney. But it was a familiar setting for him — something many in the assembled media teams would not remember.

CANDIDATES’ DEBATES have since 1960 become indispensable media elements in a presidential campaign — and so too have the full dress-rehearsals held in secret before them.

ONCE IN GREAT WHILE, an individual will cross the media landscape, maybe not leaving scorching headlines in his wake, but certainly making an indelible mark on our consciousness.

Dateline: Lancaster, England – THE WHOLE WORLD’S EYES, as they say, have been on Britain. And Britain’s own scrutiny of itself has also been intense – encouraged by an orgy of self-absorption among the British media.

I GOT TO RENEW a familiar old connection during this, my summer hiatus from writing THE MEDIA BEAT  column on a weekly basis.

LIFE AFTER POWER has its inevitable fascination for journalists. The study I’ve been making of Tony Blair since he left the UK Premiership in 2007 hits the air this weekend on the PBS broadcast Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

A LOT OF WORDS – many of them just too easy – have been applied to Gore Vidal since he died on Tuesday.

Adjectives have proliferated that evoke eras long gone by — like “patrician“… “aristocratic“… even “Augustan” (though I’m skeptical that John Dryden or Alexander Pope would have embraced him in their circles).

Dateline: LONDON — FOR A REPORTER WHO has chronicled the long bloody struggle by Irish nationalists to break free of British domination, it’s been an almost freakish time to visit the UK.

AMID THE MURDOCH EMPIRE‘s many and multiplying hard knocks — now for instance, police charges on obstruction of justice against the former Chief Executive of all its British newspapers, their Head of “Security,” and others — it’s easy to overlook intriguing items in the empire’s actual editorial output.

TWO MEDIA TALKATHONS grabbed my attention this week — each very different, though their messages chimed together in an intriguing way.

WHAT A WEEK FOR MEDIA and power, and their incestuous interrelations.

THE FIRST AMENDMENT gets my awed support three times over. As a U.S. citizen … as a journalist … and as an immigrant from England.

AMERICAN MEDIA have gone wild this week for an arcane set of arguments. I suppose we should be grateful; it certainly is unusual.

OH WOW! — A MEDIA STORM over the great Goldman Sachs being disavowed by one of its own, in an Op-Ed article (for The New York Times) that became, controversially, a news story. Overtaken only by a storm over a semi-journalistic public radio show (This American Life) disavowing one of its own episodes attacking the great Apple, Inc.

AMID THE WORLDWIDE HORROR and revulsion over nine Afghan children and seven adults evidently murdered by a US soldier, it was remarkable how, in the wake of the shootings, the Afghan media were so restrained in their coverage.

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.”