CABLE TV NEWS got its biggest enlivening jolt since the invention of CNN, enthusiasts are arguing, when the new channel Al Jazeera America (AJAM) was finally launched this week.

This newest service to emerge from the deep pockets of the Qatari royal family was also supposed to deliver a strong, hard news-based corrective to the partisan rhetoric that typifies Fox News and MSNBC. 

CASCADES OF COMMENTARY still course through the airwaves and cyberspace about the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin – a legal process that in its end last week achieved the very opposite of settling matters.

A GLOBAL PUBLISHING PHENOMENON has long fascinated me. Ranking number three among the world’s best-selling poets — after Shakespeare and Lao Tsu — is Kahlil Gibran.

THE EMERGENCY that recently drew the world’s eyes to Mali, that largely arid and desperately poor country stretching from the Sahara Desert southward to the Niger River, has now left its prime position in the West’s news media, but enormous humanitarian challenges remain.

It was no surprise to see this week that the New York Times prefigured next Tuesday’s summit meeting of the G8 countries’ top leaders. It’s the United Kingdom’s turn to host the event, and that government has made a noteworthy choice for its venue — a small Northern Irish town in County Fermanagh with the redolent name of Enniskillen.   

IT’S NOT PERSONAL, or indeed political. But just as David Cameron, my country-of-origin’s current prime minister, has crossed the Atlantic and come to my adopted hometown of New York, I have bolted in the opposite direction, over to the UK.   

THE TERRORIST ATTACK brought out some of the worst, but also much of the best in American journalism. That was true of 9/11/2001. I wish it were true of 4/15/2013 as well.

“SOUTH BY,“ to use that rather flat, familial nickname habitués have given their annual festival here, South by Southwest, contrived to be in itself a somewhat flat event this year.

I’m thinking of the Interactive (with all things geeky being considered) and the Film parts of the festival, and not the Music part — which seemed, as it started up later in the week, every bit as wild and crazy as usual.   

I GET TO TELL a little-known story on TV this weekend.

Just ahead of the centenary of Rosa Parks‘ birth, when she will be fêted throughout the nation as “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” I report for PBS on a terrible injustice being done to her memory.

AN INTER-MEDIA TRANSFER is in place that celebrity-chasing reporters have been eagerly awaiting.

Movie star Katie Holmes (movie star, that is, and still newly-divorced wife of a movie mega-star, of course) takes to the boards of a Broadway live-action theater. The play is Dead Accounts, by Theresa Rebeck, opening officially tonight (Thursday, November. 29th).

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.