YOU WOULD THINK (always a risky beginning) that media commentators would welcome the Special Forces and FBI’s neat — and casualty-free — seizure of Ahmed Abu Khatalla off Tripoli’s streets and onto a U.S. Navy ship and then a plane bound for an American courtroom. No; actually you wouldn’t think that, not given the wholesale shift, even among the president’s once-innumerable media supporters, to Obama-bashing during this advanced stage of his second term.

MASS MEDIA CONSUMERS in America might be forgiven for forgetting this, but the purpose of Memorial Day is – obviously enough – to remember our troops, past and present, with gratitude for their service. But what are those service-members themselves remembering?

MEDIA PLANNERS just love anniversaries. But I’m wondering how many in the mass media will pick up on a confluence of two such commemorations this coming week – a 50th and a 20th – which mark different, equally salient, events in the long life of a recently departed global giant.

Dateline: Austin, TX — THE BIRD GETS A BUM RAP. As the always effervescent South By Southwest multimedia festivals explode here every year at this time, the thousands of visiting movie, web and music buffs will often complain about Austin’s ubiquitous black bird.

Dateline: Austin TX — WE CAME FROM ALL OVER the world to this three-sided, multimedia party known as the South By South West Festivals, celebrating film, music and internet culture. But death cast a pall over its later days.

THE TSUNAMI IS UPON US. With February marking fifty years since the original miracle happened, the media’s own backward-looking Beatlemania is now flooding unstoppably through every platform.

THIS HAS BEEN – OFFICIALLY AT LEAST – one of those quiet weeks for political reporters. The U.S. Congress doesn’t come back to work (silly word, I know) until Monday, January 27.

But members of both House and Senate are in this quiet time having to think hard — though not necessarily talk to the press — about the uncomfortably hot potato recently tossed into their laps by President Barack Obama.  

THE VERY FIRST REPORTING of Nelson Mandela‘s death sparked in me a sharp flash of disappointment with journalism, along with inevitable sadness over losing the great man himself.

The disappointing journalism was all the worse for coming from my own home-town paper, The New York Times, one of the finest news organizations in the world — most of the time.

IT’S A LONG MEDIA TRADITION, and not just among the BHLM (“bleeding-heart-liberal-media”), to mark Thanksgiving by paying some attention – be it sincere or merely dutiful – to those citizens who clearly don’t have a lot to be thankful for.

ACCORDING TO MEDIA LORE, thanks principally to the vintage series The Naked City on ABC television, “there are eight million stories” in New York.

But one of the great untold stories of this metropolis is the high-quality art on its walls. Not just hanging on them, but literally on them; and therefore a very part of those walls themselves.

HALF-CENTURY COMMEMORATIONS of major civil rights events are now studding the calendar of our nation’s media — inevitably, since 1963 was such a fateful year.

Last month the media rightly celebrated the March on Washington and Dr Martin Luther King Jr‘s resonant “I Have A Dream” speech — a broad wedge of an event that began to prise open overdue changes in our society. And now this week, by contrast, the media have had a poignantly sharp event on which to tightly focus — the Ku Klux Klansmen’s murder of four young girls by bombing Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th. An event that lasted just a few, but interminable seconds.  

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.