WHILE THE MEDIA UNIVERSE, or at least the American media universe, gets ever more besotted with the Republican Party’s bafflement over Donald Trump, and Fox News’ showcasing of the party eating itself alive, and with Hillary Clinton’s private email server supposedly threatening her securing of the Democratic nomination … there sits quietly a powerful news story that is gaining precious little attention.

THERE IS SOME SMALL COMFORT since the horrific murders at Emanuel AME Church, Charleston to see South Carolina at last removing the Confederate battle-flag from the state’s Capitol grounds, and dispatching it to the relic room.   

JUST DAYS AFTER his ballyhooed business ‘restructuring’, Rupert Murdoch is seen to be moving in two opposing directions.

If we believe the official 21st Century Fox announcement, the empire’s paterfamilias is withdrawing backwards. Doing a fade-out, as it were (to cite an Old Media visual effect) by yielding the CEO seat to his younger son James Murdoch.

The Al Jazeera TV news organization that began in Qatar missed a great opportunity when it started Al Jazeera America (AJAM), using the cable channel it bought from ex-Vice President Al Gore‘s Current TV.  

MUCH ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CAN be quite monumentally awe-inspiring. It’s designed to be, after all.

Often it’s in a good way. From the Pope’s elevating addresses to vast crowds in St Peter’s Square – as well as to the Orbe, our wider electronically-watching world – all the way through to that same Pope memorably washing the feet of disabled men and women.    But the horrific worldwide scandal of sexual abuse by priests, and the Church’s decades of cover-up, will inevitably fall into another category

IT’S AS A MEDIA GUY that I’ve gotten really fascinated by elephants. In large part, anyway.

Along with many pachyderm enthusiasts around the world, I’ve long been in awe of these animals’ gigantic majesty, their social cohesion, and their well-appreciated smarts – including of course that renowned and enviable memory of theirs.

But their skill as masterful communicators is what has come to impress me most of all.

Dateline: Austin, Texas – AT THE SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST festival (SXSW) you can obviously get to really binge on movies, and here that means real movies, shown on – gratifyingly – the big screen. 

Dateline: Austin Texas – THE ANNUAL SHINDIG that is South By Southwest is never unenjoyable for a media-hound. How could it be – with its abundant, tripartite combination of a Film division, an entire Internet universe (or more officially the ‘Interactive’ division) and the all-pervasive backdrop of a Music festival?

THOUGH BUFFETED IN COURT, at the Federal District level at least, President Barack Obama will press on, we know. His immigration reform – outmaneuvering by executive fiat the die-hardism of GOP majorities in Congress – will doubtless get delayed but not destroyed.

“A WEEK IS A LONG TIME in politics”, to use words from my old country’s late and somewhat unloved Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It can be true in the media too.

A remarkably packed media week certainly flowed from the massacre at France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine and the hostage killings at the 20th arrondissement’s HyperCacher kosher foodstore in Paris.   

MERCIFULLY, THERE ARE SOME media outlets that don’t always, with big stories, merely plow on ahead heedlessly to the next big story.

These more thoughtful news organizations will moderate their innate devotion to utter novelty, and stay awhile with already familiar news … in order to analyze it, ponder it, and even more gratifyingly sometimes, dig deeper into it.

A REALLY ODD THING once happened to my journalism. And then, equally oddly or more so, it happened again.

I never really had anything like a real specialty as a reporter or as a TV producer – “Generalist!” was my proud boast. But suddenly back in the early 1980s I was unaccountably put in charge of network programs (for Britain’s commercial television service, ITV) that concentrated entirely on religion and ethics.    

ONE MEDIA RITUAL that’s a reliably renewable resource is the post-election poring over pollsters’ data.

Who got the results most right ahead of time naturally preoccupies the industry most of all, but so do more arcane, and often really quite useful analyses of detail. Like demographic breakdowns of the voting population … the chief motivating concerns of voters … relative turn-out by party, gender or age … and so on.    

IT’S VERY HARD TO BELIEVE. At least for me it is. I have been writing THE MEDIA BEAT for a full ten years.

It began in October 2004, in the midst of that year’s US Presidential campaign. I was assigned by the then-editor of the still fairly new, and free, New York paper AM New York, to provide a weekly critical commentary on the mass media.   

AS A MEDIA-GRABBING STORY, the surge of juvenile immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them unaccompanied as well as undocumented, seems to have gone off the boil.

We’re left with the ongoing, indeed saddeningly repetitive saga of undocumented adults making their desperate efforts to find a livelihood north of the border.

THE WORLD’S NEWEST COUNTRY, South Sudan, still struggles to end the internal conflicts that have marred its early life. This week, for instance, a deadline to reach agreement passed without success in peace talks between the warring factions.

THE UNASSUMING TOWN of Soma, in Turkey’s western Aegean region, was suddenly catapulted into the world’s media in May, with a shocking mining disaster.

Fire raged unstoppably through Soma’s aging coalmine after an electrical explosion. Rescuers made frantic efforts for four days to save hundreds of miners feared trapped underground. In the end, a total of 301 people lay dead, and many more were injured.

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.