MANAGING PRESS RELATIONS in government these days means, horribile dictu, operating within the overall coarsening of our nation’s discourse – of which the President’s unending assaults on the country’s essential institutions are often the most salient examples.

SELF-HARMING has at times featured in popular culture, occasionally to some point, but too often as just a facile piece of personality-sketching. I’m thinking right now of Secretary, the 2002 movie that first introduced the ever-affecting Maggie Gyllenhaal to most of us.

THE MEDIA GO CRAZY over this kind of story. A farmer plowing his field unearths a vast, priceless store of ancient treasures.

It’s something of a trope – since it happens, well, if not all the time … then at least both rarely enough to be newsworthy and frequently enough to invoke a familiar, even folkloric format for the narrative.   

THERE JUST TWO KINDS of people who’ll be denied a life-beyond-death, we are told in the newly-opened Broadway staging of Jez Butterworth’s sinewy Northern Irish Troubles-based play The Ferryman.

DURING A MEDIA INTERVIEW it could come as a shock to hear a senior western government’s representative quoting – approvingly and with reverence – the declarations of “our community’s Caliph”. Surely not that Caliph, a hasty or ill-briefed journalist might think. Not the leader of that blood-drenched, self-styled ‘caliphate’ proclaimed by ISIS and now militarily beaten down. And of course it wasn’t.

AN IMPORTANT STORY UNFOLDED for three weeks recently, in at least eleven American states – but it gained little mainstream press coverage.

Admittedly, it wasn’t too easy for journalists to learn checkable facts about it.     

Prisoners incarcerated across the country went on strike … expressing their demands for improved living and working conditions.

I’VE BEEN HIT by an onslaught of “The Eights”. My local public radio station, WNYC has been reflecting on our so-called ‘culture wars’, tracing them decade by decade, through the prism specifically of events that occurred in years ending in 8.

“I’M SORRY. I JUST CAN’T. If I appear in public and say honestly what happened with me – who knows what the fall-out may be.” Such has been the anxious response I’ve gotten so many times when, as a journalist working largely in TV, I’ve requested an on-camera interview.

JUST NOW AND AGAIN, specialized journalism scores a bull’s-eye hit that the mainstream media can overlook – but certainly shouldn’t.

I want to commend some dogged reporting by Marisa Taylor of Kaiser Health News, who for the past year and more has been on the trail of an egregious case of illicit medical experimentation.

Dateline: Cahors, France – Arriving in France and sampling European media again has been a jolt for me, in part because of dates. It’s the week of World Refugee Day and also of Juneteenth, celebrating the day (June 19th, 1865) when slavery’s abolition-order eventually found its way to deep in America’s still obdurate slave-state of Texas.

‘ART FOR ART’S SAKE!’ is without doubt a slogan to conjure with. And sure enough, that irrepressible conjurer/playwright Tom Stoppard (left) twirls Théophile Gautier’s 19th-century notion – that art is defiantly non-utilitarian – around his bewitching wand again and again during the newest revival of his Travesties (back on Broadway since last week).

Dateline: London  –  IS IT A JOKE AIMED …

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO be a videogame freak.” I heard that reassurance on my way in to see Steven Spielberg’s newest extravaganza ‘Ready Player One’, which arrives in theaters everywhere next week. It’s based, after all, on Ernest Cline’s 2011 barnstormer young-adult novel of the same name – which memorably made USA Today hail the author as “the hottest geek on the planet”.

Dateline: Austin, Texas – I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY ‘SIDESHOW’. But I’ve noticed something while here on my annual foray to SXSW, that gigantic combination of movies, music and all matters digital (plus growing spin-offs like education, video-gaming, comedy and more) that now pulls almost half-a-million participants into the Texan capital.

A DEVELOPING STORY that’s being tucked away here and there across our national media deserves a lot more attention. Its main attraction? Well, it features a crude and deeply corrupt President who is also allegedly a sexual predator.

LIKE MANY POWERFUL STORIES, this one starts in a black South African township. One day in the early 1950s, a boy was photographed jumping for joy.

Much later – this week in fact – the boy died, by then a world-renowned troubadour called Hugh Masakela. Fans everywhere mourned his death from prostate cancer at 78 years of age.     In South Africa he was dubbed Bra Hu (‘Brother Hugh’) a comradely designation earned largely for the activist tilt of his work.

STORIES, I’VE HEARD TELL, are the lifeblood of societies and cultures. Whether they’re factual reporting … convincingly true-to-life fiction … or gripping, incredible fantasies … we all do seem to need ‘em. They can pump through our system with rousing drive, or calm and reassure us like a soothing heartbeat.

Actor John Lithgow, in his much-traveled one-man show that came to rest and opened tonight on Broadway, poses a fundamental question to his audience when the show begins. Why do we tell and listen to stories?    

SHE BOUNCES, almost tumbles onto the stage, All-American. But with the look of a French écolière as well. The high-necked, long-sleeved gray smock-dress, red beret and a single tightly-braided pigtail provide the Gallic touches.

IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN. It’s The Media Beat‘s annual celebration of entertaining media errors (and efforts to put things right) that have caught my eye since our last unashamedly un-collegial exercise in journalistic schadenfreude … lo, these full twelve months ago.

TRAVEL JUST FOUR MILES from Heraklion International Airport on the Greek island of Crete, and you have gone back four thousand years to the Minoan Civilization.