WHAT A DIFFERENCE a night makes. Chaos reigns in the evening, but the morning can bring sanity and relief.

That’s how it was for me this week as a news consumer. Having long ago forsaken cable TV news as a hotbed of empty loud-mouthery instead of actual news, on Tuesday I picked NPR as the vector to bring me information about the latest criminal indictment of ex-President Donald Trump. As we all now know, he'll be arraigned in court (once again, this time in DC) at 4pm today.  Another big chance for the media loud-mouths, without doubt.

THE MEDIA BEAT HAS LOST A VOICE. Early on a Friday morning for seventeen years, Marshall Miles would talk with me to create the half-hour radio version of this column. But now Marshall has died, departing this world on June 24th, 2023.  

Marshall leaves behind a rich legacy of broadcast work, and his appreciative audiences are left bereft.

UKRAINE’S NEW AND LONG-AWAITED counteroffensive against the Russian invasion has made this a bad time to be a peacemaker.

Much of the world’s press decried the attempt to start talks, led by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa (photo-montaged, left, with warring presidents). The journalistic poohpoohing centered as much on who led the attempt as on its alleged untimeliness. It was judged inappropriate, coming just as the victim-nation has now started so valiantly (and in some small degree successfully) to strike back against the Putin empire.

Dateline Dublin, Ireland — THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NO REASON, of course, why a country’s national theater shouldn’t perform a classic play from a completely different nation.   It’s indeed been very heartening to see the Abbey Theatre in Dublin mounting a new version, somewhat reworked in-house, of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen’s striking modern tragedy, Ghosts.

MY LOCAL DISTRICT ATTORNEY is the dogged Alvin Bragg. We are both boosters of our shared hometown, in our somewhat different ways. To begin the public radio edition of The Media Beat, I announce each week (part seriously and part self-mockingly) that I’m speaking from “the Media Capital of the World.” Bragg was 100% serious when he told his packed press conference this week that “New York is the Business Capital.” He went on to say, “we cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct."

Dateline AUSTIN, Texas: “THEY DON’T WANT OUR PITY.THEY WANT OUR RESPECT!” That was the message from uber-chef José Andrés, famous already for feeding people in successful restaurants and on TV shows, but now elevated to the status of global humanitarian hero-figure.

TOMORROW'S REDOLENT DATE, February 24th, marks one year since Russia’s Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale war on Ukraine …,

Dateline: London, England - IN ITS BRAND-NEW INCARNATION at the UK's National Theatre, Shakespeare's Othello …

Dateline: DUBLIN, Ireland - THERE'S WONDERFUL PLEASURE to be had in seeing a cultural institution doing effectively exactly what it should be doing.

Ireland's national theater, The Abbey, founded in 1904 by the poet W.B. Yeats along with dramatist and cultural campaigner, Lady (Isabella Augusta) Gregory, whom George Bernard Shaw called "the greatest living Irishwoman," is currently breathing fresh and confident life into an Irish modern classic: Conor McPherson's The Weir.

IT IS EXTRAORDINARY to have seen citizens of the world's second biggest economy, crippled though it is by crude and brutal methods to stamp out Covid, rise up in mass protest.

The methods adopted by these astonishingly brave protestors have displayed a subtlety and inventiveness that must stir our awe and admiration, even as the ruling Chinese Communist Party cracks down hard.

I HAPPEN TO BE WRITING this on my birthday, but it's to celebrate another, much bigger and more important birthday. The British Broadcasting Corporation, to use its rarely-spoken unabbreviated name, is about to turn one hundred years old.   

When the BBC was initially founded on October 18th, 1922 the C stood simply for "Company," in fact a grouping of six communication businesses, including most prominently Guglielmo Marconi’s company, Wireless Telegraph & Signal. But within five years it was to become more grandiosely a "body corporate," endowed with both that "Corporation" title and a Royal Charter, designed in part to protect it as an independent entity from commercial or political pressures.

A NEW KING TAKES OVER from the old Queen and a new political leader replaces the previous played-out office-holder.  

That new title, King Charles III, is a challenge for newsrooms everywhere to get accustomed to. TV commentators this past week were still calling him 'the Prince' and instantly correcting themselves, hours and even days after he had assumed the topmost position. New habits do get instilled, though, and the updated moniker will be tripping comfortably off everybody's lips before too long. How Charles himself will adjust to the new role is inevitably unclear, but he and his chief courtiers in 'The Firm' know full well that a lot depends on what new relationship he strikes with the media.

INCITING? ENABLING? TRIGGERING? How should we view media responsibility in these recent days of mounting, and I’d suggest far from random, acts of extreme violence.

It would have been a mistake to ever think, if anybody really did, that the writer Salman Rushdie (left) might no longer be in danger, a full 33 years after the fatwa death sentence was declared against him by Iran’s Ayatollah RuhollahKhomeini, himself now long dead and gone.  

I SURPRISED SOME FOLKS, EVIDENTLY. During my regular public radio version of this column last week, I reacted very negatively — and some people said uncharacteristically — to one disturbing aspect of President Joe Biden’s Middle East trip.  

IT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN. The gruesome symbolism of US citizens shot dead and injured amid the red-white-and-blue razzamatazz of Independence Day was horribly predictable.

The law of averages, though it’s more a journalistic construct and far from a proven mathematical rule, has long suggested that sooner rather than later the all-American atrocity of a gunman on a rampage would occur on our national day of celebration.

IT’S SELF-EVIDENT (OR I HOPE IT IS) that any sensible New York-based media person should spend time in Europe. I’m now reflecting on almost two months recently spent in Ireland and France, which also included a brief look-in on the UK.

THROUGH THE MANY YEARS THAT I REPORTED ON SOUTH AFRICA, I had recurring appointments with Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) to interview him for whichever media outlet I happened to be working with at the time. We called them our 'catch-up interviews.'  Here below is a condensed version of one such exchange, conducted this century, plus a reflection on another from the last century.

JUST AS THE WORLD KEEPS TURNING, so does the huge glass box. In the newly reopening production (tonight) of The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway, all the action takes place inside that box, perched on a massive turntable.

When first revealed at curtain-up, the box represents glass-walled offices, home to the financial behemoth that was Lehman Brothers, on the momentous night in September 2008 when the company crashed to its death - the biggest bankruptcy in history, ushering in our so-called Great Recession. 

LET'S STEP AWAY awhile from our own society's chaotic divisions. I know a orphanage in Africa, to adapt Karen Blixen's famous opening sentence. It’s for young elephants, and it’s one of the many, though not enough, that are scattered across the continent.

AN EXISTENTIAL CHOICE faces America in these final days before November 3rd.

And how are the nation’s media rising to this epochal challenge?