Dateline: Dublin, Ireland – IN THIS MOST EUROPEAN OF CAPITAL CITIES,  I have a very effective viewing platform from which to look over all of Europe. But the view can sometimes be very disturbing.

I'VE MADE TV DOCUMENTARIES MOST OF MY LIFE. A lot of them are historical. And in those that address contemporary issues, I’ve nearly always felt the need to include some historical background.  

After all, as the Mississipi-born William Faulkner wrote in 1951, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” which I suspect may have prompted the Harlem-born James Baldwin to take it further, with his famous 1963 insistence in Ebony magazine that “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us.” But how, just how, do you faithfully represent history in today's media?

COMEDY … and … GAZA. Two words that probably don’t sit together too well. But they did come together in this week’s news.

THE TABLEAU IS VERY RESONANT. It echoes infamous episodes from an earlier time. Chief Executive Officers of big corporations are lined up, all being sworn in, hands raised solemnly, and then being called to account by our country’s elected representatives.

THE SLOGAN, AS OFTEN WITH SLOGANS, is provocative, though it lacks precision as well as any subtlety. Appearing overnight, it’s fly-posted now on the streets of many cities, and it says: FREE PALESTINE - END APARTHEID!

THE MEDIA HAVE HEADED, en masse, into Iowa. As usual in a presidential election year, it’s the first preparatory event in America’s whole unfolding primary process. And in Iowa, after a bad snowstorm that interrupted things, even the often sedate New York Times says that campaigning has now returned to “a fevered pitch”.

AFTER MONTHS OF EURO-TRAVEL, I’m back in my home base of New York City. I returned at that point in the calendar when journalists of a certain bent try as an annual ritual to predict the coming year.

Dateline: Dublin, Ireland -- I FIND IT INVALUABLE, always, to be viewing world events via a global lens, instead of through purely American eyes. This week there’s been a powerful array of global forces at work, not least in the Middle East (left), and some good international reporting on those forces.

Dateline: London, England – THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR has been dominating the media here as in much of the rest of the world. And I’m afraid that like many international crises it has lamentably been yet another chance for the British, be they politicians or journalists, to slip again into an old habit.

WE CAN REJOICE THIS FALL in a remarkable double exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s been mounted jointly with the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, where it showed through Spring and early Summer before coming to New York.

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, and our media are falling over themselves to observe the anniversary.  An almost festive air was built up with the showy flourish of President Joe Biden’s tightly media-managed train journey to Kyiv ahead of the red-letter day.

Dateline: London, England - IN ITS BRAND-NEW INCARNATION at the UK's National Theatre, Shakespeare's Othello is preceded by a centuries-long litany of previous interpretations, ever since the Bard's own debut of the play in 1604.   Fierce strobe-lighting presents us with a continuing loop of these past Othellos, represented by historic theater programs and posters, while we take our seats in the National's Lyttleton auditorium.

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.