Nowadays when we say “media,” we don’t only mean print, radio, TV, and online. We mean all of the above — plus streaming services, podcasts, and big-time players like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google.
As companies, not government entities, media outlets aren’t bound by the First Amendment, but they owe their power to shape and influence culture and thought to its continued existence.
There was a time, not too long ago, when liberals loathed censorship, cherished the idea of freedom of speech and held fast to the dictum, often misattributed to Voltaire, that, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend…
No one ever accused Saudi Arabia’s ruthless rulers of possessing a sense of humor. So it should arch nary an eyebrow that they object to an episode of the comedy series Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj that’s critical of the kingdom’s notorious young…
Those of us who were nursing our hangovers probably missed out. But on New Year’s Day, the nexus where Social Media Mavens, Social Justice Warriors, and Crossword Puzzle Solvers meet got a rare moment in the spotlight when the New…
Ellen DeGeneres, one of the most powerful openly gay celebrities in Hollywood, really really wants her pal Kevin Hart to host the 2019 Oscars, despite all of the jokes the comedian has made at the expense of the LGBTQ community. During…
Lost in the recent outrage over film critic David Edelstein’s off-color Facebook comment about the infamous “butter scene” in Last Tango in Paris is one salient fact: By any measure, the late Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 succès de scandale conveys a powerful feminist…
One of the best things about having Donald Trump in the White House is that you never have to guess when he’s angry. And he’s angry a lot. Take this past Sunday morning, when indulged in a presidential airing of…
When the right and left of the political spectrum defend the First Amendment on identical grounds, free speech triumphs — even if neither side wants to share the glory after the fact. All of that came to pass with a…
If you’re like most Americans, the holiday you most closely associate with the end of October is Halloween. Not so the purity-minded folks at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, who faithfully commemorate Pornography Awareness Week. And this year, the…
The FBI agent put a gun on me. He wore a flak jacket more appropriate to a raid on a terrorist’s bomb factory than on my suburban Phoenix home. He stood at the glass door to my office on the…
Michael Lacey has spent his entire professional life in the newspaper business. With his business partner, Jim Larkin, Lacey cofounded Phoenix New Times during the Vietnam War. The two men would go on to build Village Voice Media, a chain of weeklies…
