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.
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…
In an in-depth profile by Elizabeth Nolan Brown published this week on the website Reason.com, veteran newspaper publishers and former Backpage.com co-owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin spoke out candidly about their arrests on federal charges of money laundering, conspiracy,…
The Fourth Estate and the liberal elite in this country have yet to demand that John McCain’s grimacing mug be blasted into the side of Mount Rushmore. But give them time. Meanwhile, in response to negative comments uttered recently about…
Front Page Confidential recently hailed the First Amendment bona fides of one Michael Avenatti, the media-savvy California-based attorney who’s representing adult-film star Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford), who claims, pretty convincingly, that she had a one-night stand with Donald Trump…
