Media and Culture

Fifty years ago, the court broke the movie industry into two parts. The result was disastrous for consumers.

It's trendy to decry competition as socially destructive. The reverse is true, argues Tibor Machan.  

For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors' supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on someone else's property; the owner has the right to record what interests you. If you don't like it, you shouldn't visit. It's that simple.

For those of us who see television news and commentary as a vast, statist wasteland, the work of John Stossel has been welcome relief. But now he's under attack.

Paulina Borsook thinks the web breeds selfish geeks who don't care about others. Is she the Sinclair Lewis of our time?  

In the past, smart French students dreamed of attending the ENA, an educational citadel of government planning. No longer.

In addition to sobering tales of government malfeasance, a new work by Roberts and Stratton offers us a theory explaining why these abuses occur: review by Robert Murphy 

The Pulitzer Prize has been known for honoring great works and great folly. A newspaper colleague of mine in 1977 won a Pulitzer for a very moving (if, albeit, a bit staged) photograph of a legless Vietnam veteran sitting in a wheelchair in the rain watching an Armed Forces Day Parade in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Pulitzer also is still recovering from the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the prize committee had to rescind the award given to the Washington Post reporter who wrote a fake story about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, the story called "Jimmy's World."

Ludwig von Mises wrote that the primary moral and professional obligation of an economist is to tell the truth. 

Walter Block decries the replacement of these good-old terms with "Wetlands" and "Rainforests"