Robert Ebert on the strange thing that is happening to newspapers and other media. “Death to film critics! Hail to the CelebCult!”:

Earlier this year the Voice fired Dennis Lim and Nathan Lee, and recently fired all the local movie critics in its national chain, to be replaced, Variety's Anne Thompson reported, by syndicating their critics on the two coasts, the Voice's J. Hoberman and the L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas. Serious writers, yes, but...

Meanwhile, the Detroit Free-Press has decided it needs no film critic at all. Michael Wilmington is gone from the Chicago Tribune, Jack Mathews and Jami Bernard from the New York Daily News, Kevin Thomas from the Los Angeles Times--and the internationally-respected film critic of the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, has retired, accepted a buy-out, will write for his blog, or something.

I was wondering about that. If you use Yahoo! mail, you can't help noticing the junk news items they have in the latest news box. There's an interesting parliamentary development here in Canada but the news on Yahoo.ca! was about some people that murdered each other and some new healthy way of eating roughage.

Labels: News

No safe Iraq exit for U.S., experts warn

Who says?

With the debate heating up over the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq, CNN analysts and other observers warn of the potential consequences of leaving too soon: an international terror hub for al Qaeda, extreme sectarian violence and the potential for a larger regional conflict that draws in Saudi Arabia, Iran and others

Whoah, that's not news. “CNN analysts” aren't really representative of anything besides CNN, surely. It's as if they're saying “We can't find any real experts to say what we want, so here y'are, we're saying it ourselves. We have to do everything ourselves these days”.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it does look as if their task was to come up with some hard-hitting rebuttal of all those who think it's time to wind down the war in Iraq, and somehow they couldn't find anybody.

Labels: News