Representative Charles Rangel, a member of the US Congress, has over the past few years made a number of high-profile calls for the military draft to be reinstated. It sounds at first like a right-wing rant. Conscript all the boys and girls of America. Suit them up in camouflage. Ship them into army camps, knock off their edges, trim them up. Send them off to fight for freedom... whatever the hell that means.
The Week in Politics is stuck in a dull formula but this week's One to One, on which Richard Crowley interviewed Ben Dunne, showed some star quality often missing on RTÉ television
The relationship between the traditional print media and the online world of blogs and ‘citizen journalism' is often one of mutual hostility. On the one hand, journalists and publishers decry the lack of professionalism, credibility and objectivity of non-commercial online news sources. On the other, one of the most popular topics of the blogosphere is the failings and bias of mainstream media, or MSM as it's often abbreviated online. The internet has endless space in which these failings can be put under the microscope.
Who would ever have thought it? Ian Paisley will be first minister in Stormont come March 2007. He will head up a joint powersharing executive with Sinn Féin, with Martin McGuiness as deputy first minister.
Guerrillas in the mist
So, the Irish Mail on Sunday reckons that non-violent actions that have allegedly been proposed in support of the Shell to Sea campaign amount to “guerrilla” tactics? This column noted a couple of weeks back how averse the media are to using the term “civil disobedience” to describe the Mayo campaign, so it was predictable that such creative terminology would emerge.
Just a week ago, George Bush chose two turkeys to be spared from being served up as a part of Thanksgiving feast. These turkeys were brought to the Rose Garden and placed on a podium where they flapped around in a mildly bewildered state, shedding feathers and squawking. The enormous birds were so unwieldy they were barely able to steady themselves on their feet -- it was easy to envision them as cartoon characters, plucked and roasting in a large pan.
The latest instalment of RTÉ's Would You Believe series was raw, brilliant television, unlike the drivel that passed for entertainment on the station's One to One series of interviews
What should we call the newly-arrived migrants to Ireland without being racist or xenophobic? New citizens, non-nationals, foreigners?
By far the greatest part of the revenue generated by newspapers comes from advertising and this proportion is steadily increasing. For example, in 2005, Independent News and Media's advertising revenue rose €100m to €1.047bn, while sales increased by just €19m to €316m. Therefore, publishers' primary product is not the paper itself – they are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers.
Commercial media companies have no political or ideological interests that might stand in the way of their own immediate profits, right?