sunday morning reading
- Forbes apparently publishes an annual list of the top-earning dead celebrities and creators. They note that Shakespeare would be way up there:
[Forbes] calculated what the Bard’s heirs might collect each year if he were still under copyright and estimated it at $15 million with over 5,000 performances of his plays and hundreds of thousands of books sold in the last year.
- the medium lobster has the highest respect for slate columnist michael kinsey, who can’t understand the plame scandal, because it’s very confusing:
True, the Plame scandal is simple enough to be summarized in one sentence,[1] but the devil is in the details.
footnote 1. “White House staffers leaked a covert CIA agent’s name to the press in an attempt to discredit a critic of the flawed intelligence used to support the Iraq War.”
The problem really boils down to the fact that the plame scandal is very confusing and Not Very Sexy:
Outing CIA agents, silencing war critics, covering for the false pretext of a false war – it’s all too cerebral to have the kind of mass entertainment value that is the raison d’être of the American criminal justice system. Where’s the heart, the soul, the semen-stained dress?
Also,
Mr. Kinsley is also troubled by the impossible paradox of press freedom the Plame scandal presents. Should reporter-source privelege be an implied contract in which a journalist protects her source’s identity in exchange for reliable information, or should it be an absolutist right wantonly abused by state officials to disinform the populace, crush their critics, and commit crimes from beyond the veil of a shield law? Mr. Kinsley can’t quite decide.
algorithmically similar posts:
» bad bookstore business decisions, 2007-08-13 (score:13)» the missing voices in the sex scandals, 2008-03-22 (score:12)
» hearing on federal prosecution of artist, 2005-05-18 (score:12)
» morning tea reading, 2005-10-27 (score:11)
