“Here’s the top story we’re following at this hour: For the first time, there’s definitive proof that Fox News, the U.S. cable network that claims to be ‘fair and balanced,’ is neither fair nor balanced. Next up this hour: Experts say temperatures will drop when winter comes. And finally: Eating regularly is key to good health. Stay tuned for more details.”

OK, maybe these aren’t great revelations. But Fox News’ coverage of Comedy Central’s “Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive” rally on October 30 is worthy of a second look. The story posted on their Website stands in stark contrast to the pieces published by other media outlets, both liberal and conservative.

Disputing Fox News’ “fair and balanced” slogan is a “man bites dog” kinda story. However, it’s instructive to both lovers and haters of the leading cable news operation because the 1996 launch of Fox News in 1996 is one of the most significant events in cable new history, second only to Ted Turner’s 1980 creation of CNN. So an analysis of how a leading — albeit controversial — news network frames a story can tell us a lot about their journalism. And the people who watch the network.

Here are a few “leads” written by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Washington Times, the Associated Press, Fox News and the Christian Science Monitor. See if you can tell which one fits the Fox News narrative.

Source #1: “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show, part Halloween celebration and part political rally to call for common sense before Tuesday’s congressional elections. Satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, hosts of late-night cable TV shows, poked fun at politicians and media for stoking partisan fervor.”

Story #2: “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show. But what seemed to unite the tens of thousands who converged on the National Mall on a sunny Saturday in Washington for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was a genuine desire to push back against the strong rightward tilt of the 2010 midterm campaign.”

Story #3: “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right, Saturday’s crowded Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear marked an ironic uprising by those who want to turn down the volume. Three days before midterm elections, tens of thousands of people packed the National Mall to listen to Comedy Central satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, looking for a laugh and a chance to display their disenchantment with what they say is the bitter tone of the nation’s political discourse.”

Story #4: Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts entertained a huge throng stretched alongside the National Mall by poking fun at the nation’s diversity and its ill-tempered politics. Stewart is popular especially with Democrats and independents, a Pew Research Center poll found. Colbert of “The Colbert Report” poses as an ultraconservative, and the stage Saturday was stacked with entertainers associated with Democratic causes or Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Story #5: In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng Saturday at a “sanity” rally poking fun at the nation’s ill-tempered politics, fear-mongers and doomsayers. “We live now in hard times,” Stewart said after all the shtick. “Not end times.”

OK, pens down. Which one did you pick? Maybe it was easy — or maybe it wasn’t.

The pro-business, right leaning WSJ, owned by the same News Corp company that owns the Fox News Channel, wrote “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right…”

The Christian Science Monitor published “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show.”

If you chose “Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts…” you found the Fox in the cable news hen house.

Strangely, the Washington Times, a conservative counterweight to the Washington Post, used the the AP story without sending a reporter to the rally (“In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng…”)  Which makes you wonder: if their reporter couldn’t afford the $5 Metrocard to get to the Washington mall, things must be REALLY tough in the newspaper business…

Finally, Reuters wrote “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show…”

(One honorable mention that didn’t make this list: “whilst” surveying foreign news reports for their take on the event, I ran across the The Guardian blog of Richard Adams. His Jon Stewart rally ‘as it happens‘ entry provided an amusing play by play of the event as it unfolded from the vantage point of an outsider looking in. It was very funny with lots of wry Brit observations about American culture.)

What makes the Fox story unfair and unbalanced? Journalists are trained to report what is “new” when reporting the news. Glen Beck’s August rally was news because a conservative political pundit gathered thousands of his followers on the Washington Mall in the same location on the same day as Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech. If you were there and didn’t that wasn’t your story, you must have had an another agenda. That *was* the story. The day was about GB and his ability to muster his masses to the Washington Mall. It was an unprecedented event because it had never been done before by a cable TV celebrity — until Saturday.

Using the same logic, Saturday’s story was about how between 60,000 and 250,000 people gathered on the mall (Stewart put the number at “millions” as a pre-emptive strike for those who would try to compare his rally to Beck’s) to see two TV celebrities in the company of Discovery’s The Mythbusters, The Roots, The OJays, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Sam Waterson, Tony Bennett, Jeff Tweedy, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Ozzy Osborne and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. Among many others.

If there was a political message, it was relatively weak. Telling everyone to think for themselves and stop believing everything you read on Websites, see on cable news and hear on talk radio isn’t exactly a revolutionary manifesto. It may have been a little hard to write that sentence if you worked on the copy desk at Fox, CNN or MSNBC — the three networks that dominated the mocking clips shown by Jon Stewart — but you’d have to be an idiot to have missed that point. Or, perhaps had an agenda that reinterprets the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

In the second sentence of the Fox News story, the network reported that “there were political overtones…poking fun at the nation’s diversity and ill-tempered politics.” Actually, Stewart and Colbert weren’t poking fun at the nation’s diversity, but at the tendency of the news media to characterize events by who shows up. Fox seemed to deliberately miss the point that the Comedy Central kids were poking fun at news pundits who tune the facts to fit a particular news narrative targeted to their core audience. Writing “news” which rings of truthiness but doesn’t try to capture what happened isn’t news – that’s entertainment.

Google time line for the phrase "fair and balanced." It wasn't much of an issue until FOX News was launched and George W Bush became president.

Which is OK. The “fair and balanced” phenomenon in journalism is fairly new. Biased reporting in newspapers has a much richer history that predates the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

Fox News is to the 65+ audience what MTV is to 18-34’s: a consistent stream of content which tells people in a demo niche what they want to hear. Both networks have relatively small audiences which exert an oversized influence on the American culture. Both Fox News and MTV are extremely good at what they do: aggregating a high concentration of similar people to resell to advertisers. MTV gets heat because they don’t play music videos anymore; Fox gets heat before their definition of news isn’t what many regard to be fair and balanced. It’s a marketing disconnect which occurs when a cultural icon behaves differently than “we” think they should.

Fox News may not be “news” in the tradition of Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow. But I bet that William Randolph Hearst would be impressed.

Stewart and Colbert are right when they suggest you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV. As long as that healthy skepticism includes Comedy Central, we should all be ok.

Dave Zornow has worked as a media research consultant and applications developer at TNG Research for 20 years. He publishes MediaNewsAndViews and the hyperlocal Website NyackNewsAndViews.

See also:

• Fox News Freaks Out Over Stewart/Colbert Rally, PoliticusUSA
• Can Fox News be ‘fair and balanced’ if News Corp. gives to Republicans?, CSMonitor.com
• Rally For Sanity: They Also Want Their Country Back, Mediate.com

Did you know that Sears used to sell houses?  Yep, right out of the catalog.  When I was growing up, our neighbors two doors down lived in a house they had bought from Sears.  It was one of the older houses in the neighborhood, and they had bought it back in the 1930s.  They said it arrived on a truck with all of the parts pre-cut and ready for assembly.  I don’t know how Sears erected houses.  Probably used a local contractor.

By the 1950s houses were no longer in the catalog, but they were selling their own brand of cars.  They were built by Kaiser and carried the Allstate brand, the name of the insurance company Sears owned at the time.

The point is that Sears knew what business they were in.  They knew they were not in the clothing business or the hardware business.  They were not in the department store business or the mail order business.  They were in the merchandise supply business.  The precise mix of offerings might change with the vagaries of the market, but if you wanted it, chances are they had it and would figure out a way to get it to you.

Now The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are squaring off against each other.  The Journal is going after a share of the up-market New York general audience long dominated by the Times.  It’s a good time for everyone involved to remind themselves what business they’re in.

They are not in the newspaper business or the broadcasting business or the film business.  They are in the business of supplying entertainment and information.  If you want it they should have it or be able to get it for you and get it to you by whatever means suits you best.  I have a feeling that the people at the Journal and the company that owns it know this.  I’m not sure the folks at the Times do.  I have a nagging feeling they still think they are in the newspaper business.

Neither The New York Times nor The Wall Street Journal are simply newspapers.  They’re media brands now.  Any of their execs who don’t get this probably never lived in a Sears house.

Photo Credit: The Arlington, circa 1908-14, Sears Kit House (Model No. 145); (priced from $1,294 to $2,906) Sears Archives

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

I used to be a newspaper columnist, penning one and then two essays a week for 25 years in between plowing, planting and harvesting the second half of a 42-year, ink-stained gig in what is now said to be a “dying profession.” Only it ain’t dead yet.

It just needs the right blood transfusion. And the donors are readers, not publishers. Too many of the latter never worked in trenches where reporting means slime, greed, corruption and more official B.S. to wade through than is at the local waste treatment facility. If these corporate thinkers had been in the daily war, maybe they would understand public thirst for information and how to quench it.

While readers have remained thirsty, publishers have refused to fill the glass, instead offering surveys, think tanks and feel-good, chummy retreats that have not saved newspapers but instead have distracted the front office from what readers and reporters and good editors (not enough of those) have always known: Ever since one fella whispered to another, there’s been news. And gossip. And innuendo. And baloney. And facts closest to the truth as truth can be in this world. But you have to dig for them. And that’s news.

If all this sounds Damon Runyon, well, God bless the fact that “journalism,” a fancy word for newspapering that most scribes wouldn’t wear even on Sundays, is really old-fashioned, “Front Page” legwork –

Cultivating sources and jumping into an investigative dig worthy of Sherlock Holmes. If there is also the soul of a self-deprecating street bum, where all the goodness of humankind can reside, the reporter is the better for it. And so is the reader.

Digging and lots of new, not rehashed, reporting gives us news, and news, whether it’s what the first fella said to the second fella, or if it’s about the town or school board meeting, or the Yankees, or the president, well, it’s all information. And people crave information.

The transfusion that is ready for newspapers is the time, the mind, the heart, the soul readers are willing to give those who gather and report the news. People will spurt blood to find out what is happening. They want the dirt, the scandal. They also want the think piece that analyzes matters. They want the essayist who makes the highs and lows of life vibrate, resonating in hearts and minds and bones in ways the columnist can express but the reader cannot.

People – the readers – whether they are looking at a printed tabloid or broadsheet or the Internet or the TV news or Twitter or Facebook, want news. They want  “quality, balanced, well-written pieces (that) refrain from blurring the lines between factual news reporting and opinion/agenda/promotion views,” as one Colorado reader puts it.

Want to save newspapers? Use the blood that readers will give willingly. Go back to digging out the news and then fully reporting that, written by guys and gals who feel newspapering from their toes up, left alone by the front office to do their thing.

If we had had real news from a full, leave-them-alone reporting staff in the past two decades instead of spending the bank balance on surveys and page redesign and trendy fluff pieces, maybe the current economic debacle would have been derailed by investigative stories. Or war. Or G.M.’s troubles. Or dysfunctional government that is bedded by lobbyists.

People want the news, and only those who give it to them, in whatever and every way they want it, will survive. They will thrive, actually.

Arthur H. Gunther III is retired as editorial page editor and columnist of The Journal-News, a daily in Nyack, N.Y. He writes regularly at columnrule.blogspot.com

Saturday’s October 3, 2009 headline “Palin Holds Own In VP Debate” in the BattleCreek Enquirer tells all you need to know about how Alaska’s Sarah Plain when she went mano a mano with Joe Biden on October 3. The article, which Google News featured prominently at 7a, was at the top of the list of “related” Friday articles about Palin’s chances in 2012.

Only problem is that the BattleCreekEnquirer was a year too late.

A closer read of the story shows that it should have been filed with a dateline of October 3, 2008 — not 2009. The error was amplified by Google’s news-bot-algorithm-thingee when this retro story was grouped with recent comments by former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt said a 2012 Palin nomination would be catastrophic for the party.

Web publishers use CMS (content management systems) to manage stories, dates, bylines and ad placement. Obviously something snafu-ed in Battle Creek followed by the clueless electronic editor-in-chief-bot at Google (There’s no truth to the rumor that the new Google News slogan is “All The Dated News That’s Fit We Publish.”).

One of the funnier quips about this slip out belongs to GeeWizard, a comment poster on the BattleCreekEnquirer website.

I’m excited to see Palin, a fresh face in politics. I’ll bet she’ll be sad to quit her position as Governor of Alaska once the American people unanimously vote her into the White House. She’s not like other slimy politicians who are only interested in self-promotion and million dollar book deals. She loves her state and would stay with it forever if she could. GO PALIN!!

Wait….what year is this?

Damn computers. Can’t live with em. Can’t sue ‘em when they screw up something stupid, either. But I bet there will be hell to pay at the editor’s desk in Battle Creek come Monday morning.

Sources: Battle Creek Enquirer, October 3, 2009, The Atlantic, CNN VP Debate Transcript

Having given away the store on their websites, newspapers are talking about going back behind a pay wall.  It didn’t work before, so, of course, it will work this time.

Few seem to be discussing the broader picture of how the internet has changed the way people use newspapers.  It’s more than simply substituting electronic delivery for the carrier throwing the paper through your rose bushes.

Except for a handful of news and political junkies, consumers of print newspapers read no more than one or two papers a day.  So far, nearly all pay models seem to assume that internet users follow this same pattern.  They just want their daily New York Times or Washington Post fix, and now they get it for free without paying that annoying subscription fee.  Force them to pony up and they will.  Well some will, but many won’t because of a changed usage pattern.

Henry Ford did more than build lots of cheap cars for people.  He freed them from having to go downtown on the trolley company’s schedule.  The internet frees me from having to rely on one or two newspapers, regardless of how good they may be.  I can read a columnist I like in the L.A. Times, catch an editorial cartoon in another paper and a backgrounder on energy policy in a third. I’ll be happy to pay a reasonable rate for the news and features I read, as long as I can read them from whatever publication strikes my fancy today.  Tomorrow I might want to sample a different one.  News grazing might be a good term for it.

Maybe the club model would work.  Many of us have belonged to gyms or clubs where our membership entitles us to privileges at associated facilities in other cities.  So let’s say I subscribe for internet access to The Boston Globe, paying about what I would pay for a print subscription.  But my subscription also gives me access to the Web content of The New York Times, the Journal-Constitution from Atlanta, the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other papers across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other parts of the world who are members of a subscription co-op.

Now that I would pay for.  But I don’t want to be limited to one or two online newspapers just to avoid a hunk of dead tree being thrown through my rose bushes.  C’mon publishers, you can figure out how to do this.  BMI, ASCAP and SESAC collect fees for music rights owners from thousands of radio and TV stations and other venues, and they started long before the invention of modern computer-based accounting systems.  Find a way to shift the money around, and I’ll be happy to pay for my news nibbling.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

See also: Thinking Outside of The Polybag, Cynopsis Weekender, November 2005

The New York Times will receive $45 million in the deal with $33.5 million coming from Univison and $11.5 million from WNYC. Comments on the RadioInsight blog estimate that WNYC’s acquisition price is about 1/4 of what a similar NYC FM radio stations would normally fetch.

In a challenging economic climate for newspapers and commercial radio, Spanish and public radio appear are thriving and expanding. The New York Times described the deal: “Faced with losses brought on by a deep advertising slump, the Times Company has been cutting costs across all of its operations, including the flagship Times newspaper. This year it negotiated union concessions on wages and benefits at The Boston Globe, and closed a wholesale newspaper and magazine distribution subsidiary.”

WNYC says they plan to continue WQXR’s two most listened-to live programs – Saturday Afternoon at the Opera and The Philharmonic This Week.

“[WNYC] has been trending away from the standard presentation of classical music or concert music, ” says the New York City Eye blog. Comments on RadioInsight speculate that WNYC will change to a 24/7 NewsTalk format with music programming moving to WQXR.

The DownWithTyranny blog notes the NYT has owned WQXR since 1943 and that ironically, the dwindling classical music format was once the dominate programming on FM radio. The Times sold WQXR-AM to Disney in 2006.

Sources: RadioInsight, NYT, WNYC, New York City Eye,  DownWithTyranny

This article also appears on the NyackNewsAndViews.com community news site.

Producing a newspaper must be a humbling experience these days.  Struggling to stay afloat while watching your classifieds section dwindle to something thin enough to use as a cheese slicer can’t be fun.  The newspaper business has never been this bad, right?  Wrong, very wrong.

It depends on the point in history you pick to make your comparison.  We like to compare to the decades since WW II, the glory days when the big metro dailies have been licenses to print money and their owners counted the profits by the hundreds of millions of bucks.  Despite first radio, then television and finally the internet having the advantage for breaking news, newspapers still dominated local media markets.

This period of great riches was the exception.  To appreciate what the newspaper business has been for most of its history, warp back a hundred years or so.  Today’s papers look prosperous compared to the publications of the 1890s.  There was no competition yet from electronic media, but most newspapers were pathetic looking beasts.

I found this out while doing some historical research involving early papers in my hometown in Virginia.  Despite having had a population of only about 10,000, library-preserved copies and newspaper directories revealed that during the 1890’s the town had six newspapers – two dailies and four weeklies.  I suspect that none of them were profitable on a steady basis.  By 1900 all six had faded away and been replaced by more aggressive papers that invaded from nearby larger towns.

As to the purists who are shocked that some newspapers are selling ad space on the front page, be aware that many early papers sold all or nearly all of the front in small card ads.  Particularly popular were pitches for patent medicines and miracle healing machines that used magnetic rays to cure everything from fatigue to lumbago (whatever lumbago is.  It sounds like some sort of ballroom dance.)

Newspapers of a century ago had to be scrappy.  Only the most scrappy, ingenious and energetic survived.  Maybe the industry could use some of those publishers, editors and writers now.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

For the first six months of 2008, MonitorPlus commercial expenditures are down 10 perent across all media. The biggest losers by dollars were Spot TV (-7%), Network TV (-10%), and National Magagines (-23%). Network Cable showed a small increase at 5 percent. Spot Radio and Newspapers also took big hits, dropping 23% and 32% respectively.

GM’s Jan-July spending is down six percent with Ford and Chrysler both slashing media expenditures by  22 percent. Honda was up 13 percent and Toyota was flat.

Source: Nielsen MonitorPlus

I’m the first to admit it, my earliest memories of seeing the paparazzi in my hometown of Malibu are paradoxical at best. As a child, I used to play at the Malibu Country Mart playground – located in a central shopping area, it was definitely home to the higher-end equipment as far as local sandboxes and slides went. My dad was working at Hard Copy at the time, and he made it his policy not to accept paparazzi footage shot at that particular playground. And yet, while he was protecting his daughter’s right to play in a place unfettered by the photog’s flashbulbs, it was only because of his job as a producer on a major tabloid television show that we lived in Malibu at all.

Such is the paparazzi paradox. On the one hand, the prolific paps are reviled – and rightfully so – for the invasive and often dangerous tactics they use to get the perfect, profitable picture. On the other hand, most of the entertainment industry depends on tabloid journalism for publicity and profits. And, there is nowhere where the twain take each other on quite like in Malibu.

Just look at last weekend. Most Angelenos were escaping the record heat by hitting whatever body of water was closest. And, for many of us, that meant the beach, and specifically, the big stretch of sand and sea along the Malibu coast. But, while most people were looking to lay out and let off some steam – literally – there were clearly a contingent of paps who were not content to kick back and cool off. Sure, they were combing the sand, but not for seashells.

Instead, they went looking for yet another shot of a shirtless Matthew McConaughey soaking up the sun and surf. And, apparently, they went looking on the private beach known locally as Little Dume – a place so private that even when we used to hold high school parties there, we would still need someone with a key to get to the keg.

There’s plenty of video of what happened next, but basically, a group of local guys got fed up with the photogs, and a confrontation ensued. Footage of the whole incident, along with details of the new ordinance Malibu officials are currently drafting to deal with the increased influx of paps to these parts. You see, the thing is that when it comes to day-to-day life in Malibu, In Touch is honestly rather out of touch.

Malibu is a small suburban city, just 27 miles long, that is more oriented around families than fame. Sure, the population of almost 13,000 has more than its share of screenwriters, producers, directors, composers, musicians, actors, lighting technicians and the like. But, my immediate neighbors also include a retired cop, a number of firefighters, a teacher and a contractor. So, when a group of paparazzi jumped out of the bushes to catch Pam Anderson at her kids’ Saturday afternoon soccer game, they also managed to scare the living daylights out of my poor little brother, who happened to be playing goalie at the time. And, when Britney Spears was spotted getting frozen yogurt at the local Ben & Jerry’s, it was my frizzy, frazzled former co-worker there whose unflattering picture appeared in the background – much to her chagrin.

So, as much as my journalistic background makes me want to fight for the freedom of the press at all possible costs, there is a big part of me that wants to protect the people I love from the frenzy of flashbulbs. Sure, celebs ask for the added notoriety when they commit to their careers, and yes, we in the entertainment industry all depend on the terrible tabloids to make and maintain everyone’s fame and fortune. But, I do believe there is a line to be drawn, and I think it makes sense to draw it around actors, actresses, musicians and maybe even reality stars who are off the clock, off the carpet and (trying to stay) off the camera.

When someone is sunning on the sand, shopping at the supermarket, strolling with their kids or playing at the playground, they should get the benefit of basic human treatment and be taken off the tabloid radar. After all, how many shots of a shirtless McConaughey or a sweats-clad Pam Anderson does the American public really need to see? There must be more interesting or, dare I say it, important news going on in the greater world, right?

Yes, it’s time to draw a line. And, if a group of local guys are willing to let their beer guts be broadcast around the world as a means of literally drawing that line in the sand, then I can’t say I don’t support their intentions – if not necessarily their all-too-aggressive actions.

See also: LA Times

• 5/9, Malibu turns to Ken Starr to help get paparazzi under control
• 6/23 2nd Paparazzi Brawl in Malibu

Most of us spend a lot of time with media – watching TV, eyeballing online videos, going to movies, etc. Plus there’s the audio stuff, tunes from radio, downloads or CDs. Then we have the print delights – newspapers, mags, books. It can total double-digit hours per day for dedicated media addicts.

Yes, I’m one, too. I’m the guy you met at the meeting of MJA (Media Junkies Anonymous), the couch potato who bravely stood up and said, “My name is Paul, and I’m a media addict.”

These thoughts came this week as I noted the 25th anniversary of the release of the film “Valley Girl” and read about a study reporting that high school kids who have TVs in their rooms earn lower school grades, eat more junk food and exercise less.

Okay, class, now what difference do we see between the teens depicted in “Valley Girl” and those camped out in their bedrooms, eyes glued to the screen or with hands clinched firmly to their Wii controllers? Well, mostly, it’s that the Valley girls were out actually doing something like socially interacting with each other in a non-digital environment, even if the setting was as mundane as a suburban shopping mall.

Media content is attractive because it has interesting stories involving interesting characters doing interesting things. This applies whether it’s a movie, a TV reality show, a video game, a news story or the lyrics of a chart-topping song. I’m not aware of anyone who has produced a hit media vehicle that showed nothing but the backs of people’s heads who were watching television. We’re media junkies because media allows us to be mental hitchhikers and vicariously experience situations that would be too threatening or that we’re unable or too lazy to experience for real.

Occasionally there is a bright light. Nickelodeon has a new show called “Dance on Sunset” that actually encourages tweens to get up from their couches and dance.

Plus, there is a lot of worthwhile educational and thought-provoking content. I learn more from the National Geographic, Discovery and History channels than I ever did from most of my school textbooks. I balance this by feeding myself guilty pleasures – searching the on-demand menus for really bad low-budget movies that require no more mental effort than necessary to keep me breathing and digesting my food.

I should spend more time doing things someone might want to make a movie about and less time watching other people do things on TV, but right now I think I’ll check to see if anyone might be running a Clive Barker film festival on the tube this week. I haven’t had a good dose of Pinhead lately. My name is Paul, and I’m a media addict.