Edward Wasserman

The toughest challenges facing the news business may have more to do with values than finances. There's reason for optimism about its economic future. The appetite for fact-based reporting...

The idea that "content is king" is a favorite slogan among media people, since it's comforting to think that the industry is ruled by its creative side. Comforting, but fictional. Who does rule the media kingdom? Not the content creators, but the people who control their physical access to the public, that's who.

Thanks to the Internet, most every journalist can reach independently an audience immeasurably greater than the star reporter on the biggest newspaper or top-rated newscast could a generation ago.

Shouldn't journalists just find out what people want and give it to them? That seems to be what Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, advises. Mind you, his company has grown fat from hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising sold against content it doesn't pay for and does nothing to create.

Can journalism continue to happen if there's no money for it? That's a real question right now, as the news business grapples for a way to cope with a craven new world where neither readers nor advertisers will pay what they've traditionally paid for what journalists do.

Carlos Slim, the Mexican multibillionaire who Fortune magazine figures is the richest person on Earth, could become the largest shareholder of the New York Times. True, he wouldn't sit on The Times board and would have no voting power; only members of the Sulzberger family own voting shares.

What's odd is that while this election is historic precisely because of the major-party candidacy of a man who, under U.S. standards of race, is black, race goes unaddressed.

For a while, it looked as if U.S. politics had entered a new era in the way presidential campaigns were conducted and covered. For people who grieved over the decay of electioneering into bloopers and bites, it was an encouraging moment.

The emergence of Barack Obama as a marketable celebrity brings a new dimension to the perennial discussion of media political bias.

From the Senate floor, the Federal Communications Commission is denounced for kneeling before business by allowing broadcast owners to buy newspapers. From the executive suite, the same FCC is denounced for bullying business by forcing broadcast owners to file meticulous reports detailing what they do to serve their communities.