These are some of the things that have caught my atten­tion lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news busi­ness, but then so’s life:

• Peter Pre­ston: The US media should speak out on the con­flict in Gaza | The Guard­ian — For­get, alas, all the usual stuff about fair­ness, bal­ance and free­dom of inde­pend­ent thought. Merely fol­low Editor and Pub­lisher magazine’s own account­ing for the first eight media days of Gaza warfare.

  Cov­er­age: “Largely one-sided, with little edit­or­i­al­ising or com­ment­ary arguing against broader Israeli actions.” And: “Most not­ably, the New York Times pro­duced exactly one edit­or­ial, not a single com­ment­ary by any of its colum­nists and only two op-eds (one already pub­lished elsewhere).”

  Ground inva­sion? The Times never addressed its wis­dom or unwis­dom before the tanks rolled for­ward. A Wash­ing­ton Post edit­or­ial, after the event, thought invad­ing “risky”.

  In gen­eral, with the New York Post, the Daily News and all the usual sus­pects cheer­lead­ing away, there was no bal­ance, no fair­ness and pre­cious little you could call inde­pend­ent thought. Tel Aviv seemed to bark orders: the US media just wagged its tail.

• Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza | NYTimes.com — Like all wars, this one is partly about pub­lic rela­tions. But unlike any war in Israel’s his­tory, in this one the gov­ern­ment is seek­ing to entirely con­trol the mes­sage and nar­rat­ive for reas­ons both of polit­ics and mil­it­ary strategy.
• Field Guide for Cor­res­pond­ents | Glob­al­Post — Ground Truth is a sci­entific belief that the greatest cal­ib­ra­tion of what is hap­pen­ing in a far-off place is best achieved by being there on the ground to wit­ness it and record it.

  As a web-based news organ­iz­a­tion, we recog­nize that even in the digital age when we have access to inform­a­tion from all over the world at our fin­ger­tips and satel­lite trans­mis­sions that can focus on images thou­sands of miles away, the most trus­ted read­ing is still made by those human beings who are there wit­ness­ing the events and meas­ur­ing his­tory live.

• Eric Schmidt wishes Google could save news­pa­pers | CNN — [News­pa­pers] don’t have a prob­lem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love read­ing, dis­cuss­ing it, adding to it, annot­at­ing it.

  What if the news­pa­per industry does go down?

  To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journ­al­ism is a cent­ral part of demo­cracy. And if it can’t be fun­ded because of these busi­ness prob­lems, then that’s a real loss in terms of voices and diversity. And I don’t think blog­gers make up the dif­fer­ence. The his­toric model of invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists in any industry is some­thing that is very fun­da­mental. So the ques­tion is, What can you do about this? I think it is a fair state­ment to say we’re still look­ing for the right answer.

• Can­cer and Stat­ist­ical Illu­sion | Mar­ginal Revolu­tion — “Sci­ent­ists should stop try­ing to cure can­cer and start focus­ing on find­ing it early.  It’s the smart way to cheat death.” 

  The fal­lacy in all of this is pain­ful easy to spot.  If we meas­ure sur­vival, which these stud­ies do, with a 5 or 10 year sur­vival rate then obvi­ously people whose can­cers are detec­ted early will sur­vival longer than people whose can­cers are detec­ted late.

  The key ques­tion is whether people who are treated early sur­vive longer than people whose can­cers are detec­ted early but who are not treated.  In Thomas Goetz’s long art­icle there is not a single piece of evid­ence which demon­strates that this is true.  Indeed, quite the opposite.

• Han­di­cap­ping the Next Liv­ing Room Race | HBS — For most, tele­vi­sion remains a “lean back” activ­ity. In other words, people turn on the tele­vi­sion to switch off their brain.

  Three-dimensional tech­no­lo­gies will make the lean back exper­i­ence even more enjoy­able. Early con­sumer response to lim­ited exper­i­ments in movie theat­ers has been pos­it­ive. Tomorrow’s col­legi­ate foot­ball cham­pi­on­ship game will be broad­cast in 3-D to about 80 theat­ers nationwide.

  Brit­ish Sky Broad­cast­ing Group is already gear­ing up to broad­cast 3-D soc­cer matches to con­sumers’ homes in Eng­land. Tele­vi­sion com­pan­ies have star­ted to pro­duce “3-D ready” tele­vi­sions that refresh images at high enough speeds to sup­port non-headache-inducing 3-D programming.

• Why the New York Times Won’t Cease Print­ing | Seek­ing Alpha — The New York Times is not a small news­pa­per. It has an enorm­ous display-advertisement invent­ory, and sells most of it at high rates. It’s also incred­ibly well placed to go national, as smal­ler papers close, and become a replace­ment for people who’ve lost their local paper and who shud­der at the pro­spect of ever read­ing USA Today.

  Hirs­chorn, by con­trast, is think­ing small: He calls the Huff­ing­ton Post “the pro­to­type for the future of journ­al­ism”, and singles out the NYT’s Deal­Book blog as “a cash cow for The Times”. I’m not sure what Hirschorn’s idea of a cash cow is, but that char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion just looks strange com­ing, as it does, in the wake of Hirschorn’s easy dis­missal of the extremely-lucrative T Magazine as “life­style fluff”. I can assure Hirs­chorn that DealBook’s email ads make a lot less money than T’s lux­ury gloss.