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.