Media Miscellany: 06.01.2005

Daniel Okrent tries to get out but they keep pulling him back in: Come on, Daniel Okrent, did you really think the celebrated and expensive voices of the Times op-ed pages would take your final column lying down? Not Paul “Slicer and Dicer” Krugman, who followed up on his irate Letter to the Editor with a fusillade of facts, statistics and recriminationns in the NYT Public Editor’s Forum, where Barney Calame could only look on and imagine what fun the next 18 months would bring. Okrent, irritated to be bothered at home, phoned in his response, slapping a few facts together (thank you, reader emails!) and smackin’ down Krugman a few more times. This drove Krugman berserk, but despite two more posts, Okrent stayed silent. And now the battle belongs to us all, especially those who know enough about economics to take Krugman on and who care enough to write about it. [NYT Public Editor Forum]

ABC is rolling around in money: ABC had a good year. Long time coming, and now it’s reaping the rewards: $2.1 billion in new advertiser commitments post-upfronts and at least 20 new advertisers signed on for next season. NYT takes the opportunity to make a lame pun about how the network’s neither lost nor desperate. We take this opportunity to kick the Katie-Diane horse some more and and remind you that GMA is on ABC. Also on ABC: that hunky Jim Belushi. [AdAge]

To an avid reader, James Wolcott’s Memorial Weekend plans make perfect sense: From Wolcott’s blog: “…I stayed put over the long weekend. And decided to use that long weekend as an opportunity to get reacquainted with myself — to spend some quality time getting to know ‘me.’” In a word, touching. [James Wolcott]

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