Detail from a front page of The Onion, as featured in "Our Front Pages" (simonandschuster.com).

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For two decades and counting now, the satirical news source The Onion has been churning out the headlines that make you laugh or cry or both.

“Amish Give Up.” “Inner Cities to Receive Soothing Heroin.” “Cheney Vows to Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected.” “God Outdoes Terrorists.”

And, the day after last year’s presidential election: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Oh, my.

It all started as a college humor paper in Madison, Wisconsin. Now, it’s everywhere.

This hour, On Point: Hot headlines and the truth in bleak humor. We’ll peel back The Onion.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Joe Garden, features editor for The Onion. He joined the staff in 1993, after dropping out of the University of Wisconsin, when the paper was still produced out of Madison. The Onion’s new book is “Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude From America’s Finest News Source.”

Also from New York we’re joined by Seth Reiss, a staff writer for The Onion. He’s been on staff for three years, at the New York base The Onion has had since 2001.

From Pasadena, Calif., we’re joined by Robert Niles, editor at the Online Journalism Review, published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

And with us in our studio is star On Point intern Suzanne Merkelson, late, great editor-in-chief of The Colby Echo in Waterville, Maine.

Screenshot from the web video produced by amateur filmmaker James O’Keefe III and conservative activist Hannah Giles, right, playing the part of a prostitute seeking advice at ACORN's office in Baltimore. (Click image to watch the video on YouTube.)

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It’s hardly on the scale of Wall Street’s bonus and bailout scandals — not in the same universe. But ACORN, the liberal community organizing group that works for the poor, has some pretty ugly egg on its face right now.

The Internet and Fox News are on fire with video of undercover conservative activists posing as pimp and prostitute seeking and getting tax advice — shady, outrageous advice — from ACORN staff.

An embezzlement scandal has tumbled out. Congress has cut off federal funding. Loud critics are saying they were right all along.

This hour, On Point: Not a pretty picture. ACORN in trouble.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Carol Leonnig, reporter for The Washington Post covering  the ACORN story. Her article on Sunday’s front page was headlined “For ACORN, Video Is Only Latest Crisis.”

From New York we’re joined by John Fund, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of  the On the Trail blog. He’s been writing critically about ACORN since 1999. His latest piece, “Acorn Who?,” looks at President Obama’s reaction to the latest scandal.

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Brian Kettenring, spokesman for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

And from Rio de Janeiro, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist for Salon.com, where he’s taken on the criticism of ACORN. He’s author of “Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.”

CBS-TV newsman Walter Cronkite is seen at work in 1977. (AP)

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For almost twenty years at the height of the American Century, from 1962 to 1981, the news came from Walter Cronkite.

He was the nightly CBS anchor. And he was more than that. In a time when Americans got their news — collectively, almost communally — from the Big Three television networks, Cronkite could seem like the plain-spoken voice of God. His simple “that’s the way it is” had Olympian authority.

Now he’s gone, and an age seems gone with him. JFK. Vietnam. Man on the moon. And the news as we knew it.

This hour, On Point: Walter Cronkite and televison news, then and now.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from College Park, Maryland, is Lee Thornton, professor of broadcast journalism at the University Maryland. She worked for CBS for a decade, until 1982, and began in New York working in the newsroom with Walter Cronkite. She then moved to the Washington Bureau, where she covered Jimmy Carter as White House correspondent.

From Baltimore, we’re joined by David Zurawik, television and media critic for the Baltimore Sun, where he writes the blog “Z on TV.” His Cronkite obituary ran on Saturday, and he’s blogged about the response to Cronkite’s death here and here.

From Ossining, New York, we’re joined by Peter Boyer, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Who Killed CBS? The Undoing of America’s Number One News Network.” In June last year, he wrote about Keith Olbermann and how TV news is changing.

And from Hanover, N.H., is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

There’s Farrah Fawcett, who died yesterday after a long and heroic battle with cancer (we got the alert in the middle of our editorial meeting). I’m told by our intern Abbie Ruzicka that “Farrah Fawcett hair” is literally a term of art in the hair world:

And then, of course, there was Michael Jackson, who died late in the day on Thursday. The first album I ever bought was “Thriller.” On Facebook and Twitter last night, about a million other Gen Xers said the same thing. Here’s a classic moment in an interview with producer Quincy Jones, not long after they’d finished “Thriller.” Check out the live snake Michael has in his hands:

David Kestenbaum, left, and Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money team during the taping of this special On Point broadcast on June 24, 2009, at the State Room in Boston. (Photo: Sarah Abdurrahman/On Point)

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From the State Room high above Boston’s financial district, recording before a live audience, we’re joined today by special guests Adam Davidson and David Kestenbaum of NPR’s Planet Money.

You’ve heard their radio dramas on This American Life and their reports on the global economic crisis on All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Maybe you download their podcasts and read the Planet Money blog.

Whichever way you hear them, you know Planet Money is telling our economic story in a whole new way. In plain English, not jargon. In dramatic re-enactments. And in candid conversations with ordinary Americans and financial insiders.

How do they do it? We’re asking. This hour, On Point: Planet Money’s dynamic duo, Adam Davidson and David Kestenbaum.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Adam Davidson is international business and economics correspondent for NPR and co-creator of Planet Money. He co-produced the Peabody Award-winning episode of This American Life, “The Giant Pool of Money.”

David Kestenbaum is an NPR correspondent covering the global economy and a member of the Planet Money team. Earlier this month, in the This American Life episode “The Watchmen,” he examined what went wrong with the credit ratings agencies. Before David started covering the financial crisis for Planet Money, he covered science and energy issues for NPR.

Something which is really noticable, and all foreigners are discussing it, is that this event has simply been air-brushed from collective knowledge in China. It is routine to encounter university audiences who have never heard of the events of Tiananmen Square 20 years ago — 20 years ago, two days from now.

[Jim later added this June 4 coverage update on his blog . And others offer roundups of China's media censorship leading up to June 4, including blocking Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other sites.]

According to NPR’s Anthony Kuhn, the Chinese media are in an interesting stage of transition, with some organizations now only loosely affiliated with the government. His recent report, “China Launches Global Media Blitz,” looked at the intriguing new state-backed paper, Global Times. (Update: Global Times does indeed report on Tiananmen — credit to listener RollerGirlLois, see below…)

But most outlets are state dominated — hewing to the “nationalist,” Communist Party line. If you’ve never seen China’s government-run English-language television station, CCTV, it’s worth a visit online. Here’s the segment we played audio from during our show today, to illustrate the Chinese internal response to Geithner. If you listen to Professor Huo Deming of Peking University giving his analysis on CCTV, you hear something that sounds pretty even-handed — something you could imagine a Western academic saying. Is it the party line? Who knows…

One of the guests on our show, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok, is worried that extremist groups are being energized across the country. Some of this was discussed during our Monday hour.

Whether you buy it or not, it turns out Potok is not alone. The Department of Homeland Security recently circulated a controversial report to law enforcement on the topic. The assessment was unclassified, but was meant to be kept within officialdom. (Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News, a blog through the Federation of American Scientists that functions as a relentless check on government, posted it on Tuesday. That’s the earliest we saw it.)

“[T]he historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization,” the report states.

But one aspect of the government’s threat assessment has drawn strong pushback from some quarters.

Most controversially, the report features a section called “Disgruntled Military Veterans.” It states, “The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.”

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner fired back, calling the veterans section “offensive and unacceptable.” Veterans groups say it feeds a crude stereotype about the millions who have served.

This prompted Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to express regret that it seemed to single out former troops. She went on Fox News yesterday to apologize.

Suffice it to say, we probably haven’t heard the last on this one.

Final editions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at First & Pike News in downtown Seattle on Tuesday, March 17, 2009. The Tuesday edition ended a heritage stretching back nearly 146 years, when the Seattle Gazette, the P-I's predecessor, began publishing in December 1863. (AP)

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American newspapers are going down fast now. Denver and Seattle are just the latest cities to lose a paper. More presses, almost everyone says, are sure to be shuttered. Maybe many more.

At this week’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, tech thinker Steven Johnson made the “don’t worry, be happy” case. The transition may be rough, he says, but a new “news ecosystem” will emerge on the web, richer than what we’ve known.

Will it? This hour, On Point: Steven Johnson, and New York Times media maven David Carr, on the “news ecosystem” beyond newspapers.

You can join the conversation. If your newspaper goes, how will you get your news? Will a new ecosystem thick with bloggers fill the breach? Could it be better? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Steven Johnson joins us from New York. A tech entrepreneur and best-selling author, he co-founded the pioneering online magazine FEED in 1995 and the community site Plastic in 2001. His latest venture is the hyperlocal news site outside.in. In Austin on Friday, at the big South by Southwest Interactive Festival, his speech “Old Growth Media and the Future of News” got a lot of attention. His latest book is “The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.”

Joining us from Austin is David Carr, columnist for The New York Times covering media, business, and pop culture. He’s currently reporting from the South by Southwest Festival. You can keep up with him at the Times’ ArtsBeat blog.

And from Seattle, we’re joined by Monica Guzman, a reporter at SeattlePI.com covering the culture of technology and the main writer of The Big Blog. She was the first online reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which published its last print edition this week.

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Whether you’re Michelle Obama or Meghan McCain or Jessica Simpson, laughed out of your Daisy Dukes, body image is a global superpower of an issue these days. With nipped and tucked and Photo-shopped bodies beamed all over the world, no one is safe from impossible expectations and instant judgment.

Psychotherapist Susie Orbach says it’s driving us around the bend, leaving millions — even the svelte — as prisoners of “body hatred.”

Orbach counseled Princess Diana on bulimia. Now she’s taking on the world.

This hour, On Point: Susie Orbach on our bodies and our beleaguered selves.

You can join the conversation. Are you at war with your own body? At peace with it? If there’s “body hatred” out there, who or what’s to blame? Hollywood? Botox? Diet ads? “The Biggest Loser”?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Susie Orbach joins us from London. A psychotherapist and author, she has for years been a leading thinker on eating disorders, gender and body image, and is convener of the website AnyBody. Her books include “On Eating,” “The Impossibility of Sex,” and the bestseller “Fat Is a Feminist Issue.” Her new book is “Bodies.”  You can read the introduction here.

Screen shot from Hulu.com.

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And this just in: American television viewing is at an all-time high.

The latest Nielsen report shows household TV viewing at a record eight hours and eighteen minutes a day. The average American household now has more televisions than people. And many more ways to watch, beyond the television: on the PC, the laptop, the iPod, the cell phone — on Hulu.

Maybe it’s the recession … that we can’t afford to go out. Maybe it’s that screens are everywhere. Maybe television viewing’s triumph is traditional TV’s last hurrah.

This hour, On Point: The triumph of screens, and where TV goes now.

You can join the conversation. Are you watching more? And in more places? More ways? Are your viewing patterns and relationship with TV, with video, changing? How? Tell us.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Frank Rose, contributing editor at Wired magazine and author of the blog Deep Media.  He’s working on a book, “Welcome to the Hyperdrome,” about how story-telling is evolving in the Internet age.

James Poniewozik, TV critic for Time magazine. He writes the Tuned In column, about pop culture and society, as well as the Tuned In blog.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including “Cyberia,” “Media Virus,” “Playing the Future,” and “Coercion,” winner of the 2002 Marshall McLuhan Award.

More links:

Here’s the Los Angeles Times on Nielsen’s new “three screens” report: “Television, Internet and Mobile Usage in the U.S.” Read the full report here (PDF).

See Frank Rose’s Wired article “Free, Legal and Online: Why Hulu Is the New Way to Watch TV.” The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan also wrote about Hulu in a recent column.

Newspapers are sold on Jan. 21, 2009, in the Studio City area of Los Angeles. (AP)

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After years in trouble, American newspapers are finally up against the wall.

Advertising, vanished. Profits, gone. Losses, mounting very rapidly. Around the country, newsrooms are being hollowed out, papers are shrinking, some are letting go of daily publication. Some are going away.

So, what if? What if your local newspaper just disappeared? In a world of red ink, bankruptcies, layoffs and cutbacks, it’s possible. So, what then?

This hour, On Point: Newspapers going down — and radical steps for radical times in the news business.

You can join the conversation. Do you see a future for the newspaper as we know it? And what steps up if newspapers go down?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and author of the blog PressThink, where he writes about the future of the press. He’s also author of the book “What Are Journalists For?”

Also joining us from New York is David Folkenflik, media reporter for NPR. He’s just completed a two-part series on the future of newspapers. Before he joined NPR in 2004, he spent more than a decade at The Baltimore Sun.

And joining us from San Diego is Andrew Donohue, co-executive editor of the non-profit investigative news site, Voice of San Diego.

From The Daily Dish (courtesy of TheAtlantic.com).

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The news for the American newspaper industry just gets worse. As circulation numbers continue to slide, once-mighty dailies are cutting more staff and closing bureaus.

And while newspapers continue to lose readers as fast as trees in autumn shed their leaves, a new journalistic landscape is taking shape. There are fewer professional reporters reporting to fewer seasoned editors. But as the traditional journalistic gate-keepers retreat, the Internet is swelling with millions of bloggers and new forms of online publishing.

For many, this is cause for alarm. But one of the blogosphere’s — and print journalism’s — brightest lights, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, makes some bold claims for blogs in a new essay. He says the best kind of blogging could lead to a “golden era for journalism.”

Is he right? This hour, On Point: The state of blogging and the fate of journalism.

You can join the conversation. Where do you get your news? Do you read blogs? What’s lost, and what’s gained, in an era of shrinking newspapers and booming blogs? Tell us what you think.

-Anthony Brooks, guest host

Guests:

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of the widely-read blog The Daily Dish. His essay “Why I Blog,” in which he foresees a new “golden era for journalism,” appears in The Atlantic’s November issue. He’s a former editor of The New Republic and author of several books, most recently “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back.”

Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. In 2006 he wrote an essay for The New Yorker on blogging and online journalism titled “Amateur Hour.” His most recent book is “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.”

Tina Brown, founder and editor in chief of The Daily Beast. She is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines, and is the author of “The Diana Chronicles.”

More links:

David Carr mourns old media’s decline in his New York Times column this morning:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people…. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago….

He goes on to note:

The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there.

In the roaring 1920s, at the dawn of the radio era, nobody knew quite what to do with radio.

They had used it to flash news of the Titanic going down. They had thought of it as a giant walkie-talkie or invisible telegraph line.

But the ’20s brought “broadcasting.” It was a new idea. Somebody sitting somewhere talking about something to hundreds, then thousands, then millions.

And what did they talk about? Well, sex. And god. And politics. And the blood sport of boxing. And the next thing they knew, FDR was using radio to calm a nation.

This hour, On Point: when radio was young.

You can join the conversation. Can you imagine radio as strange and new as the Internet of the early ’90s? Were you there to hear it? Share your thoughts and your stories.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

We’re joined from New York by Anthony Rudel. He’s an adjunct professor of communications and writing at Manhattanville College and author of the new book, “Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio.”

You can read an excerpt at Amazon.com.

More links:

You can hear thousands of old-time radio selections at the site Old Time Radio Show Catalog.

Olympic and Chinese flags fly near the portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, Aug. 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

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What will we remember from the towering spectacle of the Beijing Olympic Games — about sport, about media coverage, about China?

From those massed drummers of the opening ceremony, to the eight medals on swimmer Michael Phelps, to the lightning speed of Jamaican Usain Bolt and Beijing’s eye-popping facilities, everything has seemed larger than life … except perhaps those tiny Chinese gymnasts.

China, NBC, and a whole lot of athletes wanted gold out of Beijing — and there’s a lot to go around. This hour, from sport to media to China’s bottom line, we’re scoring the Olympics.

Have you loved the Games, hated them, been riveted — or not? What image of sports, of China, will stick in your mind? And how about the way we’ve been shown, or not shown, the Games and the host nation by NBC and by China? How do you score these Olympics as a media event? What have you learned, or not learned, about China? You can join the conversation right here. Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from London is Rob Gifford, NPR’s London bureau chief. He was NPR’s Beijing bureau chief for six years and is the author of “China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.” He was last in China following the earthquakes in May.

From Washington, we’re joined by Paul Farhi. A staff writer for The Washington Post since 1988, he currently covers popular culture, the media, politics, and other subjects for the Post’s Style section and writes washingtonpost.com’s Olympics blog, “Playback: The Games on TV.”

And from Laurel, Maryland, we’re joined by David Steele, longtime sports columnist for The Baltimore Sun, Michael Phelps’ hometown paper.

image not available

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More than 4,000 dead in Iraq. More than 500 in Afghanistan.

For families whose sons and daughters have died, the reality of war has hit painfully home. But for so many others, America’s wars feel very far away.

One reason may be that we don’t see images of the U.S. war dead. In more than five years of war in Iraq, only a handful of images of dead American troops have been published.

To protect families and to be sensitive to the comrades of the fallen, the military restricts what we see. Some critics argue the military also wants to make the war appear less deadly. And they note that historically, Americans have never been so shielded from war’s harsh realities.

This hour, we’re talking about America’s invisible casualties.

You can join the conversation. Is it appropriate to hold back images of dead American soldiers? Does it sanitize a war that has taken thousands of American lives? We hope you’ll share your thoughts.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

* * *

Guests:

Joining us first from Baghdad is Sudarsan Raghavan, Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post.

Joining us from New York is Michael Kamber, a photojournalist and reporter working for The New York Times’ Baghdad bureau, he has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize, twice for photography and once for reporting. The article “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images,” which he co-wrote, ran on the Times’ front page on July 26. You can view collections of his photography at his website.

From Washington, we’re joined by James Robbins, former special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he is director of the Intelligence Center at Trinity Washington University and senior fellow in national security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is a contributing editor at National Review Online, where he writes on national security. His wife is a U.S. Army officer who returned in May from a one-year deployment in Iraq.

And joining us from Marais, Minnesota, is William Serrin, professor of journalism at New York University and a former correspondent for The New York Times.

* * *

More links:

Statement from the Defense Department
The Defense Department provided On Point with this statement on its guidelines for photography of U.S. military casualties.

Photojournalist Zoriah Miller’s Blog
Miller, whose difficulties with the U.S. military Michael Kamber and Tim Arango reported in this front-page New York Times article last month, maintains this blog where he chronicles his work in Iraq. On June 26, he witnessed a suicide bombing in Anbar Province, and posted a number of graphics images on his site. You can see them, and read his comments and those of others, here. Warning: the images are extremely graphic.

“The Painful Images of War” (The New York Times)
The Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote about Kamber and Arango’s story, and reactions to it, in his column for Sunday, August 3.

The Australian Rupert Murdoch, global press baron, plays hardball and big money with the news media on several continents. These days, he’s up to his elbows in American media.

If you read The Wall Street Journal, which he now owns, you’ve seen the changes. Whether you watch or avoid Fox News, you know its impact. And those are just a start.

At a time when the news business is in turmoil, there’s a hot debate over whether Rupert Murdoch’s money is saving or wrecking American journalism.

This hour, On Point: Rupert Murdoch and the news media in America.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John Koblin, a reporter covering Rupert Murdoch for the New York Observer.

Robert McChesney, professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of “Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media” and “Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy.”

Dean Starkman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal from 1996 through 2004, he runs Columbia Journalism Review’s blog “The Audit,” where he has been closely tracking the changes at the Journal under Murdoch.

James T. Madore, reporter at Newsday covering the bids by Murdoch and others to buy the paper.

It’s a hot new TV show about young Americans straining to launch their lives in an uncertain time. And it’s not premiering on TV. The new show, called “Quarterlife,” will premier this fall on the Web. The Internet. Not on the big screen in the family room, but the little ones, all over.

TV and television-style content is pushing deeper onto the Internet and computer screens. It’s old style — like “Lost” and “24.” But it’s also new, like “Prom Queen” and “Funny or Die.” Don’t know those yet? You may soon.

This hour, On Point: TV goes to the web — and change happens.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joseph Menn, media reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

Mark Kvamme, partner at Sequoia Capital and board member of funnyordie.com.

James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

For millions of Americans in love with a little fictional corner of Minnesota, Saturday night is Prairie Home Companion night, and Garrison Keillor is the man who keeps the lamplight burning.

An old-fashioned master of storytelling and the radio review, who plucks at mystic chords of memory until Powdermilk Biscuits and the Chatterbox Cafe pop out. For decades now, he’s been at it — on the air, in print, and lately on the big screen. Some call him the new Mark Twain. He’s out with a new book called “Pontoon”.

This hour On Point: a conversation with A Prairie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Garrison Keillor, host of Minnesota Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion and author of the new book, “Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon.”