Does this make sense to anyone? From the Washington Post:

Journalist Peter Seewald, who interviewed Benedict over the course of six days this summer, raised the Africa condom comments and asked Benedict if it wasn’t “madness” for the Vatican to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

“There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility,” Benedict said. But he stressed that it wasn’t the way to deal with the evil of HIV, and elsewhere in the book reaffirmed church teaching on contraception and abortion, saying: “How many children are killed who might one day have been geniuses, who could have given humanity something new, who could have given us a new Mozart or some new technical discovery?”

According to Politico, MSNBC has suspended morning host Joe Scarborough:

MSNBC said Friday that it is suspending “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough for two days after he acknowledged giving eight previously unknown $500 contributions to friends and family members running for state and local offices during his tenure at the network, a violation of parent NBC’s ban on political contributions by employees without specific permission from the network president.

“I recognize that I have a responsibility to honor the guidelines and conditions of my employment, and I regret that I failed to do so in this matter,” Scarborough said in a statement. “I apologize to MSNBC and to anyone who has been negatively affected by my actions,” he said, adding that after he was made aware of some of the contributions, he called MSNBC President Phil Griffin “and agreed with Phil’s immediate demand of a two-day suspension without pay.”

First of all, shouldn’t MSNBC see that this apparently-haphazard application of their suspension policy is doing more harm to its image than good? [Side question: Does anyone think a two-day suspension is anything but the most shallow of attempts at appearing impartial?] But at least they’ve learned something from the Olbermann suspension: do it more carefully and you can avoid creating a media firestorm and pissing off your on-air personalities. I was a bit taken aback last week reading Howard Kurtz’s deconstruction of the Olbermann fiasco, as it’s apparently even more crazy over there than it already appears.

We’ll see how the media reacts to Suspending Your Host Redux, but I suspect there won’t be as big of a hullabaloo this time around.

From NPR comes the fascinating story of why humanity chose gold as one of its most valuable metals:

You want the thing you pick to be rare…At the same time, you don’t want to pick an element that’s too rare.  So  osmium — which apparently comes to earth via meteorites — gets the axe. That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. And all of them, as it happens, are considered precious metals.

And to think, platinum, it could’ve been you if your melting point was just a wee bit lower…

Screenwriter John August, writing about Amazon.com’s new movie studio:

Several readers have written to ask my take on all this. I won’t conjecture about anything beyond what’s on the press release and website, but I’m left with some pretty big questions. I have a hunch other screen-bloggers will be tackling some of the glaring ones, like copyright, authorship and the 18-month free option. So I’ll just ask one: Do you really want random people rewriting your script?

…In software development, the open source movement has succeeded in bringing teams of strangers together. But writing code is a lot different than writing a screenplay. A bad line of code is obvious; it doesn’t do what it needs to do. A bad line of dialogue is a judgement call. A thumbs-up, thumbs-down voting system isn’t likely to fix this.

Last night, Steve Weintraub at Collider posted an extensive interview with William Monahan, the director of London Boulevard. Monahan is probably best known for writing films like Kingdom of Heaven, Body of Lies, and most famously, The Departed. London Boulevard will be Monahan’s directorial debut. The film’s production was troubled by rumors that Monahan was a control freak, and that many setbacks might have turned his otherwise great script into a mediocre mess.

I’ve hung out with Steve on numerous occasions and in addition to finding him to be a really cool guy, the one thing I take away from our interactions is that this is a man who is extremely good at his job. Collider always has an ungodly number of interviews and often breaks news by digging out those minute details that other outlets are unwilling or unable to drill down for.

So why did notorious film blogger Jeff Wells take a bat to his integrity in a recent column?

The weird part is that Weintraub has seen the crime drama but declines to post a sidebar review despite the fact that it’s opening in London eight days from now, on Friday, 11.26…Weintraub explained [via e-mail] that he was shown London Boulevard as a friend/admirer of Monahan and not as a critic, and that he’s simply respecting Monahan’s request not to review it. “You’re hedging,” I replied. “This movie is presumed to be troubled on some level and is about to be reviewed by all of London, and you’re holding back on the specifics of your admiration because Monahan is a pally? I’d understand if the opening date was a couple of months off, but EIGHT DAYS?”

…Monahan and Weintraub know that the word on this thing is dicey, and that the general feeling is that it’s a bleeding groaning bear with a bullet in its side. If Weintraub really likes it as much as he says he should be a man and tell the world how good it is — clearly and specifically and passionately. 

I have two reactions to this:

1) First of all, it’s hard to explain how difficult it is to own/manage a major film site these days. In addition to the fact that the ad market constantly threatens our solvency, there are issues of press access, credibility, and respect that we are forced to contend with on a weekly basis.

In my opinion, sites like /Film and Collider are in an awkward in-between phase; we are large enough to command some attention from the movie studios (i.e. large enough that Sony will invite someone from each of our sites to see an advanced screening of The Social Network), but have nowhere near as much clout as someone from Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, or even critics from major local newspapers (although our readership undoubtedly is comparable to those in the latter category). For example, many of us are still forced to respect press embargoes on movies we’ve seen in advance. But if someone like Entertainment Weekly disregards their embargo and publishes a review early, well, I have a feeling they’ll still get an invite the next time around.

As a result, we struggle to strike a balance between capitalizing on the few advantages we get, while still maintaining our journalistic integrity. And to be crass about it, if I was given the opportunity to see the film as a friend of a director and handed a big fat exclusive in the form of a lengthy interview, the last thing I would do is turn around and completely disobey that director’s wishes by publishing a review of the film. Does that make me a terrible “film journalist?” Possibly, but it also ensures that I can deliver high-quality, unique content to our millions of readers for the foreseeable future. And in a job where exclusives are difficult to come by, and where readers care more about what they see on the page than what’s going on behind the scenes, that’d be a trade-off I’d be willing to make.

[Update: Examples of the type of content I’m referring to, regardless of the means through which they arose: My relatively lengthy interviews with people like Danny Boyle, Chris Morris, James Cameron, and /Filmcast appearances by people like Richard Kelly, Michael Dougherty, Rian Johnson and Vincenzo Natali, to name but a few. I believe these instances offer fascinating insights into the filmmaking process, and that some of our readers/listeners might not have been exposed to them were it not for our site/podcast.]

[Note: In case it’s not clear, I would not apply this logic to say, war reporters in Iraq or political reporters in Washington. But we write about who’s writing what script, and who’s directing what movie, and how much X actor is getting paid for appearing in the Y series of films. There’s a qualitative difference in our jobs.]

2) Not everyone can be a complete, unapologetic dick to people and still be invited to things and be perceived as an essential, relevant voice in the film world.

Dylan Stableford, writing for The Wrap:

House Democrats rejected a bill — supported unanimously by Republicans — to defund NPR. The measure, proposed by Republican Whip Eric Cantor, was defeated in a 239-171 vote, with only three Democrats joining the Republicans. “When NPR executives made the decision to unfairly terminate Juan Williams and to then disparage him afterward, the bias of their organization was exposed,” he said in statement before the vote. In their own statement after the measure was shot down, NPR said, “good judgment prevailed as Congress rejected a move to assert government control over the content of news.”

For some context, I’m reminded of this piece that James Fallows wrote a few weeks ago, a stirring defense of NPR as a journalistic organization in the midst of the Juan Williams firing debacle:

NPR, whatever its failings, is one of the few current inheritors of the tradition of the ambitious, first-rate news organization. When people talk about the “decline of the press,” in practice they mean that fewer and fewer newspapers, news magazine, and broadcast networks can afford to try to gather information. The LA Times, the Washington Post, CBS News — they once had people stationed all around the world. Now they work mainly from headquarters — last year the Post closed all its domestic bureaus outside Washington — and let’s not even think about poor Newsweek and US News.

Who is left? The New York Times, for one. The Wall Street Journal, with a different emphasis; increasingly Bloomberg, also with a specialized outlook. The BBC. CNN, now under pressure. Maybe one or two others — which definitely include NPR.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has a column today praising Anderson Cooper for performing basic fact-checking on his CNN show:

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.

It reminded me of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic piece on how internet has killed our conception of truth. When fact-checking lies that are on-their-face outrageous (or what they do on The Daily Show every night) is equivalent to the apex of journalism, we have a lot more problems with our discourse than Friedman is letting on.