Svetlana Kuritsyna, a 20-year-old woman from an impoverished rural region of Russia, has become a media star on the basis of an innocent, somewhat inarticulate video interview in which she praises President Vladimir V. Putin. She can be seen as the polar opposite of Pussy Riot, the anti-Putin feminist punk band, three of whose members are now in prison, Sophia Kishkovsky writes. Ms. Kuritsyna is now the star of her own trashy reality show.
- Appearing in Beijing on Sunday, Elton John dedicated his concert “to the spirit and talent of Ai Weiwei,†the Chinese artist and dissident, James C. McKinley Jr. reports, noting that, according to The Associated Press, there was no applause, only expressions of shock and a wave of murmuring. The Chinese government generally applies strict control to live concerts, requiring musicians to submit a detailed set list in advance.
The head of the trust that supervises the British Broadcasting Corporation testified be fore Parliament on Tuesday, saying the corporation's recent report that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in sexual abuse showed “appalling editorial judgment,†Alan Cowell and John F. Burns report.
- The hearing in Parliament comes just days before a report on press ethics is set to be released. That report was prompted by the phone-hacking scandal mainly centered on Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper division. The variety of investigations and hearings into British journalism, Mr. Cowell writes, “illustrates once more the intensity of the scrutiny faced by journalists and editors in Britain at a time when the news business is struggling to make a painful and costly adjustment to the digital era.â€
The Times's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, looks at when (or whether) a critic should offer an entertainingly nasty review. Her peg is the widely circulated, take-no-prisoners review by Pete Wells of a Times Square restaurant opened by Guy Fieri, the Food Network star. After recounting a series of devastating reviews - including one that called Coldplay “the most insufferable band of the decade†- and potent put-downs by the likes of Dorothy Parker (that Katharine Hepburn could “run the gamut of emotions from A to Bâ€) she concludes:
Is it ever really acceptable for criticism to be so over the top, considering that there are human beings behind every venture? I think it is. That kind of brutal honesty is sometimes necessary. If it is entertaining, all the better. The exuberant pan should be an arrow in the critic's quiver, but reached for only rarely.
