The massacre of first-grade students at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last week has prompted soul searching among Hollywood executives about the kind of fare they are producing, as well as the more practical question of which TV shows and movie screenings should proceed and which should be delayed, Brooks Barnes and Bill Carter write. In a sad reflection of the prevalence of gun-related violence in recent months, these executives have become expert at quickly assessing exactly how bloody - and potentially offensive - their shows and movies are. For example, USA network can perform a keyword search for “shooting,†“school†and “children†to check scripts of programs about to air.
Three prominent United States senators on Wednesday joined critics of the film “Zero Dark Thirty†over its depiction of C.I.A. interrogations in the ultimately successful hunt for Osama bin Laden, Scott Shane writes. In a letter to Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is releasing the film, the senators called the film “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location†of Bin Laden. The three - Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan; and John McCain, Republican of Arizona - called on Sony to “consider correcting the impression that the C.I.A.'s use of coercive interrogation techniques led to the operation†against Bin Laden, but they do not explain exactly how that could be done.
- The documentary “We Steal Secrets,†about Julia n Assange and the whistle-blower site Wikileaks, will debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and represents the beginning of a boomlet in Wikileaks related filmwork, Michael Cieply writes. The documentary is a collaboration between the producer Marc Shmuger, the former chairman of Universal Pictures, and the Oscar-winning director, Alex Gibney.
- Also in January, DreamWorks Studios and Participant Media plan to begin shooting a dramatic feature film to be directed by Bill Condon. HBO also has had plans for an Assange movie, and Mark Boal, the writer and a producer of “Zero Dark Thirty,†continues to work on a possible Assange drama based on a New York Times Magazine article, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest†by Bill Keller.
An investigation of the sexual abuse crisis within the British Broadcasting Corporation concluded on Wednesday that leadership hampered by “rigid management chains†left the organization “completely incapable†of dealing with the crisis, John F. Burns and Stephen Castle write. The report, written by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, criticized the decision to drop a segment that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a BBC fixture; but it said that confu sion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision. Also, the report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC and current president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation.
Jenni Rivera, the Mexican-American singer and television star who died in a plane crash in Mexico on Dec. 9, experienced a surge in sales, both in CDs and digital downloads, Ben Sisario writes. Taylor Swift remained atop the Billboard album for a fifth week with her al bum “Red†(Big Machine) recording 208,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The 64,000 albums reported on Wednesday represented a 10-fold increase; a compilation album released just two days after Ms. Rivera died, “La Misma Gran Señora†(Fonovisa), reached No. 38 on the overall Billboard album chart.
Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.
