Beacon Male Blog

'Page One: Inside the NY Times' opens Friday at Bear Tooth

I once asked the great documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman if there was a subject he really wanted to make a movie about but knew he couldn't. His answer was "a great American newspaper," because he knew he'd never get the access to do it right.

I thought about Wiseman when I saw Andrew Rossi's "Page One: Inside The New York Times." Sure enough, he didn't get the access. Instead, he offers up a disappointingly narrow view of the Gray Lady, primarily focusing – when this scattershot documentary bothers to focus at all – on the paper's relatively new media desk. (It was created in 2008, two years before the time when most of "Page One" was filmed, after years in which The Times only glancingly deigned to cover the press.) Even here, the panorama is skewed. Since reportedly both of the women on the desk declined to participate in the film, Rossi homes in on four male journalists – Tim Arango, Brian Stelter, David Carr, and media editor Bruce Headlam.

Headlam gets points for having a big French poster of "Citizen Kane" in his office. Stelter, the wunderkind who started his TVNewser blog while still in college, has a Gumby action figure on his desk – a distinct comedown from "Kane," but perhaps a generational sign of the times (or Times). Carr is given the most screen time. Rossi seems altogether enthralled by his mix of punkish edginess (we are told repeatedly that Carr was once a cocaine addict and single father on welfare) and old-school cynicism (though he is practically devotional about the Times).

Carr is a marvelous camera subject and the only newspaperman in the movie who provides a temperamental link to the old "Front Page" days. The best scene in the movie records his phone conversation, alternately wheedling and damning, with a beleaguered representative from the bankrupt Tribune Co., which he will shortly eviscerate in print.

But giving so much of the movie over to Carr is, in a sense, a kind of abdication, since it also exposes how little else in "Page One" is galvanizing. The turmoil of the newspaper business in the age of the Internet, the seismic shifts in how we obtain and distribute news, the fate of serious journalism – all of this has been hashed over so many times that "Page One," with its parade of quizzical, platitudinous talking heads, adds little to the noise.

Rossi keeps bopping back and forth between scenes about WikiLeaks, Iraq, Comcast, ABC, Watergate, the iPad – you name it. What we don't get to see much of is anything at The Times outside of the media desk. Hardly a mention is made of the national or city news or foreign news desks, not to mention sports or entertainment, all of which might have been more enlivening than the media desk. (When I saw the film at Sundance, Carr said afterward, during a Q-and-A, that "We write about people who write about people who actually do things.

When medical screening leads to overdiagnosis | Calgary Beacon

If you feel like you have something wrong with you, don’t delay, go to your doctor and get it checked out.

But if you are healthy and otherwise feeling fine, should you ask your doctor for tests to see if your body is harbouring some kind of disease or another? Everywhere you turn it seems there is someone or some group urging you to you to get tested for something to stay healthy.

Medical testing is big business

It’s important to realize that whether it’s a cholesterol test, a check of your bone density or a probe of your prostate, the modern medical testing juggernaut is eager to “screen” you for disease, ironically, in order to prevent it. Frequent and routine screening is good for giving doctors steady business and puts dollars in the pockets of the medical testing and pharmaceutical industry. And many of us appreciate it: After all, better safe than sorry, right?

Wrong. Or should I say, “mostly wrong.” There are a few reasonable instances where the evidence supports screening entire populations of healthy people to find diseases before they can cause harm (screening for colon or cervical cancer, for example) but most others are often little more than exercises in futility for healthy people.

Has he lost that loving feeling?

Let’s look at one case in point.

There is an ad taking up to a third of the page of a major Canadian newspaper, showing a couple in bed, separated by words etched into granite asking: “Has he lost that loving feeling?” It’s obvious there is something wrong in the sex department with this couple and the ad is part of a bold new campaign to get men – and their physicians – thinking differently about what it means to be male and getting old. In days of yore before every aspect of our lives was colonized by the pharmaceutical industry, it was perfectly acceptable for a guy approaching 50 to start taking naps and losing interest in sex. But today pharmaceutical manufacturers cast a lusty eye on large untapped markets of boomer decrepitude, in this case the natural drop in testosterone as we men age.

The ad here directs men to a clever self-screening questionnaire asking them to answer a few questions to find out if losing that “Loving Feeling” is due to a lack of testosterone. The punchline is the standard staple of a drug ad: “See your doctor!”

While a conscientious doctor won’t whip out the prescription pad right away on the basis of a drug-company quiz that questions your manhood, the testosterone gel company flogging the screening quiz isn’t banking on conscientious doctors. It only needs to convince some of the estimated 1.7 million Canadian male boomers that they might have Low T. They’re hoping we men will have the cojones to ask our doctors for some testosterone-based libido enhancement.

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