Actress and environmental activist Darryl Hannah thinks the media should stop giving coverage to those who say global warming is not a real phenomenon.

She was speaking on a panel about environmental responsibility and the media at the Banff television festival.

From the NYT:

Classical music criticism, a high-minded endeavor that has been around at least as long as newspapers and reached an English-language peak with George Bernard Shaw, has taken a series of hits in recent months.

Critics’ jobs have been eliminated, downgraded or redefined at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country and at New York magazine, where Peter G. Davis, one of the most respected voices of the craft, said he had been forced out after 26 years.

The developments have flustered the profession, which views robust analysis, commentary and reportage as vital to the health of the art form. But the changes have also disturbed the people who run musical institutions like opera houses and orchestras, several of whom have protested to local editors.

The worries come as classical music is already riled by fears of aging, declining audiences and an increasingly marginal role in American society: curiously enough, the same worries afflicting newspapers, which are cutting costs and trying to grope their way in the multimedia world. Often the first targets have been the arts and book review pages.

From the NYT:

Journalism fellowship programs are feeling the fallout of the media industry’s turmoil.

Some prominent universities have noticed a drop in applications from American journalists. Stanford, M.I.T. and Harvard report a decline in journalists seeking to specialize in business, science or other disciplines. But foreign applications are pouring in at a record pace.

The decline comes as many newsrooms are scaling back through buyouts and job cuts in response to declines in revenue as many readers turn to the Internet. Some in academia wonder if journalists are staying put to avoid losing their jobs.

This year, 83 Americans applied to the John S. Knight Fellowships Program at Stanford, down from 101 in 2006. ...

Stanford did not receive any applications from employees at The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and some other large newspapers.

“Journalists are afraid for their jobs,” said Alex S. Jones, the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. “They are afraid that if the newspaper can go on without them for a year, their job might be in jeopardy.”