“Let’s take off the gloves,” moderator Paul Schmelzer of the Minnesota Monitor said to his panelists, an assembly of media critics charged with talking about their changing role in an evolving media landscape. The question: What could they be doing better?

Janine Jackson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) called for more rounded subjects. Critics get mired in deconstructing the coverage of domestic and party politics, she said. Among the areas in which Jackson would like to read more are the disability community, labor news, and feminist and antiracist criticism. She also noted a tendency to focus heavily on print media, neglecting mediums such as radio. “Wherever the influence is, criticism should be,” she stressed.

Eric Deggans of Florida’s St. Petersburg Times noted that media critics don’t criticize themselves very well, that they’re more cautious when approaching their own institutions. Deggens also pointed out the lack of media criticism on TV; he’d like to see the nightly news dissecting media coverage. “[Producers] don’t think viewers are interested,” he said, “but they could get them to be interested.”

Media Matters for America 's Eric Boehlert suggested refraining from personal attacks. It’s a model that’s worked for Media Matters, which keeps its criticism focused on “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” as opposed to demonizing conservative pundits.

Finally, Diane Farsetta, from the Center for Media and Democracy, chimed in with the need to form partnerships with community, university, and other local organizations. If the media is missing a story, or misreporting the information, instead of “becoming an expert in 30 minutes,” make a community connection, she counseled. Then when you deliver your criticism, you can direct the criticized party to an expert source.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

Tokyo-born, Germany-based writer Yoko Tawada has been called “a surrealist with a funky, abrasive sense of humor,” according to World Literature Today. “Hair Tax,” a short piece of her fiction featured in the May-June 2008 issue (article not available online), is a wry case in point.

“After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved,” Tawada writes (translated from German into English). “The Hamster Lovers’ Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd.”

Sounds fairly reasonable, no? From there, Tawada traces the increasingly surreal repercussions: Calculating tax based on “surface area,” of course, could be deemed discriminatory against obese animals, so the term “furred surface” is adopted, presenting certain problems for fans of new-fangled furry furniture (brought to you by genetic engineering), and on and on it goes....

In taking regular ideas to irregular lengths, Tawada’s “Hair Tax” pleasantly jostles the brain; the piece is at once familiar and unexpected, begging reflection on the world as it is. "Hair Tax" is available to read online via Words Without Borders, a web-based magazine of international literature recently profiled in the University of Chicago magazine.

And after reading it, if a hair tax still seems a bit, well, surreal, consider this: A Minnesota state representative proposed just such a follicular tax not so long ago. Rep. Jim Abeler carried what began as a snarky suggestion through to its over-the-top end—proposal of an amendment—hoping to make a point about how simple it is to create new programs, reports the Minnesota Monitor. Life imitates art, it would seem.

Image by annia316 , licensed under Creative Commons.