Ink-Stained to Link-Strained: A Kvetch

"Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once?" NBC anchor Brian Williams opines in Time. "What if 'talking' means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention?"

And that is one downside of this new digital culture, that we can all drown in it. How do we pick out the stories, sites, blogs, videos and info-shards that are worth our precious time? We can follow the electronic links from people and places we trust, but in an odd way, that's bringing back the old gatekeeper role, with popular portals granting admission to a selected few content creators.

It's nice to be able to gorge on this movable feast. But awkward old Ed Sullivan would have a hard time making it today. Maybe he'd have to sell his best segments on iTunes.

The Doctor Is In

For Sanjay Gupta, television isn't brain surgery. It's harder.

"I still cringe sometimes when I have to watch some of my live shots," the 37-year-old neurosurgeon says after a long day of performing operations.

But five years after CNN hired him as a medical correspondent with no previous TV experience, Gupta had full-time job offers from several broadcast networks. He signed a part-time deal this month with CBS News while remaining at CNN. Gupta also spends nearly half his time teaching at Atlanta's Emory University School of Medicine and performing surgery at its affiliated hospital.

Gupta will be the second physician doing pieces for the "CBS Evening News" -- Jonathan LaPook was recruited last summer -- in an era when the networks, and lots of local stations, consider it obligatory to have an in-house M.D.

Keeping a foot in both medicine and journalism has its advantages but can also create conflicts. Gupta recalls CNN asking him to cover the case of an Emory whistle-blower raising questions about its hospital and concluding that "I just don't think it's right for me to cover that."

During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Gupta was embedded with a Navy unit called Devil Docs and, while covering its mission, performed brain surgery five times, the first of which was on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy.

Gupta, who drew criticism at the time, says it "seemed absolutely the right thing to do" because the unit had no other neurosurgeons to deal with such emergencies. "Someone was dying and I was the only person who could potentially save him." He says he discussed the first operation on the air only because BBC had reported it.

The Michigan-born son of Indian and Pakistani parents, Gupta finished medical school at 22. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. Since joining CNN, he has launched the weekend show "House Call," started a column for Time (whose parent company owns CNN) and was named one of People's "Sexiest Men Alive."

Health reporters are perfectly capable of handling the beat, but physicians -- who also cover medicine for the New York Times and Washington Post -- seem on television to be imbued with an extra aura of authority, even without the white coats. "Medical news is very personal, very intimate to people," Gupta says.

When CBS News President Sean McManus learned that Gupta was not willing to leave CNN, he worked out a sharing arrangement, similar to one in which CNN's Anderson Cooper contributes to "60 Minutes." Gupta says that he is eager to reach a wider audience but that his seduction by the bright lights will go only so far.

"I'm a doctor first," says Gupta. "If I had to choose one today, I'd choose medicine."

Fair and Balanced

The campaign chatter on "The Daily Show" was 98 percent nasty to Republicans, and -- hold your outrage -- 96 percent mean to the Democrats, reports the Center for Media and Public Affairs. (Jon Stewart's interviews with public figures were not included in the study.) Knowing that Stewart might well mock the report, the center even offered him a punch line: "I have one thing to say to the pinhead researchers. . . . Give us a second chance: We'll get it to 100 percent."

Correction of the Year

From London's Sun, as chosen by the Web site Regret the Error:

"Following our article on Princess Eugenie's birthday celebrations, we have been asked to point out the party was closely monitored by adults throughout and while a small amount of mess was cleared away at the end of the evening, there was no damage to furniture, no revellers dived into bedrooms in search of drunken romps and to describe the house as being trashed was incorrect. We are happy to make this clear and regret any distress our report caused."

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."