Tag: news

Book Review: A Reporter’s Life by Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite as a morning show newsreader had dialogues with a lion puppet and Dick van Dyke.

At some point a year or two ago, I bought a whole bunch of books for not very much money; can’t remember where. They sat on my bookshelf en masse, all but untouched until I got into this recent reading binge. First up had to be the 1996 autobiography of Walter Cronkite (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009), for he was my all-time favorite news anchor.

The early chapters, about him growing up in Kansas City and later Houston, I found to be a bit bloodless, even as he tells about murderous racism. It seemed very “that’s the way it was.” His World War II retelling was somewhat livelier. When he described being stationed in Moscow for CBS News, he realized “how effective lies can be when the truth is suppressed,” so that his Russian driver was convinced that the Soviets had invented baseball and the Jeep.

When he gets to the issue of television, though, he lets his personality, and his opinions, shine through. He believes that the press’s focus on the “sizzle rather than the steak” of politics created a cynicism that resulted in an “international embarrassment” of low voter participation.

During Cronkite’s tenure as the anchor, US government officials were looking for the network to take a more supportive role toward the Vietnam war. He replied, “It is not the journalist’s job to be patriotic. How can patriotism be determined anyway? Is patriotism simply agreeing unquestioningly with every action of one’s government? Or might we define patriotism as having the courage to speak and act on those principles one thinks are best for the country…?”

My favorite parts of the book are the insights about the early days of television, where folks established in radio and print figuring out the new medium, including his tenure as a morning show newsreader having dialogues with a lion puppet and Dick Van Dyke. Later, he recognizes that he had become an “800-pound gorilla” of news trying not to upstage his news colleagues. When he retired, he developed disgust with the new CBS News ownership of the early 1980s over its concern with profits over content.

Of course, he tells about reporting the important events of the times, including the John Kennedy assassination and the landing on the moon. He namechecks his college physics teacher, who would be amazed how well Cronkite explained the technical aspects of the space missions.

I think that the state of television news, from the time he wrote this book until he died, must have filled him with despair for his chosen profession. Still, it was a most interesting read by a most stellar individual.

Hostess: the mostess, for a few

I boycotted Hostess from about 1970 until the Vietnam war was over in 1975.

For me, the issue of the Hostess Brands snack food line apparently going under – I can’t believe that someone won’t buy this venerable line – isn’t the loss of Ding Dongs. It’s that, apparently, the company had “manipulated” its executives’ pay–sending its former chief executive’s salary, in particular, skyrocketing- in the months leading up to its Chapter 11 filing, in an effort to dodge the Bankruptcy Code’s compensation requirements.

Yet the stories I hear on the nightly news talk about the failure of the company to come to an agreement with the unions. Implicit in that is if it weren’t for the greedy unions, we’d still have our Twinkies. Maybe, just maybe, it was the unions who were offered a bad deal, and are now getting a bad rap.

I have a peculiar history with Hostess. During the Vietnam war, the product line was owned by ITT, and ITT built stuff that helped the war machine. So I boycotted Hostess from about 1970 until the war was over in 1975. Truth is, I never much liked Wonder Bread all that much, and after I started eating whole-grain breads, Wonder Bread was inedible. I liked Twinkies, though. Finally, after a half dozen years, I tried a Twinkie again; I thought it was AWFUL, pure sugar. Had my taste buds changed, or did my previous political antipathy make it taste bad? But I still liked the fruit pies when I tried them again, though I preferred the ones by Drake, which had a fun commercial to boot.

Mark Evanier made some interesting points. “They came out with ‘100 calorie’ packs of their Twinkies and cupcakes… but the experiment caused me to swear off their products for good. The size of a Twinkie that got the calories down to that acceptable number was so small as to be unsatisfying and it made me more acutely aware of how many were in the full-sized version.” Other brands did the same thing, and I had the same reaction. As for Wonder Bread, “by the time they did offer a ‘whole grain white,’ it felt insincere on their part.” Absolutely!

I’m not planning on buying up some Hostess products. Despite the cliche, they WON’T last forever like styrofoam.

 

Hurricane Sandy and incredibly silly people

My ire was predicated by the very real devastation the storm brought to a whole lot of OTHER people.

First off, I should note that I’m fine, we’re fine, in Albany. 150 miles north of New York City, we got a little wind and a little rain, but nothing substantial. They closed our public schools in the city for two days due to an abundance of caution; the new superintendent is from New Jersey and I think she was taking her lead from the mayor, who had proclaimed a state of emergency for a day or more.

And because it wasn’t a big weather event HERE, I’ve heard people calling it a “dud”, that they were “cheated”, which frankly ENRAGED me. (I referred to such people as “idiots” on Facebook; maybe I should stay off Facebook. Someone else called them “callous douchebags”, which I suppose is worse.) I wonder if it’s the result of the infotainment quality of big weather event reportage, alluded to by both Cheri and Mark Evanier?

My ire, though, was predicated by the very real devastation the storm brought to a whole lot of OTHER people, starting in Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica, then much of New Jersey, Connecticut, and southern New York State, specifically NYC and Long Island. Over 80 dead, at least 33 in the US:
Millions without power
Oyster Creek, New Jersey on “Alert” as Sandy Threatens Nuclear Facilities
NYC flights still grounded by Sandy, and major train disruption as well. LaGuardia airport, in particular, is a mess.

One of my best friends wrote on Tuesday morning: “NYC and the surrounding area are a mess. The transit authority said this was the most devastating storm in the city’s history… The seven subway tubes underneath the East River connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn are Queens are flooded. The subway stations in lower Manhattan are flooded. Depots in all 5 boroughs where trains and buses were parked are underwater… This is the worst storm recorded in the city’s history. A buoy in NY harbor recorded a wave of 32.5 feet, the highest ever recorded. Seawalls in Queens and New Jersey recorded the ocean surging over 13 feet, the highest ever recorded. The creek did rise.”

Meanwhile, in the theater of the absurd, George W. Bush’s FEMA Director During Katrina Criticizes Obama For Responding To Sandy Too Quickly. As opposed to Michael Brown’s more…casual pace in dealing with the 2005 disaster. Also, some anti-gay preacher blamed Hurricane Sandy on “homosexuality and marriage equality”; these clowns seem to pop up every disaster. They should go send money to the American Red Cross, and, as another friend of mine used to say, “zip their traps.”
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What to do after a hurricane – US-specific, though some useful messages about preparation for all.

Kind of stupid stuff

This is actually a legitimate scientific theory…of the 18th century and before.

SamuraiFrog was complaining about some burnt-out rocker claiming President Obama was behind the recent mass shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin so that he can get a gun ban bill passed. And it wasn’t even Ted Nugent, this time. Yeah, it might have bothered me if I had heard of this guy, other than by the stupid things he blathers.

I’m actually much more peeved with the British. Diplomats suggested that they could invoke a little-known law to strip Ecuador’s embassy of diplomatic privileges, meaning police would be free to move in and detain [Julian] Assange. Does this mean that if, say, Iran, decided to threaten to void the diplomatic immunity of some Western country, that would be OK? I am guessing not. Oh, the Brits were just discussing options? Then do it in private. Where’s the “diplomacy” here? And, off topic, but I love the headline of this article: Assange to break silence amid diplomatic stoush. No American media source would use the word stouch – yay, ABC News, i.e., the Aussie version.

Roger Ebert has a good piece about what Thomas Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church & State. He writes: “That’s why it’s alarming to see so many politicians proposing to tear down that wall. It’s most evident in the eagerness of states to permit the teaching of Creationism (in the guise of Intelligent Design) in public schools, despite the ruling of a Pennsylvania U. S. District Court that ‘the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.'”

Of course, the Republican candidate for US Senate from Missouri is so lame that the Republican Presidential and VP candidate had to distance themselves from him. “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” said Todd Akin in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” This is actually a legitimate scientific theory…of the 18th century and before.

I’ve been following a discussion about the scoring in Olympic events. I must say that the yuckiest moment I saw was when some poor Romanian girl lost her bronze medal when the American coach was able to lodge a protest which went in the American gymnast’s favor. So many of the sports have these somewhat subjective, or at least somewhat mysterious, scoring system. I appreciate the effort by the diving folks, who throw out the highest and lowest scores. It’d be a dull (and short) Olympics if they only included the sports in which people ran the fastest, jumped the highest, threw the farthest, etc., and I am not advocating for this, but I do understand the sentiment.

This whole blog post, though, was really inspired by a trip Saturday to the Altamont Fair, the regional fair in the Albany, NY area. It’s a great event – we spent over six hours there. But on the rides were signs a bunch of rules, all of which made sense. Still, the necessity of the last two lines pained me:
DO NOT FORCE A CHILD TO RIDE IF HE OR SHE IS FRIGHTENED.
A SCARED CHILD ON THE GROUND MAY PANIC IN THE AIR.
The necessity of such a warning suggests that some parents are tools. sad.

So, to return to SamuraiFrog, let’s Dare to be Stupid.

Getting rid of ABC News’ Brian Ross, for starters

In a three-minute span last week, anchor Diane Sawyer made two errors.

I’m forever fascinated by the news media, and how often they get it wrong. Anyone who has appeared in the newspaper will tell you that; “that’s not what I meant.” Often it’s breaking news they botch, such as CNN and FOX News reporting of when it was declaring that the Supreme Court had killed “Obamacare”

But it was some hours after the Aurora, Colorado shootings when ABC News’ Brian Ross, interrupting the news anchor, speculated that the shooter may have been a member of a local tea party chapter. Ah, his investigation seems to be that he Googled James Holmes and Aurora and found A James Holmes in Aurora, who is unrelated. The network issued a public apology. This was hardly the first of Ross’ premature reporting.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart totally lambasted Ross (at 5:00 in), and rightly so. Regret the Error explains the network’s mealy apology, while at the same time, making me suspicious of another detail of the story. “The network had reported that Holmes’ mother said ‘you have the right person’ when it contacted her to ask if her son was the shooter. She has since said she was referring to herself to let the reporter know she was Holmes’ mother.” I tend to believe Holmes’ mother’s version.

Ross, however, is hardly the only sloppy newsperson at ABC News. In a three-minute span last week, anchor Diane Sawyer made two errors. First, she noted that the British had 9,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, but 18,200 at the Olympics, which is “MORE than twice as many;” not when I went to school. Then she referred to late actor Sherman Hemsley as “Helmsley.” Forgivable mistake, perhaps, but when the reporter on the piece REPEATEDLY announces his name correctly, you’d think she’d fix it. Or, if she didn’t notice, that SOMEONE would whisper into her headphone about her miscue.

It wasn’t that long ago that the late Peter Jennings, who died in 2005, was anchoring ABC’s evening news. Those types of errors likely wouldn’t have taken place, and if they had, heads would have rolled. I’m reminded once again why I gave up my ABC News habit.

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