news Archives - Page 8 of 14 - Ramblin' with Roger

May rambling #2: Leterman, and Vivaldi’s Pond

James Taylor interview by Howard Stern on May 12

You might want to bookmark this because it’s updated regularly: Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)? Most recently, it’s former New York governor George Pataki, who’s been out of office since 2006.

Obama To Posthumously Award “Harlem Hellfighter” With Medal Of Honor For Heroism on June 2, 2015. That would be Sgt. Henry Johnson, who I wrote about HERE.

On July 28th, 1917: Between 8,000 and 10,000 African-Americans marched against lynching and anti-black violence in a protest known as The Silent Parade.

“Playing the Race Card”: A Transatlantic Perspective.

The Milwaukee Experiment. How to stop mass incarceration.

The Mystery of Screven County by Ken Screven.

From SSRN: Bruce Bartlett on How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics.

Does Color Even Exist? “What you see is only what you see.”

The linguistic failure of “comparing with a Nazi.”

Vivaldi’s Pond by Chuck Miller.

Arthur is dictating the future, albeit imperfectly. Plus AT&T did a good job predicting the future.

Woody Allen On ‘Irrational Man’, His Movies & Hollywood’s Perilous Path – Cannes Q&A.

The Tony Awards for Broadway air on CBS-TV on Sunday, June 7. Some nifty theater links. Listen to songs from Something Rotten.

Lead Belly, Alan Lomax and the Relevance of a Renewed Interest in American Vernacular Music.

Trailer of the movie Love & Mercy, about Brian Wilson.

James Taylor interview by Howard Stern on May 12, in anticipation of Taylor’s new album release on June 16th, listen to HERE or HERE. A friend said, “it was Howard at his best. James forthright, thoughtful and plain honest.”

Why Arthur likes Uma Thurman by Fall Out Boy, besides the Munsters theme.

SamuraiFrog ranks Weird Al: 70-61.

For Beatlemaniacs: Spirit of the Song by Andrew Lind Nath.

The Day That Never Happened and Let’s Drop Beavers from Airplanes and Tater tots and termites.

Apparently Disney Used To Recycle Animation Scenes.

Muppets: Rowlf ads.

Of course, there’s a lot of David Letterman stuff. Here’s How Harvey Pekar became one of his greatest recurring guests. Articles by National Memo and Jaquandor. Or one could just go to Evanier’s page and search for Letterman.

EXCLUSIVE Preview: HOUSE OF HEM #1, a collection of Marvel comics stories written and drawn by my friend Fred Hembeck.

I love Rube Goldbergesque experiments.

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

The Ranting Chef’s Two-Timing Number One.

I made SamuraiFrog’s This Week in Neat-O, which is kind of…neat. And Dustbury shared the same piece.

Dustbury on Procol Harum.

I suppose I should complain, but it’s so weird. Twice now in the past month, someone has taken a blogpost I’ve written and put it on their Facebook page. The person has kept a citation to my original post, which I imagine could be stripped as it gets passed along. But I’m so fascinated someone would even bother to do so that I haven’t commented – yet.

GOOGLE ALERT (not me)

Roger Green, Art Green’s grandfather, “was born and bred in Rangitikei, and ran the family farm, Mangahoe Land Company, during the 1960s until they put a manager on it in 1967.” (Arthur Green is in New Zealand’s version of The Bachelor.)

Ferguson, from a conservative’s view

Even if you read only the parts of the Ferguson DOJ report that come directly from the files of the FPD, the report paints an incredibly damning picture.

Attorney General Holder meets with local residents and community leaders of Ferguson at Drake's Place Restaurant — Attorney General Holder meets with residents of Ferguson, MO

As usual, I read a variety of points-of-view on political issues. This was one of the items I read this week about the US Department of Justice’s report on the police of Ferguson, Missouri:

People are highly resistant to changing their minds and they become impervious to new evidence, often dismissing out of hand outright facts just because they are reported by a given source (e.g., “the media is untrustworthy” or “you can’t trust the Holder Department of Justice.”) Perhaps nowhere has this phenomenon been more obvious (or regrettable) than in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown…

Conservatives…have become highly resistant to assimilating information that strongly suggests that the Ferguson PD – as with many other municipal police departments in the country – truly is out of control, in that it recklessly violates the constitutional rights of the citizens of Ferguson and does so in a manner that has a clearly disproportionate impact on minorities…

Even if you read only the parts of the Ferguson DOJ report that come directly from the files of the FPD (which is to say, files that would be most favorable to the Department), the report paints an incredibly damning picture of the Ferguson Police Department. No conservative on earth should feel comfortable with the way the Ferguson PD has been operating for years, even according to their own documents.

This report did not come the left-of-center Daily Kos, which DID note this month, If you think ‘reverse racism’ is worse than what blacks face, read the Ferguson report.

Instead, it came from the right-wing publication Red State, written by the noted conservative ~~Erick Erickson~~Leon Wolf. It was titled “Many Conservatives are Blowing it on the Ferguson DOJ Report,” with the subhead: “Their reaction is neither fair, accurate, nor good for America.”

Meanwhile, The Weekly Sift noted:

Both the city manager and the police chief have resigned, but the mayor is determined to hang on. He isn’t even convinced the city has a serious problem:

The report stated there was probable cause to believe the police and court routinely violate people’s civil rights. But, [James] Knowles [III] said, “that’s not proof.” He added that “there is probably another side to all of these stories.”

One might suggest that Mayor Knowles didn’t read the same report Leon Wolf did.

News guys: Brian Williams, Jon Stewart, Bob Simon

Brian Williams on the moon with Neil Armstrong.

It was a Wednesday night. I was at our Dad’s group at church, and the pastor was reading this excerpt of the book Jesus for President, about, in retrospect, the obvious buildup to the Iraq war, featuring folks such as Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush.

It reminded me of something CBS News correspondent Bob Simon had said in January 2003 on the Sunday Morning program. The exact words I don’t recall, but it was, in effect: The United States and its allies are now occupying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, allowing the inspectors to look for those “weapons of mass destruction” we were supposedly so sure existed.

There was no reason to go to war; the status quo is the way we should pursue things. Of course, the US ignored his counsel, and we’re still dealing with the effects to this day (e.g., ISIL).

Bob Simon knew something of the region. “At the beginning of the Persian Gulf war in January 1991, he was captured with colleagues by Iraqi forces. The team spent 40 days in a prison of Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein. He was interrogated, beaten with canes and truncheons, and starved by his Iraqi captors. He would later recount his story in the book Forty Days.”

I got home that evening and discovered that Bob Simon was dead from a car crash. He was described as a “reporter’s reporter”, winner of 27 Emmys and four Peabody Awards, covering a wide range of topics from Vietnam to making instruments out of rubbish to how elephants communicate.

This news upset me far more than I would have anticipated.

Maybe Bob Simon was the kind of old school journalist/war reporter that Brian Williams, the suspended NBC News anchor, had hoped to be. Watch how his accounts of his time in Iraq had changed since 2003, which is a recurring pattern for him.

As bad as his six-month suspension, and loss of $5 million in salary, must be, what is worse is the public humiliation. He’s a Twitter hashtag, #BrianWilliamsMisremembers. Brian Williams on the moon with Neil Armstrong. Someone took the iconic picture of John Kennedy, Jr. saluting his father’s casket, and superimposed Brian Williams’ head, which, I admit, made me LOL.

The defense of Brian Williams seems to take two forms. One is that other news networks lie all the time. A quote attributed to Chris Rock read: “Fox News lies unapologetically for 20 straight years = #1 cable news network. Brian Williams embellishes one story = worldwide controversy.”

The other is that Cheney/Bush et al. lied about the reasons for going into the Iraq war, and Williams is the only one punished?

Frankly, I’m convinced that possible apology tour will not work, that his predilection for fibbing, which former anchor Tom Brokaw told him about, will do him in, even though he may well have begun to believe his own narrative, putting himself in the story, rather than a deliberate lie.

In the same news cycle, Jon Stewart announced he’d be leaving The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s faux news broadcast, which many critics think is far more substantial than the “regular” news.

As many are, I was saddened by the news; as a friend of mine said, Stewart had a way of expressing his own thoughts, but in a more coherent way. Here are some of his best bits.

Lots of speculation about who will replace Stewart. Some suggest Jon Oliver, former Daily Show contributor, who’s got a gig on HBO. Tina Fey or Amy Poehler both hosted the Weekend Update segment on Saturday night Live, are other names being bandied about.

Why not Brian Williams on The Daily Show? After all, he had wanted to be the Tonight Show host. Comedy Central might be a step down, but if Williams did some of the real news Stewart did, it just might raise Williams’ credibility to Jon Stewart level, which is quite high. Whereas he’ll be tainted for NBC, CBS, and ABC for a long time.
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I’ve only recently read the columns of David Carr, “who wrote about media as it intersects with business, culture, and government in his Media Equation column for The New York Times.” He died at his office last week. He was only 58.

The Lydster, Part 127: Watching the news

I was the kid who was watching Huntley-Brinkley on NBC News or Walter Cronkite on CBS News by the time *I* was ten.

For her first nine years, I sheltered the Daughter from watching the evening news, viewing it after she went to bed, or before she got up in the morning. Sometimes, I’d watch it while she was in the other room.

Turns out that she is preternaturally interested in these things. Moreover, she develops opinions about them that did not necessarily come from us. Ferguson, MO made her aware that it’s a little scarier being a black child in America than she previously thought. The death of Palestinian children during the conflict with Israel made her angry. And she has great antipathy for Russia’s Putin.

Sometimes, she shows off her knowledge. Last summer, she said to a friend, “Do you know what happened in Mali?” Her friend didn’t know who Molly was; it was a reference to a plane crash. During a manhunt for a cop killer in Pennsylvania, she was surprised that her friend from Pennsylvania was unaware of it.

It’s my fault. I was the kid who was watching Huntley-Brinkley on NBC News or Walter Cronkite on CBS News by the time I was ten. But the news seemed tamer when I was her age. Our involvement in Vietnam was still minimal. There was racial strife, but it seemed to be focused in the far-away South.

Now, there are ISIS/ISIL video executions; she didn’t see them – heck, I didn’t see them, but she was still aware of them, though not the first one until after the second one had taken place. Hundreds of girls are kidnapped in Nigeria. Several NFL players are involved with domestic violence.

She always DOES have the option of going away from the set, but she seems to have the peculiar notion that she should be an informed citizen. Where she got THAT idea, I have no idea.

One wants to protect one’s child, but I guess keeping her blissfully unaware is not an option anymore.

Fair and balanced news

Here’s something I DON’T understand: the European Union Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” ruling.

Musing on what passes for news these days, I was taken by this story: The distorting reality of ‘false balance’ in the media. It’s saying, essentially, that if you have two people on the news debating whether the Earth is round or flat, you unnecessarily elevate the flat earth argument to be equivalent.

I haven’t written much about either the awful shootdown of Malaysian flight or the Israel-Gaza war, other than I found it depressing as all get out. (What does “depressing as all get out” mean? In this case, I want to get out from all this sadness.)

There is a certain arc to stories of tragedies on television: 1) The bare facts – airliner goes down, 295 aboard, likely no survivors. Wait, it was 298 people – those first stories understandably never get it quite right. 2) The speculation, official and otherwise, about caused the tragedy. 3) The narrative of the actual people who died, which is the worst for me to watch. This catastrophe was particularly painful for the Dutch, who lost the majority of the victims. Awful for the HIV/AIDS community, which lost some prominent scientists and activists. Add to this the treatment of the bodies and the crime scene in Ukraine and [throws up both his hands]…

The story behind the story in Israel/Gaza recently has been NBC pulling veteran reporter Ayman Mohyeldin after he witnessed Israeli killing of children in Gaza, also noted here. Maybe the coverage wasn’t McNewsy enough.

Once upon a time, in the Mesozoic era of Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley, it seemed that facts were, you know, facts. Now “reportage” seems to have an inordinate amount of opinion. One of the things I’ve only obliquely heard was this “blame Obama” mantra regarding the shootdown of the Malaysian flight, which somehow almost always leads to the deification of Ronald Reagan even though Reagan did little after a Korean flight was shot down in 1983.

Now, particularly with user-created content, it appears (SHOCKING!) that sometimes people LIE in order to drive their political agenda, falsifying reports. After all, almost everyone has a camera these days. Amnesty International has launched a video verification tool and website, which sounds really useful for them..

If journalism is the pursuit of truth – OK, my working theory – Here’s something I DON’T understand – the European Union Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” ruling. The unintended consequence is that it can become a disinformation tool. Fortunately, those whose articles are being delisted, many of which are journalistic institutions, aren’t going to simply lay there and allow some third party to selectively edit their publications.

“The Bolton News (UK) just received notification from Google that one of its stories was due to be vanished from Google’s search engine. Needless to say, this request has produced another story highlighting the original story the filer(s) wanted delisted.” Brilliant response, I say.

Finally, sometimes when you do write a piece accept praise for something great in your story, even if you didn’t mean it. This HAS even happened to me, in a blog post or two.
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I was sad that actor James Garner has died. I watched him religiously in the TV shows Maverick, in which he played a gambler, and The Rockford Files, as an unconventional L.A. private eye. But I also saw him in 8 Simple Rules and First Monday, the TV movie My Name Is Bill W., the films Victor/Victoria, Murphy’s Romance, Maverick, and Space Cowboys, and probably others. He had a relaxed genius as an actor. Loved those Polaroid ads with Mariette Hartley. Oh, and apparently Rockford anticipated our current police state way back in 1978.