Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg said on Monday that
talking to U.S. President Donald Trump at a United Nations summit on
global warming would have been a waste of time since he would not have
paid any attention.
Smart youngster. It is very encouraging to see a new generation of young activists. She is a prime example of why I think there is hope for this world of ours adults are doing so much to harm.
Monday, December 30, 2019
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Fred P. Graham, Legal Affairs Reporter and Court TV Anchor, Dies at 88
I watched Fred Graham’s reports when watching CBS News was an ingrained ritual: I would not consider any other network as valid.
The son of a Tennessee preacher, Mr. Graham, a lawyer with a soft drawl, a habitual cheroot and the steady gaze of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, was a Yale, Vanderbilt and Oxford University scholar who went to Washington in 1963 as chief counsel to Senator Estes Kefauver’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments, then served two years as a special assistant to Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz.
After getting laid off by CBS in 1987, he wrote “Happy Talk: Confessions of a TV Newsman,” first published in 1990, on his two decades in broadcast journalism, in which he argued that network news programs had become “infotainment,” the equivalent of “a well-produced video version of a tabloid.” As Michael C. Janeway, then the dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, noted in a review for The Times Book Review, the title, “Happy Talk,” referred to “that mindless banter with which television anchors fill air time.”
It has only gotten worse. Anchors laugh and banter and comment, coo and smirk. News leads off with disasters or tragedies, aiming for ratings, and switches to actual news when there are no more plane crashes or murders left.
The son of a Tennessee preacher, Mr. Graham, a lawyer with a soft drawl, a habitual cheroot and the steady gaze of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, was a Yale, Vanderbilt and Oxford University scholar who went to Washington in 1963 as chief counsel to Senator Estes Kefauver’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments, then served two years as a special assistant to Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz.
After getting laid off by CBS in 1987, he wrote “Happy Talk: Confessions of a TV Newsman,” first published in 1990, on his two decades in broadcast journalism, in which he argued that network news programs had become “infotainment,” the equivalent of “a well-produced video version of a tabloid.” As Michael C. Janeway, then the dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, noted in a review for The Times Book Review, the title, “Happy Talk,” referred to “that mindless banter with which television anchors fill air time.”
It has only gotten worse. Anchors laugh and banter and comment, coo and smirk. News leads off with disasters or tragedies, aiming for ratings, and switches to actual news when there are no more plane crashes or murders left.
Friday, December 27, 2019
Arthur Singer Jr., Who Set the Stage for Public TV, Dies at 90
He played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Carnegie Commission report that led to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal funding.
Can one imagine the federal government funding public broadcasting today? Not me. Lindsay Graham, that paragon of mediocrity, wouldn’t allow it. Can one imagine there not being public broadcasting today? I shudder at the possibility.
His efforts came in the wake of a speech in 1961 by Newton N. Minow, the newly named Federal Communications Commission chairman, to a roomful of 2,000 television executives in Washington, in which he dismissed their product as a “vast wasteland.”
Big difference: today we pay for that drek.
In a typical day of broadcasting, Mr. Minow said, “You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
How little has changed.
Can one imagine the federal government funding public broadcasting today? Not me. Lindsay Graham, that paragon of mediocrity, wouldn’t allow it. Can one imagine there not being public broadcasting today? I shudder at the possibility.
His efforts came in the wake of a speech in 1961 by Newton N. Minow, the newly named Federal Communications Commission chairman, to a roomful of 2,000 television executives in Washington, in which he dismissed their product as a “vast wasteland.”
Big difference: today we pay for that drek.
In a typical day of broadcasting, Mr. Minow said, “You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
How little has changed.
Factbox: Erdogan pushes 'crazy' Istanbul canal dream despite opposition
12/27/2019:
President Tayyip Erdogan has revived plans to dig a canal on the edge of Istanbul despite opposition from hundreds of petitioners and the city’s new mayor against the kind of mega project that has come to define Turkey’s economic boom and bust.
Erdogan is pursuing his dream of grandeur, enabled by the absence, nay, the withdrawal of US presence. That crazy man currently in 1600 Pennsylvania is doing great damage to the nation and our interests as he whips up hysteria among his base, in pursuit of his own dreams of grandeur.
President Tayyip Erdogan has revived plans to dig a canal on the edge of Istanbul despite opposition from hundreds of petitioners and the city’s new mayor against the kind of mega project that has come to define Turkey’s economic boom and bust.
Erdogan is pursuing his dream of grandeur, enabled by the absence, nay, the withdrawal of US presence. That crazy man currently in 1600 Pennsylvania is doing great damage to the nation and our interests as he whips up hysteria among his base, in pursuit of his own dreams of grandeur.
Thursday, December 19, 2019
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