November 17, 2016--Don't Turn Off Your TV

Many of my liberal friends have been telling me that the results of the election and the current state of the transition are so upsetting that they've stopped reading newspapers and watching TV.

Having similar inclinations, I understand this.

In spite of this, I also feel we have to resist the impulse and make sure we're watching a lot of network and cable news, that we're reading all the newspapers and magazines we can tolerate, that we are spending time surfing the internet for political stories and insights, and are pushing ourselves to talk with each other about our frustrations and, much more important, what happened and what to do, to actually do, to make a difference, to recapture the agenda.

Republican conservatives have been adept at keeping in touch with who their people are and their issues and for decades have been organizing themselves to shape the discourse and gain power from the local to national levels.

Progressives? Not so much. Especially when it comes time to move beyond check-writing and self-referential smart-talk.

I'll be frank--what I've been hearing from liberal friends is that they are tuning off the news because dealing with it is making them unhappy. To quote many, "When I turn off the TV, I immediately feel better."

In response I have begun to say that, "With all due respect and affection, this sounds indulgent. Being an engaged citizen is not about feeling good. It's often about feeling bad and in spite of that, because of that seeking ways to become productively activated."

It's gotten to the point that some people I've known for many years don't want to talk with me anymore. Or, if we talk, want only to speak about happy, diverting things.

But unless more of us who opted out even before the election, pretty much having become disenchanted with politics, leaving the protection of our rights to governments, unless we reengage and get mobilized what we have seen recently is what we will likely experience for the rest of our lives.

One friend yesterday, finally exasperated by my unwillingness to stop hectoring him, said, "OK. I hear you. But what should we do? What should I do?"

Here's what I told him--

• Write letters to the editor and op-ed pieces
• Call in to radio talkshows, especially right-wing ones, and take on their demagoguery
• Write to Democratic members of the House demanding they vote to replace Nancy Pelosi as minority leader
• Write to whomever makes the decision about who you prefer to be the next head of the Democratic National Committee
• Support, volunteer for, send checks to organizations such as the ACLU that are dedicated to promulgating and protecting liberal rights and values
• Consider running for public office--school board membership is a good place to start
• Spend vacation time driving the blue highways of America and talk with, listen to people at the lunch counters of local diners
• Keep the TV on and watch not only PBS but Fox News, especially Fox News
• Get started fighting back
• Never give up!

Richard Nixon

April 22, 2015--That's the Way It Was

Little remembered, Roone Arledge did more to shape contemporary TV network sports and news than anyone better known.

From 1968 through 1986 he was president of ABC Sports. In that role, to personalize coverage, especially for women, he was responsible for adding "up-close-and-personal" packages to ABC's airing of the Olympics games and, for an almost broader audience turned ABC's Wide World of Sports into a mega-hit that weekly featured everything even quasi-sports-like, including barrel jumping from various hotels' ice rinks in the Borscht Belt, cliff diving from Acapulco, and demolition derbies.

With all that success ABC executives in 1977 made him the network's president for news and the rest is history.

Up to that point on places such as the Tiffany Network (CBS) the news was presented as serious business--wars, famines, revolutions, presidential nominating conventions (wall-to-wall coverage was the norm), and the occasional natural disaster. With the understanding that to deserve air time the disasters had to measure at least 7.0 on the Richter Scale. No mudslides in Malibu could pass the Walter-Cronkite test.

So when Cronkite signed off each night with, "And that's the way it is," that was the way it was.

Cut to 2015.

We live in a very different news universe where what is "reported" weeknights on the three network news shows is no longer that much about news. And no longer appeals to a mass audience. Particularly does not appeal to young viewers. Thus all the Lavitra commercials.

Almost as many get their news from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show as from Scott Pelley on CBS. And many more than that get their news on line via so-called mobile devices.

Network news mavens have figured out that all day long people with smart phones check their favorite websites to see what's happening and when doing that tend to click on things that offer more visual than written content.

So, last week there was a lot of exciting footage, mainly shot by bystanders with iPhones, of out-of-control police that went viral. From video of a policeman in Arizona careening intentionally onto the sidewalk to run down someone fleeing from the police and other repeatable footage of a 73-year-old police volunteer in Oklahoma who shot and killed an alleged suspect with what he thought was his taser, mistaking his service revolver for it.

And just the other day there were vivid images of a young black man being subdued, shackled, and tossed into a police van by three white cops where he may or may not have had his spine snapped, which in turn led to his death.

Knowing all these images, and thus "stories," had been in wide circulation long before 6:30 P.M. and knowing that their residual Baby-Boomer audiences do not search the Web all day seeking the amusing and lurid, the networks began their broadcasts and filled half their time with these videos. In effect to help their aging, tech-phobe viewers catch up with what the more wired had been looking in on through the day.

So this is what network news has devolved to--showcases for viral videos for the unplugged.

On ABC, where news as entertainment was invented and reached its apotheosis, where no distinction is made between fun, the grotesque, or the urgent, David Muir is the least credentialed, most unabashedly hunky, blow-dried "anchor" of all time. On his show one day last week (and "show" it is), though Barack Obama was meeting in Panama City with other North and South American leaders, we saw the police videos over and over again--in slower-and-slower slow motion and closer-and-closer detail (including the pop shot--the police cruiser slamming into the fleeing suspect) there was literally no mention of the historic meeting between Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro.

May 21, 2014--Local News

I'm a TV news snob.

I have my issues with the so-called network news as well as the way national and international news is reported on CNN and other cable outlets (for their sensationalist and entertainment audience-building agenda); but I am particularly snobbish when it comes to local news.

We watch too much TV while in Florida and occasionally check in with local news reporting, particularly when there is the threat of bad weather. We otherwise tend to actively ignore it, tune it out, because we know what we will see--mainly people of color being arrested or shot down while robbing convenience stores. We know this is dog-whistle stuff--how the "news" reminds us about how "these" people behave in our midst.

Occasionally an ultra-rich guy after a polo match runs someone over in his Bentley and that gets covered. There is a strain of schadenfreude that permeates our culture that likes to see the rich and famous come crashing down. Justin Bieber comes currently to mind as does Alec Baldwin.

But mainly on Florida local news we see houses disappearing into sinkholes, Burmese pythons infiltrating the Everglades, fatal car crashes, and of course endless robberies, more and more caught by surveillance cameras. Mainly black guys in hoodies beating up South-Asian shopkeepers. Best, every once in awhile, the person behind the counter has a hidden baseball bat or gun which he uses to pound on the perpetrator or pump a couple of shots into him.

When we watch Florida local news, we gloatingly say, "Wait 'til we get to New York. At least there on the news they cover art exhibits and what's playing on Broadway."

Not so much.

The other day on the local CBS station the lead stories included a video of a taxi jumping the curb and mowing down shoppers on the Upper Eastside; pictures of a SUV crashing through the plate-glass window and all the way into a Nassau County pet store; an iPhone video of someone falling off a subway platform just as a train was about to pull into the station; and then more surveillance-camera images of an Asian grandfather being stalked by an African-American thug before being slammed to the ground and stomped on, dying from that a day or two later.

"I guess we'll have to look in the Times to see what's on Broadway," I said, trying to muster a little self-depricating humor.

But then WCBS turned to its version of national news, again it was wall-to-wall bad news--the tragic wildfires burning their way across San Diego County in California and the discovery of a second case of the Mers virus in the U.S. Wouldn't you know it, in Orlando, Florida.