Showing posts with label CBS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CBS. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

You can have 'diversity.' I'll take variety.

The CBS network lineup: Sunday, Nov. 10, 1968

Diversity. All we hear about these days is "diversity."

What is "diversity"? We certainly don't have ideological diversity among those most committed to the D-word today in the United States.

Racial and ethnic diversity seems more about building either an ideological monolith of rainbow hues or, alternatively, segregated racial and ethnic enclaves uneasily inhabiting common organizations, institutions or physical spaces.

Me, I think we ought to strive for variety, then go from there. If you're under 45, you probably have little memory of variety, which is what more or less -- sometimes more, sometimes less -- took place when shared common spaces were the norm and opportunities for, say, media self-segregation weren't. Of course, we all had our opportunities and mechanisms for self-segregation (and forced segregation) but we likewise had more spaces where interaction and cross-pollination was unavoidable. Like television.

THE BABY BOOM is the last generation to be forced in its youth, through prehistoric technology that had become just pervasive enough, to open itself a little bit to a lot of things.

And people.

And cultures.

We may not have had "diversity" (again, whatever the hell that might be) but we did on occasion achieve variety. That's not nothing, and in today's blasted moonscape of a political and cultural battlefield where warring monocultures try to cleanse America of the diverse Other, that long-ago variety begins to look like a lot.

And I really would have liked to hear the backstage conversation between Jefferson Airplane and Kate Smith.

Thursday, December 08, 2016

Godspeed, John Glenn


John Glenn is dead.

And with the great astronaut's passing at age 95, so dies a part of every star-struck child of the 1960s. There's not much more a man can say -- the life of an American hero speaks for itself. And what a life Glenn had.

In an age so devoid of greatness -- in an America now so impoverished -- this is what greatness looks like. And below, as broadcast Feb. 20, 1962 on KFAB radio in Omaha, is what greatness sounded like.

Sit back and enjoy this NBC Radio special report reviewing the flight of Friendship 7.

Godspeed, John Glenn.


Monday, November 14, 2016

Welcome to the Donald Trump Presidential Library
(Official Trump clothespins -- $14.99. Cheap!)


What do you get when you elect an authoritarian, racist, misogynist, vulgarian bullshit artist as President of the United States?

A steady stream of authoritarian, racist, misogynist, vulgarian bullshit from the future President of the United States. Starting with this:
Lesley Stahl: You said that lobbyists owned politicians because they give them money.

Donald Trump: Yeah.

Lesley Stahl: You admitted you used to do it yourself. You have a transition team—

Donald Trump: And when you say lobbyists, lobbyists and special interests.

Lesley Stahl: And you want to get rid of all of that?

Donald Trump: I don’t like it, no.

Lesley Stahl: You don’t like it, but your own transition team, it’s filled with lobbyists.

Donald Trump: That’s the only people you have down there.

Lesley Stahl: You have lobbyists from Verizon, you have lobbyists from the oil gas industry, you have food lobby.

Donald Trump: Sure. Everybody’s a lobbyist down there--

Lesley Stahl: Well, wait

Donald Trump: That’s what they are. They’re lobbyists or special interests—

Lesley Stahl: On your own transition team.

Donald Trump:–we are trying to clean up Washington. Look--

Lesley Stahl: How can you claim--

Donald Trump: Everything, everything down there-- there are no people-- there are all people that work -- that’s the problem with the system, the system. Right now, we’re going to clean it up. We’re having restrictions on foreign money coming in, we’re going to put on term limits, which a lot of people aren’t happy about, but we’re putting on term limits. We’re doing a lot of things to clean up the system. But everybody that works for government, they then leave government and they become a lobbyist, essentially. I mean, the whole place is one big lobbyist.

Lesley Stahl: But you’re, but you’re basically saying you have to rely on them, even though you want to get rid of them?

Donald Trump: I’m saying that they know the system right now, but we’re going to phase that out. You have to phase it out.


AND CONTINUING with this:
Lesley Stahl: Are you in any way intimidated, scared about this enormous burden, the gravity of what you’re taking on?

Donald Trump: No.

Lesley Stahl: Not at all?

Donald Trump: I respect it. But I’m not scared by it.

Lesley Stahl: Now you’re not scared, but there are people, Americans, who are scared and some of them are demonstrating right now, demonstrating against you, against your rhetoric--

Donald Trump: That’s only because they don’t know me. I really believe that’s only because--

Lesley Stahl: Well, they listened to you in the campaign and that’s--

Donald Trump: I just don’t think they know me.

Lesley Stahl: Well, what do you think they’re demonstrating against?

Donald Trump: Well, I think in some cases, you have professional protesters. And we had it-- if you look at WikiLeaks, we had--

Lesley Stahl: You think those people down there are—

Donald Trump: Well Lesley—

Lesley Stahl: are professional?

Donald Trump: Oh, I think some of them will be professional, yeah--

Lesley Stahl: OK, but what about – they’re in every city.

Lesley Stahl: When they demonstrate against you and there are signs out there, I mean, don’t you say to yourself, I guess you don’t, you know, do I have to worry about this? Do I have to go out and assuage them? Do I have to tell them not to be afraid? They’re afraid.

Donald Trump: I would tell them don’t be afraid, absolutely.

Lesley Stahl: But that’s not what you’re saying, I said it-

Donald Trump: Oh, I think, no, no, I think-- I am saying it, I’ve been saying it.

Lesley Stahl: OK.

Donald Trump: Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid. You know, we just had an election and sort of like you have to be given a little time. I mean, people are protesting. If Hillary had won and if my people went out and protested, everybody would say, “Oh, that’s a terrible thing.” And it would have been a much different attitude. There is a different attitude. You know, there is a double standard here.

It has been five full days since the election and anti-Trump demonstrations, driven in part by Hillary Clinton’s edge in the popular vote, have been significant.

When we interviewed him on Friday afternoon Mr. Trump said he had not heard about some of the acts of violence that are popping up in his name… or against his supporters.

Nor he said had he heard about reports of racial slurs and personal threats against African Americans, Latinos and gays by some of his supporters.

Donald Trump: I am very surprised to hear that-- I hate to hear that, I mean I hate to hear that--

Lesley Stahl: But you do hear it?

Donald Trump: I don’t hear it—I saw, I saw one or two instances…

Lesley Stahl: On social media?

Donald Trump: But I think it’s a very small amount. Again, I think it’s--

Lesley Stahl: Do you want to say anything to those people?

Donald Trump: I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, ‘cause I’m gonna bring this country together.

Lesley Stahl: They’re harassing Latinos, Muslims--

Donald Trump: I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, “Stop it.” If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.
IT'S GOING to be a long four years. Assuming Trump, or the United States, makes it that long.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

30 years


Three decades ago today, my wife and I were on the road somewhere on U.S. 60 in south-central Missouri, on our way to Washington, D.C., from Springfield, Mo.

We turned on the radio. There was network special coverage on. The space shuttle? What happened?

Then the punch in the gut. It's a cliché because it's true.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Bigfoot lives, and he does social media!


Finally, a news organization not named The Star, the Enquirer or The Globe takes notice of Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch, whatever you want to call him.

It's about time, CBS News!
In the midst of the potent wind and heavy snow, a yeti was spotted roaming around the streets of Boston Monday night.

As the blizzard of 2015 howled in, Bostonians were told to stay off the roads. But as tall figure dressed in a white, fluffy costume with grey gloves embraced the storm, documenting its trip and calling itself the @BostonYeti2015 on Twitter.

The mythical abdominal snowman started its journey in Somerville at 10:48 pm.
HOWEVER, I strongly object to the use of the word "mythical."

Friday, November 22, 2013

5 Decades & the Truth


A funny thing happened on the way to this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth.

About half past noon this afternoon, I turned on the CBS News web stream of its coverage from Nov. 22, 1963 -- that day. Uncut, real time, starting at the moment of the first bulletin that shots had been fired at the president's motorcade in Dallas.

Within an hour -- live on TV -- America was forever changed. Over the next three days, television news grew up, making up how to cover the unthinkable, live and non-stop . . . as it covered the unthinkable, live and non-stop.

It did so, by today's technical standards, primitively and without formatic bells or whistles. Television also did so powerfully and occasionally artistically -- and without a surfeit of hairspray.

OF COURSE, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a powerful blow to a country -- to a people. The death of our young president and the images of his grief-stricken widow -- as well as television's reflection of our own grief -- hardly could fail to affect. Powerfully.

Let me put it this way. When President Kennedy fell victim to Lee Harvey Oswald's deadly aim, I was four months shy of my third birthday. I have memories of that day.

The sense of overwhelming sadness and loss endure after five decades. It comes storming out of the mists of time, as raw and fresh as yesterday. And it wasn't just the loss of what was; it was the loss of what might have been.
 
Too, maybe it was the loss of what might not have been. We are a greatly changed people from what we were Nov. 21, 1963. In some ways, that is a good thing. In more ways, I fear, that has been a bad thing.

We are a more cynical people since that day.

Great tragedy, should you survive it, can make you stronger. The aphorism to that effect did not come from nowhere.

Great tragedy, however, is just as likely to break you, too. That is a proven fact. Fifty years ago, I think, we were broken -- at least partly. I am 52, and I have lived my life watching the wheels come off a society. Not uniformly, but enough.

I've unfortunately done my part to make that so, Lord knows.

THAT'S WHAT is washing over my mind and through my soul as I find myself unable to pull myself away from CBS-TV, circa 1963. When Walter Cronkite once again -- through the time machine of videotape -- read the flash from Dallas confirming the death of the 35th president of the United States, I reflexively crossed myself.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In retrospect, that's not a bad reaction, even half a century hence. In that spirit, this sad anniversary isn't the time for jazz, rock 'n' roll or even blues in the night. That's what happened today on the way to the Big Show -- there won't be one. It just didn't feel right.

Stay tuned for a few days for a pre-Thanksgiving edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

God bless us, every one.

Saturday, June 01, 2013

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. . . .


Thirty-three years later, this still makes me cry.

Somehow, this scene from Archie Bunker's Place seems highly appropriate today.  The New York Times today bears the sad news:
Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 90.

Her agent, David Shaul, confirmed her death.

Ms. Stapleton, though never an ingénue or a leading lady, was an accomplished theater actress with a few television credits when the producer Norman Lear, who had seen her in the musical “Damn Yankees” on Broadway, asked her to audition for a new series. The audition, for a character named Edith Bunker, changed her life.

The show, initially called “Those Were the Days,” was Mr. Lear’s adaptation, for an American audience, of an English series called “Till Death Us Do Part,” about a working-class couple in east London who held reactionary and racist views.

It took shape slowly. The producers filmed three different pilots, the show changed networks to CBS from ABC, and Ms. Stapleton acted in a film directed by Mr. Lear, “Cold Turkey,” before “All in the Family,” as it was finally called, was first broadcast in January 1971.

For three or four months, hampered by mixed reviews, it struggled to find an audience, but when it did, it became one of the most popular shows in television, finishing first in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons and winning four consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding comedy series. Ms. Stapleton won three Emmys of her own, in 1971, ’72 and ’78.
I REMEMBER, during a 1986 visit to the Smithsonian's American history museum,  that one of the biggest thrills for me -- this in a museum filled with amazing things, including the original "Star-Spangled Banner" from the War of 1812 -- was being able to gaze upon Archie and Edith's chairs from All in the Family.

Perhaps it was that I had seen these things every week for years on the small screen. Or maybe it was because they were second-class relics of two of the greatest actors in the history of television.

Whatever the case, I am sure of one thing. No one will ever fill those chairs.

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Toujours fidèle


As this 68th anniversary of D-Day comes to a close, please take some time to watch these On the Road reports from CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman.

William Faulkner once famously -- and truthfully -- wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The past two nights on the
CBS Evening News, Hartman has shown us, heartbreakingly, how the Second World War may be over for a Texas widow and a French town, but it is anything but past.

It is a wound as fresh as today. It is an old debt still being repaid by a little town and the grateful Frenchmen who inhabit it.

It also is the story of how government incompetence and the malfeasance of a Texas congressman and his staff prolonged an old woman's heartbreak. And it is the tale of how her grace and forgiveness exposes how inconsequential can be the powers and principalities that possess our nation's capital.


Ne jamais oublier. Never forget.

Monday, February 20, 2012

John Glenn and the way we were


Who were we?

Who were we Americans, who could absorb the psychological body blow of Soviet Russia putting Sputnik into orbit while we still were blowing our satellites up on the launch pad . . . and then four years later, Yuri Gagarin into orbit before we could get a man into suborbital space at all?

Who was this people who sat by radio and television sets this day 50 years ago, waiting for John Glenn, strapped inside his tiny Mercury capsule, to rocket into orbit atop an Atlas rocket and even the spaceflight score with the communists?

What manner of people -- once Glenn had gone up, gone around three times and come down alive and well -- would celebrate his achievement, this affirmation of American greatness, without irony, self-consciousness or reservation? Indeed, what sort of nation would have the audacity to set its sights on placing a man on the moon and returning him to Earth safely in less than a decade's time?

Who
were we? Who were these people of supreme faith -- in themselves, in God and in their way of life?

Who were the people who listened to radio like this on
KCBS in San Francisco as early birds on the West Coast awaited history in the late winter's predawn?

Who were the people heard in this bit of radio history later that night, along the
NBC radio net and over the airwaves of KFAB radio in Omaha as a winter storm roared across the northern Plains?



WHO WERE
these people?

Who were we? What sort folks could maintain such hope and confidence amid the threat of the Cold War going hot and the world being engulfed by a mushroom cloud?

Who was this people, the one able to look at the racial horrors of Mississippi, Alabama and across the Deep South, yet keep faith with the better angels of its nature? What sort of man . . . or woman . . . still believed in God, country and heroes?

And who in the world listened to sweet music on the airwaves in the chilly predawn? Who still allowed grown-ups and other assorted squares to have a say in the popular culture?

I remember these people.
I do.

I scarcely recognize them anymore, though. I scarcely recognize the nation that gave us Friendship 7 -- and visions of a bright future -- a mere half-century ago. But on the television today, there's an old man, some 90 years of age, a man clearly of a different age -- an anachronism still in this world, yet not of it.

Not anymore.

Godspeed, John Glenn.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Experience it. Feel it. Enjoy it.


I bought an old record album Monday evening.

"The Sound of Jazz," on Columbia Records, was the companion LP to one of the greatest moments in TV history. That came Dec. 8, 1957, when the program of the same name aired as part of CBS' short-lived The Seven Lively Arts anthology.

A few days before, all the jazz greats featured on the television program gathered in a Columbia Records studio to commit music set for the TV program to magical grooves in round slabs of vinyl. The LP hit stores the next year -- '58 -- and now one of them sits next to me in the Revolution 21 studio.

I am a happy man. I own the TV show on DVD. I own the 54-year-old record now, too.

As I revisit The Sound of Jazz -- the TV show . . . the LP will be savored later today -- I am struck by a remark from the show's host, New York Herald Tribune media critic John Crosby. Hell, nearly literally.

"There's not gonna be a lot of talk on this program today," Crosby said at the program's start. "I'm not gonna interpret jazz, analyze it, bring you its history. The important thing about jazz is to experience it -- feel it. Enjoy it. "

That's it. That's 3 Chords & the Truth, the podcast arm of this august (cough) media empire (snort). I'm not going to go all public radio on you and analyze jazz -- or any other music -- to death. It's not an endless list of everyone playing on a session . . . for every bloody song.

Music is not work. Music is joy.

"The important thing about jazz is to experience it -- feel it. Enjoy it." Ditto for rock. And punk. And country. And blues.

That's rather like life, don't you think?

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Because CNN can't afford 20ish strippers


Occasionally, I am compelled to haul out a dire warning about television legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow delivered to the Radio and Television News Directors Association . . . in October 1958.

As far as I can tell, each time the sad pairing of Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper on the alleged
Cable News Network drove me to it.

Here we go again.


AND HERE Murrow goes again -- out of dire necessity. Not that there's any saving us now.

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small fraction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

-- Edward R. Murrow, 1958

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Happy now, Rush?


I'm sure Lara Logan of CBS News is bearing up stoically in her hospital room knowing that she damn well deserved her fate at the hands of an Egyptian mob.

What would we do without Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to give us clarity on these things?


FROM the CBS News website:
In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

Don't mess around when burtations strike


In Los Angeles, when a reporter does this, it's cause for alarm and much legitimate speculation about on-air strokes or possible brain tumors. Scary stuff.

In Omaha, when a reporter does this, it means you must be watching Channel 6.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Simply '70s: Turning the world on with her smile


Fall 1970: I dunno . . . yeah, Mary Tyler Moore was great as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show a few years back, but is anybody really gonna buy a show about a "career woman"?

I give it half a season.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Simply '70s: The odd couple


No, not The Odd Couple, the odd couple -- Sally Quinn and Hughes Rudd on the CBS Morning News.

What were they thinking upon the debut of this . . . thing on Aug. 6, 1973? "They" being the people in charge of CBS News.

Was this a backdoor attempt at a precursor of the
Jerry Springer Show? Were the network producers thinking they could slip one by William Paley, taking on the mantle of plausible deniability and feigning total surprise when Rudd inevitably snapped and began to stub out Lucky Strikes on Quinn's forehead as she affected her way through the day's headlines?

Would she have name-dropped her way through the aftermath, saying she once had provoked the Great Man himself, Edward R. Murrow, to do the very same thing during a junior-high field trip?

Sadly, none of the nefarious plans for prematurely lowering the television IQ
(assuming there were any nefarious plans, as opposed to a plain-old screw up) came to fruition, and neither did the ratings that would have generated. The Quinn-Rudd era of the CBS Morning News ended -- mercifully -- in February 1974.

Notable appearances this day: Jay Silverheels' anti-litter PSA and a young Pat Buchanan, flacking for "Tricky Dick" Nixon.

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Election '82


Just in time for Ronald Reagan's first midterm election in 1982, the economy was about as bad as it had been since the Great Depression.

We wouldn't see an economy that bad again until . . . now.

Funny -- isn't it? -- that Reagan
(the real Reagan and not the mythologized one) probably would be derided as a RINO by the tea-party crowd today, and the Democrats have become a party that can't hold a lead. Ever.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Harry Reasoner's Wild Kingdom


We travel to the undulating landscape of San Francisco, where our intrepid CBS television newsman Harry Reasoner is on the trail of the mysterious hippie.

I'll stay here in the Impala to safeguard our supply of narrow ties and gray woolen suits. Meanwhile, Harry is instructing our Haight-Ashbury guide on our game plan for luring a pack of hippies to our camera position. Let's listen in on what Harry is saying to tracker Warren Wallace:
"Well, it's going to be tricky to snare one, Warren. Usually, they can smell Establishment at a great distance, and they'll run away.

"But I estimate that if we can bait a trap with enough incense and cigarettes . . . oh . . . and munchies -- and if you stand off to the side and start yelling . . . and the exact wording is important, here, Warren . . . if you start yelling, 'Sunflower scored some really good
[BEEEEEEP!], man' . . . I think we can snare one or two."
FAST FORWARDING from 1967 to 2010, we get to pass judgment on the completely unhip and slightly bemused Reasoner's conclusions about his encounter with the wild hippies amid the coastal hill country of the Bay Area.

And you know what? For a clueless, tragically square old fart, it would seem Harry Reasoner had the hippies' number.

Because the Age of Aquarius remains just another pipe dream, and Better Enlightenment Through Chemicals was just another (dis)illusion.

And the hippies? They ended up selling out to The Man, of course.

COULD IT have been any other way? Harry was right . . .
such a waste.

Dissent was in order. New ideas were in order. The Establishment was corrupt. And what was the great rebellion against establishmentarian rot? Tuning in. Turning on. Dropping out.

That worked out so well for us all.

Well, at least the music was groovy. Maaaaaaan.