1446 Bad Week for News

Bob Simon was one of those guys about whom the label “legendary” landed and stuck.  After covering wars on three continents, he died ingloriously on the battlefield of a New York City road.

David Carr was one of those reporters who covered guys like Simon.  His own war zone was a background in which the words “drug” and “booze” still emerged frequently, but whose insight and prose and investigative skills kept the rest of us more or less honest.

And then there’s Brian Williams.

Three guys gone missing in one of two ways.

Simon’s biography and his prowess have been well covered.  He was one of those correspondents who made CBS the “Tiffany network” at least for news.  And you can read anywhere about his exploits and the stupidity of his death as a passenger in a livery cab. Probably, you have already.

Carr was the media columnist for the New York Times.  He died “in the office” yesterday as the paper so delicately put it.  His work was a must read for those of us who navel gazed about ourselves, or work our colleagues and the trends -- really the tidal wave -- that the news business is dealing with nowadays.

And then there’s the now-suspended Williams, who brought honor and dishonor to NBC and osmotically to the rest of us lesser lights.

As for Williams, it’s time to let the scars heal before we resume the whipping. And let’s consider what the controversy really all about.

The short answer is money.

You have to ask, does NBC’s owner, Comcast, really care about the credibility of the fallen anchorman?  This also has a short answer: yes… money.

Not the estimated yearly ten to 13 million dollars they spend keeping him in good suits and a fancy midtown east apartment.  It’s the hundreds of millions the Nightly News program brings in.

Keep these facts in mind:

--The evening newscasts are on life support.

--The Williams version was the least likely to die until Brian was outed as a teller of tall tales.

--It is number one in a slow race largely because the ABC version is anchored by a kid whose main asset is that he’s a kid and the CBS version is so boring it puts you to sleep before 7 pm.

These once premier newscasts -- replacements for the afternoon and evening newspapers -- have descended into a television hell that tells you nothing you haven’t already heard on radio, read on the internet or don’t care about and shouldn’t unless you’re a big fan of missing puppies.

Think about it.  Huntley-Brinkley, Chancellor, Brokaw, Jennings and Cronkite used to sit you down for half an hour and tell you what you missed while you were busy all day.

But you don’t need them anymore.  You have CNN and Yahoo news.  And the Huffington Post and Drudge.

So the job of anchorman (or woman) now is more ring master than tour guide through the maze that is each day’s news.

People are comparing Williams’ six month unpaid suspension with the slow speed ousting of Dan Rather at CBS.  Not the same thing.  

First, Rather’s supposedly fake story might actually have been real, but he couldn’t prove it.  Second, Rather had his enemies within CBS and within the Washington establishment.  He got canned, but  wasn’t turned overnight into a national laughing stock.

Money.  Williams’ future hangs on what happens to ratings and revenue during his absence.

And the amateurs at Comcast need to learn how to run a newsroom.  So far, the lessons are lost on the company-wide news chief and her ineputy, the president of NBC News.

You can learn a lot about an anchor by looking at what he or she does during the off time.  Lester Holt is said to take refuge behind a Fender bass.  Cronkite took refuge on his sailboat.  Williams took refuge by appearing on Letterman and Saturday Night Live.

Then there’s Brokaw.  Here’s a story from a weekday afternoon in the third floor newsroom at 30 Rock.  

Brokaw has his coat on and is heading for the elevators.

The executive producer at the time, Jeff Gralnick (1939- 2011,) asked him where he was going.  The answer: to some local school where kids were waiting to talk with him.

Gralnick: “I want to send a camera crew along.  We can use that.”

Brokaw: “Nah.  That’s not what this is about.  This is about those kids.”

Heard it with my own ears from a distance of about one foot.

Guess we’re all going to have to turn to Jon Stewart for the news. Oh, wait… he’s calling it quits this year.

Well, there’s always Drudge and the Huff-post.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to it. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1424 Sharpton

Once upon a time, there was a very good newspaper called Newsday, now a shadow of its former shadow.  It had the snap and shape of a tabloid but the solidity of an old line broadsheet.  Even though it was published on Long Island, it was right up there with the print stars of the day.  Nationally,  it was the fifth largest in circulation and third in frequency of being quoted.

One of the people who made it so was a reporter-then-editor-then columnist called Les Payne. Mr. Payne is black.  That’s important to this story.

Then in the 1980s, there came a young girl named Tawana Brawley who also is black.  And that’s important to this story.

She charged that she was raped, bound, thrown in a garbage bag by racist whites.

She is the pilot light that lit the gas bag that is Al Sharpton. But while Sharpton was flogging the story, some of us were convinced the allegations were nonsense.  We took the facts of the case and divined that Miss Brawley was a scared teen, out after curfew and scared that her stepfather would punish -- maybe beat -- her and made up the story.

Evidently, Payne was one of those, investigated and found out it was so, then published the story which was then in effect lifted by the New York Times which got all but one element of the case steamrolled into a pancake and thrown away.

The element that survived?  Sharpton.  He insisted Brawley was telling the truth and like Goebbels, kept repeating the lie and today, he’s welcome at the White House.

There is only one thing you need to know about Al Sharpton; it should tell you everything.  Before he was a self-anointed member of the clergy, before he was an “activist,” before he was anything, he was a record promoter. Ethics on a scale of 1-10?  Minus five.

So first we had the giants of the modern era civil rights movement. MLK, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, and on and on.

Gradually and sometimes not so gradually, they were replaced by people like Jesse Jackson and Ralph David Abernathy.

And now, THEY are replaced by Reverend Hoodwink and Farrakhan.

Wonder what Les Payne thinks about all this.

Grapeshot:

-Question for Robin Meade: Why don’t you take more time off and give us a rest?

-Question for the New York Times: will lopping off 100 heads in the newsroom really help your bottom line or are you just flailing and rearranging deck chairs?

-Question for Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky: Are you happy you could now re-invade Cuba if you were alive?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1247 Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death

1247 Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death

Every now and then you read about a nurse or doctor who kills patients he or she is sworn to care for, treat and -- sometimes -- save from death.

Every now and then you read about a firefighter who moonlights as an arsonist, sometimes to appear as a hero when he’s first on the scene with the truck or just likes to see stuff burn.

Now there’s the internet, connecting the world, increasing the flow and quantity of both information and data.  And you can revere its goals and its ability.  But you also can rightfully accuse it of attempted murder. if not murder itself.

Okay, we all know that printed newspapers and printed magazines are on life support, just waiting for Nurse Deadly to finish the job. Part of it is their own fault, of course. They started giving away information that they probably should have charged for in the first place.

The big exception to this seems to be the Wall Street Journal.  The Journal, of course, is not a newspaper.  It’s a trade paper.  Probably the best trade paper ever.  But still, a trade paper.  

Its subscribers tend to have money and expense accounts.

The rest of the print world now tries to act like crack peddlers who tease you with a free sample, hook you and then make you pay for online news.  At the same time, they’re pricing their print product out of the market.

Even the mighty New York Times is trapped in the new model.  The Times experimented a few years back with a hybrid pay/free system.  You got the general news free but you had to pay for the columnists and specialty reports that are the real reason people read the Times.

We’re in a recession.  Yes, yes, officially we’re not.  But emotion trumps statistics in this case.  We feel recessed.  So we look carefully at what we spend.

You probably lie when you say you’ve created a budget. But probably you do question yourself when it comes to spending.   “Okay, I’ll pay for the Times, but not for Newsday or Modern Grocer or the East Acne, Idaho ‘Daily’ Bugle” which only prints three days a week and home delivers on one.

The latest example of business model failure is possibly the easiest to understand.

“Consumer Reports” is losing money.  CR does some of the best journalism in journalism.  But they don’t accept advertising either in print or online.  And people are abandoning them for Amazon user reviews, competing magazines that DO accept advertising and self verified review sites like Angie’s List.

OK.  You don’t need CR unless you’re buying, say, a refrigerator or looking for the best running shoes or the best used cars.

But in fact you need the kind of research, testing and polling CR does.  Would you rather get the opinion of skilled investigators or Mrs. Kunklewasser down the block?  You know… that woman known for the charming phrase “get your dog off my lawn.”

So, solid testing, alert editors, accurate figures.  Great way to build confidence.

Mrs. Kunklewasser, not so much.

Time to shift this paradigm (don’t you just love “paradigm?” It’s soooo much fancier sounding than “template” or “system” or “action plan.”)

If you set the same standards for news sources that you use for the ratings of lawn mowers or heat-and-serve waffles, you find the well- staffed and (relatively) prosperous newspapers, wire services, major magazines and so on.  When you accept any old report on the internet, you’re as likely to get the Kunklewasser Post as anything else.

And Mrs. K is so busy chasing you and your dog, she has little time to supervise what her inexperienced unpaid writers write.

This doesn’t mean everything in the K-Post is wrong.  It just means you can’t depend on it to be right.

The internet is killing the traditional media.  The death will not be immediate and some of it will be slower than even the most nay of the neighwhinniers neighwinny.

The answer of course, is to pay for what you buy instead of shoplifting it off a screen.

Now, what of the doctors, nurses and firefighters that ended their careers by playing God or committing arson?  Well, many of them were highly skilled.  And they started with a keen desire to help.

So did the world wide web.  But like everything else on the internet, it is both larger and more numerous than the human fellows and felons.  And the actions of the few affect people by the millions, not just one at a time.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com or find Mrs. Kunklewasser in the phone book, if you still have a phone book.

© WJR 2013

836 The Plasticarians

836 The Plasticarians

Say, someone tells you steak is nothing more than the recycling of cows. Even the biggest meat eaters would say that’s nuts, and it is. Cows, after all, are alive. They breathe, they (occasionally) move. They go “mooooo.”

So, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” doesn’t apply to cattle ranches. But what about plastic. Plastic is made from carbon and oil and such. Oil comes from... plankton? Dinosaurs? Aunt Martha?

So when Alexander Parkes made the first plastic in 1855, was he fooling around with what we now call celluloid, or was he creating life in a test tube?

The Plasticarians think the latter. When your grocery bags no longer are useful, do you recycle them like cows? Or do you give them a proper burial, either in a landfill or your back yard.

It may take them millions of years to come back in an equally useful form, but they WILL come back.

Do plastic objects have souls? Ask any practitioner of Voodoo and you’ll get a “yes.” And they’ll tell you the same about logs, little stuffed dolls, statues and drums.

So when you’re finished with the Glad Wrap or the grocery bag or the water bottle and you just casually throw it into a recycle bin somewhere, do you know what happens to it? Maybe it goes to the landfill. But maybe it’ll be cruelly tortured by being melted down and made into something else. There’s no way you can be sure unless you bury it yourself. While burying a human corpse in your backyard is illegal in many places, burying a zip-lock bag is not.

Would you tear a six ounce soda bottle from its one liter mom? Not if you think like a Plasticarian. Are you sure the bottle of liquid detergent and the bottle of liquid fabric softener that sit on your shelf have not fallen in love?

It’s a good thing Guinness and Newcastle Ale don’t come in plastic, else there might be a mini-war between the Irish and the British at the bottle melting factory! These too deserve proper burials. And not in the same place.

Time to organize! Prevent the abuse and torture of plastic. Eliminate the death penalty. Keep families together.

And while you’re doing that, please pass the recycled cow.

Shrapnel:

--Happy returns: Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe return for season ten of Law & Order Criminal Intent. Too bad it’s the last season.

--Unhappy returns: At the end of the month, the New York Times will return to charging for use of its on line edition for most users. Wouldn’t pay for Newsday; will do it for the NYT, which is a buck or so a week cheaper and remains worth reading.

--Mixed returns: The feds were pretty good about this year’s taxes. Getting back about enough to cover the real estate taxes.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© 2011 WJR

824 Going Buy the Book (store) and Book Look

824 Going Buy the Book (Store) and Book Look

We’re in the Borders on Park Avenue in the 50s with a gift card and a Latte at their coffee and pastry corner. About half way through the shared drink we find something in the cup that wasn’t on the menu: a roach.

They made nice on us after that, refunding our money (thank you,) offering a replacement drink (no, thank you) and willingly cashed out our gift card, a violating company policy. They were as happy to see us go as we were to leave.

That was one of two leading indicators that things were not going perfectly at Borders. The other was their stock. They had more strange and obscure books than any major retailer whose specialty was not strange and obscure books.

It seems their choice was either to imitate Barnes & Noble’s Wal-Martish approach (minus the censorship) or shrink to fit the obscurity market.

They did neither. Chapter Eleven bankruptcy protection is kind of like attempted suicide: If you’re caught in time, you live. Otherwise you die. As part of the filing, the company plans to close about one third of its stores of which there are something over 600. Something like six thousand jobs are going or gone. They’ve piled on $500 million in new loans from GE Capital to keep running while they figure out what else to do.

So what can they do? First, they can get with the Amazon program. The Border website is clunky, their prices are high, their e-readers are inadequate compared to what else is out there.

Amazon and B&N have turned books into a commodity. The only thing Borders can do is become the “important alternative,” the book store for book lovers.


Book Look: Heat & Light: Mike Wallace and Beth Knobel.

CBS’ Mike Wallace, 93, has built himself the best possible kind of monument. “Heat & Light” (Three Rivers Press 2010) is a guide for a future generation of journalists, most of them in great need of guidance, if not therapy.

His co-author, Beth Knobel is a former CBS producer and current professor at Fordham University with a pile of Ivy League sheepskins probably to heavy to carry all at once.

Tips on writing, on video on interview techniques, the law, a reporter-editor’s checklist, the balance between drama and information, and a gazillion good quotes from some heavy industry hitters.

“The Elements of Style” it ain’t. But close. At the end of the book, the authors thank the people who contributed, either gladly or by intimidation. C’mon. What idiot would or could turn down a question from Mike Wallace? And the seven most feared words in any politician’s vocabulary? “Mike Wallace is here to see you.”

===Readometer Key: 1 and 2 It’s already a paperback.
1 - Buy it.
2 - Wait for the paperback.
3 - Take it out of the Library.
4. Flip through it at the book store.
5. Forget it.


Shrapnel (New York Times edition):

--Bernie Madoff’s gave a jailhouse e-interview to the New York Times and said Wall Street “had to know” about his multi-zillion dollar King of the Ponzi schemes. Of course they did. But selective blindness is common on The Street.

--The Times also has reported recently that the NYSE is selling itself to the Frankfurt exchange. Technically, it’s a merger, but there ARE no mergers. Daimler Chrysler all over again.

--Gotta stop reading this paper. Something infuriating every day. Liberal-Shmiberal... The facts alone are enough to inflame.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011