Back in February, Saturday Night did a peppery parody of a CNN televised debate in which it painted the press as fawning all over Democratic Senator Barack Obama and dismissing and being hard on Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s campaign and Clinton herself pointed to that parody in their argument that the press was going easy on Obama and part of “Obamanamia” and hadn’t been vetting or challenging him.
Shortly after that, what many believe was Obama’s “free” ride indeed ended — and some pundits attributed it to the SNL sketch and the Clinton campaigns use of it as an example of how it wasn’t only them that had this perception of the press’ behavior.
Obama supporters charged SNL was repeatedly biased in its parodies in favor of Clinton and skewering their candidate — and Dan Abrams on MSNBC noted in a segment that political supporters were going haywire…and that SNL was a political candidate equal offender (click on the link since he includes various excerpts).
The Clinton campaign loved SNL — but it’s likely the love affair is over now with last night’s latest parody which at times seems downright brutal.
The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” last night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be unimaginable to the people who made and saw that movie then, including a 23-year-old just back from World War II who had little audacity and even less hope of living in the rich, glossy world it portrayed.
Gregory Peck played a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish. A decade later, I was an editor on one of those magazines, unknowingly hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather as the first Jew among thousands of employees, working with Laura Z. Hobson, who wrote the novel on which the picture was based.
First, if you’re wondering what I as a Hillary supporter think about Hillary’s decision to continue running after yesterday, the answer is I don’t know what I think of it as a strategy. Naturally I would like to believe that she could still somehow prevail. I am not sanguine. People are speculating that she is now running for the VP slot. We’ll see.
But — and this matters more to me — I most definitely admire her for her unswerving commitment to see the process through. Despite the pissing and moaning in the media, and whatever the outcome, I predict that the day will certainly arrive when people will look back with awe and amazement at Hillary’s insistence in going the distance against all odds and wish that they had chosen her. She is indomitable. I like that in a Democrat and so should other Democrats. Alas, many of them are so beguiled by the media myths about Hillary that they just can’t see what a force of nature she really is.
Obama could learn a lot from her and he’d be a better (future) president for it. Instead, I imagine we’ll be stuck with him in his current incarnation — all rhetoric, all the time.
James Woodard spent 27 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. He was released last week as a result of DNA evidence gathered through an unprecedented cooperative effort between Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, a Democrat and the first black DA in the history of Texas, and the Texas Innocence Project.
Together they re-examined hundreds of cases and have freed 17 Texas inmates so far — their effort still has 250 more cases to review. Last year NPR’s Morning Edition profiled DA Watkins. Last night 60 Minutes did a segment on the DA and the Innocence Project that featured the story of James Woodard. Convicted in the 1981 murder of his girlfriend, Woodard served 27 years and four months, the longest of any inmate in the nation to be cleared with the help of DNA.
Woodard had always maintained his innocence, he says, including every one of the 12 times he came up for parole:
“They always told me, as long as you deny your guilt its saying something about you, you know you are not willing to own up to your deed. And we gonna deny you,” Woodard says.
But Woodard refused to admit guilt. “I wasn’t guilty,” he says.
“You chose truth over freedom,” Pelley remarks.
“I mean, a man has to stand for something,” Woodard says.
Jeralyn at Talk Left called it “one of the most moving segments ‘60 Minutes’ has ever done” and points to a summit on the wrongfully convicted in the Texas Senate on May 8.
A Georgia resident, I am reminded of the case of convicted “cop killer” Troy Anthony Davis who sits on death row here despite the recantations of seven witnesses who testified against him, despite the fact that no murder weapon was ever found and no physical evidence linked him to the crime, and despite the fact that he has maintained his innocence throughout.
RELATED: 60 Minutes was at the top of its game last night. Crooks & Liars and Think Progress both applaud the What Really Happened to Pat Tillman? segment. Said Pat’s mother Mary Tillman, “this isn’t about us. It’s about what they’ve done to the public. This was a public deception.”
Howard Dean was on The Daily Show last night. The interview was all smiles and laughs but chock-a-block full of important and substantive information. It went on for an unusually long 9 minutes and ran right up into the commercial break.
Stewart commented on Jeremiah Wright on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s shows and — in contrast to every other cable news show — his clear and conclusive emphasis was on how miffed with the media he was because “this issue which should have only had enough fuel to last one news cycle has somehow lasted eight news cycles.”
Now Stewart’s is not a news show. It doesn’t have to obey the “News” rules, so it is not able to speak with that “News” authority. No, Stewart’s is a comedy show.
Any comic fool can rush in, where the angels of journalists and historians fear to tread. And as we know if we’ve ever watched any Shakespearian tragedy, fools can often be the wisest people on the stage.
Bob reminds us that comedy does not have to deal with the inconvenience of checking facts, getting multiple sources, or trying to get it right. Comedy gets to make stuff up! But it’s also able to intellectually explore lots of the stuff that neither journalism nor history can because they’re both so bound by facts.
That comic freedom has obvious attractions to intellectually active and politically engaged young minds. So I’m thinking that Stewart and his spin-off Stephen Colbert are out there dog-whistling to the youth-vote. And I’m wondering how accurate we’ve got that measured. Aren’t they — with their cell phones and non-traditional media habits — a demographic we’ve traditionally had trouble tracking anyway?
Maybe the Colbert bump holds a clue. It was in the news a while back as a legit phenom for Dems (Republicans need not apply). Thompson gives it the benefit of the doubt:
You know, some people might say, well how can this be? I think the burden of proof is on proving that there is no such thing as the Colbert bump. I think the common sense assumption would be that, yeah, there probably is. Until proven otherwise, that seems to be the commonsense thing that one would have.
Said Stewart after having his good fun, “Let me tell you something, Jeremiah Wright is not the one running for president. He’s the guy who used to talk at the church of one of the guys who is running…”
Stewart’s guest tonight will be Newt Gingrich, who was on both “Good Morning America” and “The View” today presenting pro-Hillary talking points. How much do you want to bet that Stewart doesn’t let Newt get away with that tonight?
“The old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth” is one to which the Pentagon has stuck to with unheard of will, strength, and consistency. Thanks to the Benedictine work a journalist from The New York Times - and there is no better word to describe it- we now know that the U.S. executive has applied itself to building a propaganda machine so powerful, that it highlights the disdain that Bush and company feed on with respect Read the rest of this entry »
The New York Times buried a lede big-time in its story about the Clinton-Obama Pennsylvania debate.
That debate was widely criticized for the way the hosting network and its moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, devoted the first half of the 90-minute debate to questions of little substance, such as the importance of wearing American flag lapel pins.
Wrote The Times: “The media post-mortem — which boiled over in more than 17,600 comments posted on the ABC Web site alone — also touched on questions that had long been simmering in the protracted Democratic campaign over the role of moderators in televised debates, to say nothing of political journalists generally.
“If there was a common theme, it was that Mr. Gibson and Mr. Stephanopoulos had front-loaded the debate with questions that many viewers said they considered irrelevant when measured against the faltering economy or the Iraq war, like why Senator Barack Obama did not wear an American flag pin on his lapel. Others rapped the journalists for dwelling on matters that had been picked over for weeks, like the incendiary comments of Mr. Obama’s former pastor, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that she had to duck sniper fire in Bosnia more than a decade ago.”
The Times did not resolve the question until the story’s last two paragraphs. Usually, newspaper people like to get the question answered in the first paragraph, or lede, then use the rest of the story to explain the answer.
The last two paragraphs in the story: “Don Hewitt, the director and producer of the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, said ABC’s structuring of the questions was an acknowledgment that a debate entails ‘a big dose of show biz’ and ‘trying to keep an audience.’
‘When you’re in television,’ Mr. Hewitt said, ‘that’s your job.’ ”
Those truths were revealed, literally, in that Kennedy-Nixon televised debate, the very first presidential television debate, in September, 1960. John F. Kennedy – talk about an elite – was savvy, or made savvy, about the power of the new medium, television, to establish an image, so he dressed the part. He rested before the event, and worked on his tan. These were preparations, he realized, as vital as answers to any issue of the day.
Nixon, meanwhile, the old-school pol – talk about stubborn – was traveling hard, making speech after speech, and he arrived in Chicago, site of the debate, looking tired, and he was tired. He looked pale and drawn. Sallow. And he had a noticeable, natural, five o-clock shadow. At the studio, his managers and the television people sought to make him look better with face make-up. Plus, he was a natural perspirer.
In the heat of the debate, and lights – mostly the lights – Nixon started to sweat, and his make-up started to run. In David Halberstam’s book, “The 50’s,” Hewitt said JFK’s manager started calling for more shots of Nixon than of his man, and Nixon’s manager was insisting on more shots of JFK. Cool and collected as the opposition might appear, anything was better than close-ups of Nixon in meltdown.
It was a famous evening in politics, and in televised politics. If Hewitt and his contemporaries had not realized it already, that debate showed that they were not in the business of televising politics. They were in the business of televising, period. That means a big dose of showbiz, and trying to keep an audience. In other words, in television, the audience comes before the issues.
Years later, Russell Baker of The New York Times wrote of the Kennedy-Nixon debate: “That night, image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics.” Where, then, does a public desperate for change go, for an in-depth comparison of Clinton and Obama? Kurt Loder is an interesting person to provide that answer. Loder won his media fame as an anchor for MTV, the television product that more than any other contributed to the evolution of the short American attention span. Loder later became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, getting back into print in obedience to his own advice. In a teaching video produced by The Annenberg Foundation, Loder says you can’t rely on television for all of your information. Television just can’t provide the depth, he says, and will always be “an adjunct to the printed word.”
Gibson, Stephanopoulos, and the Adjunct Broadcasting Company illustrated these truths again the other night.
In 1969, over Memorial Day, Life Magazine devoted an issue to pictures of 242 American soldiers who had died in Vietnam in a recent week. While the nation, the editors said, was being “numbed” by a “statistic which is translated to direct anguish in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the faces. More than we must know how many, we must know who.”
It made the country stop and think. This Memorial Day, the best way to honor the dead of all America’s wars would be to look at those who died in Iraq and see them as people, not statistics.
On a cable news network or PBS, at the rate of one every ten seconds, it would take more than 11 hours to bring their faces, names and home towns to the TV screens of American homes.
April 17th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Why is the media, and the blogs, overlooking the “real” issues? The recent Clinton/Obama debate once again brought under spotlight a serious lack of professionalism among journalists and their growing penchant to trivialize serious issues. To give another example, few seem interested at the looming food crisis that is likely to have worldwide political and economic ramifications.
Would the media wake up only when the wolf reaches their doors or the dinner table (when it is too late)? Even if the media is looking for “sensational” news there is plenty to be found in the “real” issues. How about this….?
“Food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator. In Haiti, protesters chanting ‘We’re hungry’ forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt’s president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment. ‘It’s an explosive situation and threatens political stability,’ worries Jean-Louis Billon, president of Côte d’Ivoire’s chamber of commerce,” reports The Economist. Read the rest of this entry »
April 14th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Some younger Americans may not quite get Barack Obama’s swipe at Hillary Clinton, suggesting she is posing as Annie Oakley in his reference to her comments on guns — part of the increasingly aggressive tone between the two camps in light of the controversy over Obama’s comments about people in small towns being bitter.
READ THIS for a quick summary of Oakley, who was one of the Old West’s cultural figures, a legend in the late 19th and 20th centuries — and one of America’s first female superstars. In the late 20th century, her tale spawned movies, a TV show and — most famous of all — Irving Berlin’s immortal Broadway classic “Annie Get Your Gun.”
It’s usually a smart move when politicos use cultural references about their foes. Walter Mondale used the slogan from a commercial “Where’s the beef?” against Senator Gary Hart. It is said that Jackie Kennedy came up with the linkage of her assassinated husband JFK with the musical “Camelot,” and the song from the original cast album has been played on some tributes to him. You can also see the cultural reference technique used to great advantage, in terms of show business, in the employment of quick satire bits on the animated cartoon “Family Guy.”
Using a cultural phrase is “high concept” — immediately recognizable. In this case, Obama’s reference would have connected more to baby boomers. A cultural reference also conjures up a whole slew of other images associated with it. Used correctly, it could be an advantage.
Here is a rare treat that will explain the Annie Oakley reference to younger Americans. Here, from a very rare kinescope of the 1957 TV adaptation of the musical done live in front of a studio audience is Broadway legend Mary Martin (South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Peter Pan) playing Annie in the character’s most defining song — You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun. FOOTNOTE: To this day I remember watching this TV production live…I was in elementary school.
April 14th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Today Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert kicks off his Pennsylvania coverage with a guest: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. But is this symbolic for Campaign 2008 and journalism’s future? What’s the most effective way to deliver news to people on the Internet and to appeal to younger American voters? Video and web producer Joe Windish. offers this compelling original interview on the decline of traditional news an across-the-generations political information delivery system and the ascent of vehicles such as Comedy Central’s news-based comedy shows:
Stephen Colbert: A Media Maestro Plays Philly
by Joe Windish
The New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story this weekend was The Aria of Chris Matthews. Released to the web last Tuesday, bloggers had been baffled by it all week. Even Mark Leibovich, who wrote the story, noted that “three network officials asked me why I was writing about Matthews and not [Keith] Olbermann.”
The gist of the piece was that Matthews is an anachronism likely to be downsized when his $5 million a year contract is up next year. MSNBC’s now betting on Olbermann and David Gregory. Why the paper of record deemed it necessary to devote 8,000 words to that observation, I’ll never know.
Meanwhile, the whole way these guys are playing the cable news game seems a little passé to me. The big questions today are: how are we going to profitably port news over to the Internet, and how are we going to make it appealing to a younger demographic? Indications are that by either of these measures the leader in the cable news game right now is in not to be found at NBC, CNN, or FOX.
The hands-down champ is Comedy Central, whose Daily Show and Colbert Report have been playing by the fast and loose rules of comedy to beat journalism at the news game as far back as Indecision 2000. Since then Jon Stewart’s won two Peabody Awards for his election coverage, and he was joined just last week by Stephen Colbert when The Colbert Report won a Peabody of its own.
Today Stephen Colbert and his 80 staffers kick off a week of Colbert Report coverage of the Pennsylvania Primary from the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. As it happens, Chris Matthews, a Philadelphia native, is slated to be Stephen’s first guest.
JW: You’ve referred to comedy as The Fifth Estate. Can you explain?
BT: I started calling comedy the 5th Estate to keep the 4th Estate of journalism in check several years ago… I think this whole notion of comedy as the Fifth Estate really, in many ways, is more important in these new shows that are actually doing parodies of news shows because it’s the idea that the Fourth Estate is keeping those first three in check. The idea of what’s going on in Colbert and The Daily Show and even some of what Saturday Night Live and shows like that, is that it’s not only dealing with the political issues but it is dealing with the way in which the mainstream news operations are covering the issues.
Let’s take, for example, the classic example of what Jon Stewart did in the lead up to the war, when he was really examining that issue in a way that a lot of reporters were not for fear of being called unpatriotic and all the rest of it. The whole Dixie Chicks phenomenon. I think there Jon Stewart was a lone voice crying in the wilderness that this was the stuff that ought to be covered. And he was really making fun of – with evidence, showed the clip and that kind of thing – of how this was being inadequately covered by the traditional journalist operation. So there, I think, what Jon Stewart was doing was a really important message about the lead up to the war, but about the way it was being inadequately covered.
JW: What’s your take on Colbert’s Peabody?
BT: Certainly the Peabody is another feather in the cap of respectability that Comedy Central’s hour-long block in late night television has been garnering. That Peabody just goes on the mantelpiece right next to the invitation to speak at the Washington Correspondents Association Dinner, and all kinds of other things that have just been being heaped upon these shows. So, the Peabody is another example of how these late night comedy shows that Comedy Central are doing are really being taken very seriously by a whole range of people… Now we should remember that it also says something about the Peabody Awards. The Peabody Awards are one of my favorite of the awards given because they really don’t operate on the traditional criteria of what we think would be good. Let’s remember that Colbert got a Peabody I believe at the same time that Project Runway got a Peabody. Project Runway is not the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth estate! However, it’s a really good show and I think it deserved its Peabody as did Colbert, but for different reasons. When you think of when Comedy Central first started, and when you think of a lot of the other shows that are on Comedy Central, and you think of how Colbert does that whole act when he dances across the stage when he’s about to interview someone, it’s really pleasing to think that this is now the Peabody Award winning Stephen Colbert!
JW: Colbert is a really tough interview. There’s not a lot of fluff on his show. He brings on hugely complex topics and seems to help his interviewees make their point. And the arc of the show through a season is almost like a college course, he is educating his audience. I come away blown away sometimes. It seems like to me a very high-brow news show. Bring me back to earth Bob. Read the rest of this entry »
April 13th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
How far will the staff of some shows go to get big ratings? This far:
The TV talk show Dr. Phil McGraw confirmed on Saturday the fact that its staff bailed out of Florida jail one of the girls involved in the violent video posted on YouTube. The video depicted several teen girls beating one of their classmates while filming her.
Mercades Nichols is one of the eight teen girls who face charges in the case of the vicious beating posted on YouTube. She was bailed out by a representative of the show on Friday night, MyFOXTampaBay.com reported.
The bails for the violent girls were set on Friday and they are ranging from $30,000 to $37,000. The girls are aged from 14 to 18.
The bailing out was confirmed via E-mail by Terri Corigliano, a show spokeswoman. In his E-mail, Corigliano explained that the show has previously helped other “guests and potential guests” of the show with different needs, but in this case “certain staff members” who were in the process of booking guests for the Dr. Phil McGraw show went a bit too far and broke the rules of the show.
“These staff members have been spoken to and our policies reiterated. In addition, we have decided not to go forward with the story as our guidelines have been compromised,” Corigliano wrote in the statement.
Keep this post and bookmark this story. Will the girl eventually appear on Dr. Phil’s show? If so, the show’s explanation will prove to be….inaccurate.
In an earlier story TMZ noted that when it comes to jumping into big stories, Dr. Phil is a serial offender:
Apparently Dr. Phil didn’t learn much from his interference with Britney Spears. Paging Dr. Fame whore.
The talk show host has allegedly posted bond, which was set at $33,000, for one of the eight teens that was arrested for severely beating another teenager in Florida. The highly publicized case has been in the news for over a week now, and Dr. Phil must want some of that action.
A bail bondsman told several local media outlets that Mercades Nichols, who has been widely reported as the alleged “ringleader,” had her bond paid by the show’s producers. When Nichols left the jail, a man who claimed to be a producer for the Dr. Phil show helped escort Nichols and her mom.
Mercades’s grandmother recently told local reporters that she didn’t have the money to bail her granddaughter out.
According to reports, the producer then told reporters to leave the jail because the Dr. Phil show had exclusive rights to the delinquent’s story. He did not comment on if Dr. Phil had helped pay for her bond.
This was how another earlier story by Fox News described how it was known Dr. Phil’s people bailed the girl out:
Mercades Nichols, one of eight teens charged in the brutal attack which was captured on a YouTube video, was bailed out by a representative of the show on Friday night, according to a report from MyFOXTampaBay.com.
A judge on Friday set bails ranging from $30,000 to $37,000 for the teenagers.
The Dr. Phil representative was waiting by the jail’s exit, and when Nichols walked out, he tried to block Tampa TV station camera people from getting video of Nichols and her family leaving jail.
TV news and TV talk shows are always focused on “the get” which is getting the big news makers who are at the center of flavor-of-the-week huge news stories. The clear reason: to attract big audiences with guests that won’t and can’t appear on other competing shows.
So remember this story — and the show’s statement that it won’t do it now.
But here is the bottom line: when shows get sensational guests, they usually get the ratings, which increases ad revenues…so their behavior (even in bailing out teens accused of beating up another teen) is rewarded when people tune in.
Democrats need to factor into their calculations the fact that presumptive GOP President nominee Senator John McCain is totally relaxed and comes across as quite likable in front of the TV cameras.
Just watch this exchange from a few days on David Letterman’s Show. First, Letterman delivers his zingers and then McCain. The jokes are obviously prepared but note (a) the pizazz with which McCain delivers his opening line, delivered as well as any actor can do it. (b) the ease with which he reads the teleprompter, not looking into it all the time.
We ran this about a year ago but have had a reader request to run it again. Did you ever hear about the old vaudeville shows, where high-energy performers had to entrance an audience with their talents, energy and charisma?
Here’s a perfect example of that kind of act. In 1955 the great comedian Jimmy Durante (one of the most beloved performers of the early to mid 20th century) did his old vaudeville act on TV with his former partner Eddie Jackson. Note the pizazz with which they do the songs, the timing…and the incredible energy of these two performers who were not exactly spring chickens when they wowed this audience.
Young aspiring performers, take note and study their stage presence:
April 3rd, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
There seems to be a universal outcry at the deteriorating standards in the television channels worldwide. From India to Britain and the USA…there is a sense of general dismay that the TV channels are failing in their primary duty of initiating/explaining important issues of public interest, so essential in democracies to help people take informed decisions.
This subject needs wider scrutiny within and outside the media. The Independent on its opinion page has this to say about Britain: “At its best, TV is a tool of democracy, a way for us all to see our leaders being confronted with the truth. But instead, it largely consists of the airless circulation of ignorance, while the real decisions in the real world are taken somewhere else – beyond the awareness of us, the people.
“What is the effect on British politics when television coverage – the public’s main way of learning about how their country and planet is run – is distorted or disappears? Democracy doesn’t work properly.
“Vital issues simply aren’t explained to the public – so we cannot vote intelligently. While there are still oases of serious coverage – Newsnight, Panorama and Channel 4 News can be excellent – much of what remains is being corrupted. The BBC has given almost all its high-profile politics slots to Andrew Neil, whose bias is increasingly outrageous.”
Because of the Big Three, 550 American baseball games a year are broadcast on television here. About 300 of them are carried without commercial interruption, allowing Japanese viewers to gaze between innings at their beloved stars as they sit quietly in the dugout or stand around on the field. These players, unlike their American counterparts, are rarely caught on camera spitting, picking their noses or scratching themselves in manly places.
Crimes against humanity come large now–wars, holocausts, ethnic cleansing–but sometimes a small horror rises from the past and pierces the heart. Such is the case of a man convicted last week of grave robbing–harvesting and selling body parts, including those of the most civilized man I ever knew.
For several generations of Americans, Alistair Cooke was the Englishman who loved America, writing about life here for the Manchester Guardian, doing “Letter From America” radio broadcasts that were heard around the world and finally sitting in an armchair in front of Public TV cameras as the cultivated host of “Masterpiece Theater.”
The HBO miniseries on John Adams began this evening and I was riveted.
Letting myself immerse into the story I swelled with pride and awe at the courage, tenacity, inspiration and skill of our founding parents. They let themselves rise from the frustration of tyranny to envision and commit to a new standard of rights for all of Humankind. It is so easy to take the American Idea for granted. But it was so unique and is still so fragile because it is the nature of power to seek to minimize the gifts we enjoy. If we don’t protect it, it could easily become an aching memory.
