So many anchors, commentators, and pundits speak on so many platforms, their collective din borders on the dizzying. As I sample news show after news show, discussion show after discussion show, and gabfest after gabfest, there’s one thing I’m searching to hear but never find. It’s the voice of reason.
Once upon a time there were newspeople who spoke with authority. They not only gave opinions, they told their audience how they arrived at their opinions. Sources were vetted.
There wasn’t the sense that prevails today that any gossip heard in any corridor from any voice will do. There was more skepticism if say, a prominent member of one political party happened to say something about a member of another party. Innuendo wasn’t enough.
There had to be solid, visible evidence. Otherwise, you’re stuck with one person’s word against the other’s. With partisanship so rife among today’s television press, information being reported often suits the political leanings of the presenter rather than facts.
Or more to the point, complete facts. Facts are tricky. A fact is itself is not conclusive.
Two people hearing the same fact can have legitimately different reactions to it, e.g. whether a Supreme Court decision is valid or outrageous.
There’s plenty of room for commentary and editorializing but to me, it’s only valuable if it is comes from reason. If it reflects looking at a story from every angle and perspective, so that 100% of a situation, event, statement, or case is considered before an opinion is offered. Otherwise, commentators simply indulge in the worst kind of persuasion: shilling.
What I see in television news today amount to pandering to an audience a broadcast entity, be it Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or a network wants to entertain. Or from which it seeks approval. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from “War and Peace” in which Tolstoy, as narrator, speaks of a Russian courtier who chooses his political leanings in the same way he chooses his clothing, according to the fashion of the time.
News is best when it doesn’t follow fashion. So are politics, although saying so might not take into full account the nature of that particular beast, which at least purports to respond to a public’s wishes. Yet a desire to be “cool,” i.
e. fashionable or admired by preaching to the convinced radiates from almost every news program I see. My personal remedy is to scour various print news sources on a daily basis, reading both sides of an issue, when available, and making my own judgments based on where I see the most reason, logic, and concrete references I can go back, if to choose, to read deeper.
The process took a while. I’ve learned to weed out pure partisans, whose opinions are bound to match an ideology, publications that have a known ax to grind, and writers who advocate more than they inform. Print sources give me more leeway to decide who I can trust, or whose prejudices I may have to get past.
Television, alas, presents the program that’s on at the moment and leaves no time to sample, compare, and explore broadly alternative points of view. Television has to improve. Otherwise, I don’t see how anyone takes it seriously, and I tend to cringe when I meet people who do.
I see tinging of the news from Fox and MSNBC hosts alike. I don’t want to watch Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Jesse Watters, or Sean Hannity. CNN is no better.
I hear the bias is headlines and see it lower-screen crawls before the commentators even speak. Talk shows and news forums are even worse. Does anyone think anyone regular member of “The View” panel, with the possible exception of Sara Haines, is informed, has sources of their own, or knows more that what the populists on Fox or MSNBC are spouting? I hope not.
Then, there’s Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Bill Maher. They are all entertaining, but they’re comedians, not journalists. I give them more of a pass because of that.
Their purpose is to amuse rather than inform. But to take their ideas to heart is ludicrous. Even the best of them, Maher, perhaps the best of all the TV talking heads, goes afield or muffs a basic fact from history.
I worry at the dearth of sound, intelligent, reasoned commentary on television. It might be we face an election with candidates like Kamala Harris, who I call the “silk purse” because a few months ago she was denigrated more than she was lionized, and Donald Trump, who I rejected in 2016 because his diction and sentence structure raised my blood pressure more than his statements, but who at least has four years in office as president of the United States, assuming what happened during those four years is reported as thoroughly as the flaws in Trump’s personality, by which to make some judgment. In a time that is definitely more vividly historic, chaotic, and volatile than most, not only in United States politics but throughout the globe — just look at the vacancy in leadership in the West in general, with no Churchill or Nixon or Angela Merkel to be a broker — we need a better, more rational, more grounded, more responsible news source.
Just as we could use a contemporary Abraham Lincoln in the White House and a modern-day Winston Churchill negotiating for the West, we need a Cronkite, Murrow, Jennings, Brinkley or Sawyer behind our news desks. We need a voice of reason. Without it, fashion, bias, gossip, misinformation and purposeful persuasion are our lot.
Frankly, my dears, that isn’t good enough. Emmy Awards preview The wealth of news, and some interviews I’d conducted that had time stamps, have kept me from commenting on one of television’s most important events, the bestowing of the 2024 national Emmy Awards for network, cable, and streaming television programs and performers. Usual suspects abound among the nominees, but this year’s group also features some dark horses and newcomers.
FX/Hulu’s “The Bear” and ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” dominate the categories for comedy programming, but series such as “Palm Royale” and “Reservation Dogs” wiggle their way into the competition. “The Bear’s” seventh episode last year, a flashback of a holiday dinner that featured Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White’s) late mother and Jon Bernthal as his late brother, is among the best individual offerings in television history and should be enough to clinch “The Bear’s” place as the show most likely to glom awards. Except for Netflix’s “The Crown” and maybe Apple’s “The Morning Show,” the nominees for dramatic series seems fresh, including a nod to Prime Video’s “Fallout” and Netflix’s “3 Body Problem.
” Best Limited Series is especially strong with (alphabetically) Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer,” FX’s “Fargo,” Apple’s “Lessons in Chemistry,” Netflix’s “Ripley,” and Max’s “True Detective” competing. Acting categories for Limited Series are just as heady with performances by Jon Hamm (“Fargo”), Tom Hollander (“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”), Andrew Scott (“Ripley”), Jodie Foster (“True Detective”), Naomi Watts (“Capote vs.
The Swans”), and Juno Temple (“Fargo”) in the mix. The most interesting category might be Best Actor in a Drama since no nominee stands out as towering over any other. Contrarily, Best Actor in a Comedy is filled with favorites who have been nominated before.
Of course, they all have to face Jeremy Allen White, who might as well be called to the podium and given his Emmy at the beginning of the presentation broadcast. That broadcast is set for 8 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 15 on ABC (Channel 6). Channel 3 alum gets CNN anchor spot Jessica Dean has been given the weekend primetime anchor berth at CNN, where she has been an anchor and reporter since leaving her five-year primetime post at Channel 3 in 2018.
In addition to her duties on “CNN Newsroom,” Dean will continue as a correspondent covering politics. Recently, she was the lead reporter on the attempt to assassinate 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. She was also among the team that covered Iran’s attack on Israel.
I haven’t spoken to Dean since she left Channel 3, but I remember our conversations about books. Like me, and her Channel 3 colleague, weather anchor Kate Bilo, Jessica is an avid reader. Although it was about six months in coming, Dean replaces Jim Acosta, who went to weekend anchor duty on “CNN Newsroom.
” CNN also promoted reporter Donie O’ Sullivan to senior correspondent. One of the subjects O’Sullivan regularly tackles is “misinformation.” Hmmm.
I don’t express that as a specific comment on O’Sullivan, but in light of my general impression of cable news. Well, national television news. (See above.
) Shortened ‘Dream’ at Hedgerow still satisfies The lively, engaging production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Hedgerow Theatre reminded of my early days in television. I was working at Channel 48, one of the three independent stations that emerged when the UHF band became available in 1965 and the only television station in American broadcast history to turn back an active license to the FCC in 1983. Being a movie buff, I used to mourn and marvel simultaneously at the way classic film had to be cut to fit programming windows.
Even a two-hour movie scheduled to run for two program hours might be edited by 40 minutes to account for commercials and other station breaks. I often knew what was missing. Sometimes it drove me crazy to think Katharine Hepburn’s visual response to Spencer Tracy’s comment was cut because for content purposes Tracy’s line was enough.
But except for dance numbers cut from musicals, I thought the editors did a judicious job. I think the same of director Peter Reynolds and Hedgerow artistic director Marcie Bramucci to cut “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to a brisk 90 minutes. Playing the full text might take three hours and require an intermission, but I was satisfied with what Reynold chose to show us and what he left for folks to read should they be interested.
The course of love that never did run smooth is Reynolds’ focus. He leaves room for the village workmen to mount their rendition of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” but for the most part we see and revel in the different combinations of attraction, rejection, and love among four young people in the early throes of romance, the coming nuptials of a duke and his bride, and the shenanigans played by the Fairy King on the Fairy Queen. It is enough.
I, a purist who likes his Shakespeare complete, was more than sufficiently entertained by some sharp readings that not only put Shakespeare’s plot into perspective but showed that actors can do credit to the Bard’s verse while sounding contemporarily conversational. Reynolds’s cast was especially adept at nailing sarcastic rejoinders. Hedgerow’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a co-production of the venerable Delaware County theater and Philadelphia’s Mauckingbird Theatre, of which Reynolds is the artistic director.
The staging, which lives up to its name in terms of summer entertainment, runs through Sunday..
