Category Archives: media news

media news

Small-town paper makes it … big time!

I love hearing stories like the one that brought a lot of attention to a small Iowa town and the newspaper that serves its residents.

The Storm Lake Times was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Big deal, you say? Damn right it is!

The winner of the prize is a fellow I don’t know, although I feel a certain kinship with him. Art Cullen is his name. I have had a long personal friendship with his brother, Jim, with whom I worked at the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise. Jim moved eventually to Austin, where he covered state government for the newspaper. He now is editor of the Austin-based Progressive Populist.

His brother Art’s big prize speaks to the value of community journalism, the kind practiced by small newspapers all across the nation.

Taking on the big interests

The Pulitzer committee recognized Cullen “For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.”

Those “powerful” interests are important at many levels to the readers of the Storm Lake Times, given Iowa’s heavy reliance on farming and ranching.

It’s also fascinating to me that the Pulitzer committee gave Cullen the award over finalists from the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Post. It simply shows that size — meaning the amount of corporate funds and resources — matters less than the quality of one’s work.

We hear all the time about reports from vaunted big-city media organizations. You know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times … and on and on.

It gladdens my heart to know that a 3,000-circulation newspaper — which is published twice each week — has received such high praise from a panel of peers who recognized the courage it takes to challenge such important players in the community it serves.

I offer my own congratulations to Art Cullen and his colleagues at the Storm Lake Times.

media news

CNN vs. Fox over this O’Reilly matter

There’s little doubt I will tire of this story quickly, but for now I’m kind of chuckling at a media war that’s flaring up over the controversy surrounding a cable news star.

You’ve heard of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News Channel’s main man who’s been accused by several women of behaving a boorishly, of committing acts of sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, CNN talking heads and commentators have been blazing away rhetorically over the troubles at Fox.

Fox is firing back, accusing CNN of ignoring a story regarding whether former national security adviser Susan Rice outed some Trump campaign officials who might have been monitored by, oh, someone. CNN denies ignoring the story. Fox, meanwhile, is sticking with O’Reilly.

The two main-event combatants appear to be O’Reilly and CNN’s Don Lemon.

I plan to watch this tempest play itself out from the peanut gallery.

Fox is ignoring the O’Reilly matter

CNN has been covering the Rice story. It’s pretty clear, though, that Fox is giving short shrift to the O’Reilly story. I get that the stories aren’t parallel; Rice is a former government official while O’Reilly is employed by one of the feuding cable news networks.

Fight on, cable news guys.

media news

Cool the jail talk, Rep. Waters

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Maxine Waters must still be angry over that tasteless joke about the “James Brown wig.”

The California Democratic U.S. representatives then popped off on her own, saying that Bill O’Reilly “needs to go to jail” over allegations that he sexually harassed several women.

Whoa! Let’s hold on here.

O’Reilly made a stupidly insensitive “joke” about Waters’ appearance, making some reference to her hairstyle as resembling the late singer James Brown’s hair.

He later apologized for the crass remark. OK. Fine.

Then came a flood of accusations from women contending that O’Reilly sexually harassed them. We’ve heard of settlements from O’Reilly and from Fox News to the women. From where I sit, a “settlement” implies a bit of fire under all that smoke.

Should the bombastic blowhard — O’Reilly — go to “jail” because of what he might have done? I don’t think so.

Do not misconstrue this as anything approaching an endorsement of O’Reilly. It isn’t. I cannot stand the sound of his voice, let alone the content that pours out of his mouth. He very well may deserve to be banished from TV airwaves. Fox execs aren’t likely to do a thing about it as long as O’Reilly’s loyal viewers keep watching him.

Rep. Waters, though, ought to show a bit of discretion when talking about this matter. Mentioning a jail term, instead, reveals a good bit of hysteria.

media news, national news

Should ‘Bill O’ accept Trump endorsement?

This is not an original thought from yours truly … it comes from a friend of mine.

My longtime pal Gary wonders whether Bill O’Reilly is smart enough to reject an endorsement from Donald J. Trump, who calls him a “good person.”

You see, O’Reilly — the loudmouth Fox News talk show host — is fending off accusations of sexual harassment from several women. O’Reilly has settled many of the complaints already; so has Fox News. The women have gotten a lot of money. The accusations have triggered many advertisers to pull their ads off of O’Reilly’s nightly program.

Trump weighed in recently with a defense of O’Reilly, who he has known for many years.

My friend’s question, though, concerns Trump’s own history with women. After all, the president actually admitted to grabbing women by their private area. If you think about it, the president of the United States has admitted to committing sexual assault.

This is an endorsement that Bill O’Reilly should welcome?

I’m waiting for O’Reilly to reject the president’s overture. I figure it’ll be a long wait.

media news, Uncategorized

Students kick new life into gumshoe journalism

Pittsburg, Kan., has become the print journalism capital of America.

It’s because a group of high school students demonstrated to a local school board and the school system’s superintendent that they didn’t do their due diligence in hiring a school administrator.

Man, I love this story.

Six students at Pittsburg High School, who happen to serve on the staff of The Booster Redux — the school newspaper — managed to dig out the truth about the resume presented by the school’s new principal.

Amy Robertson was hired as the principal. Then the students begin sniffing around about the school Robertson had listed on her credentials. It turns out that Corllins University — which Robertson listed as where she earned her masters and doctoral degrees — is nothing more than a degree mill. It ain’t accredited, or legit, the students learned.

Students show up their elders

The students, though some vigorous gumshoe reporting — and the help of the Internet doing basic Google searches — managed to show up the school board and the superintendent, who should have vetted the principal properly before hiring her.

And what, in this instance, constitutes proper vetting? Nothing more than checking to determine the quality of the school that Robertson had listed as providing her education.

The students did the school board’s and superintendent’s job for them.

Get this from the Kansas City Star: “On Wednesday, Destry Brown, the Pittsburg schools superintendent, said the district was reposting the job and from now on will be doing a background check and vetting credentials before any candidate is hired.”

Background check and vetting credentials? No spit, folks.

What gives this story its additional legs is that the student  reporters employed basic journalism principles in rooting out an important story. It gives some of us old-school journalism dinosaurs hope that the profession is about to jump off its death bed before it is overcome by “click-bait journalism” preferred by too many publishers these days as they stagger away from traditional print journalism to something called “the digital product.”

The students didn’t expect this kind of attention. The national media have jumped on this story, I believe, because it speaks to old-school journalism values exhibited by a group of young people who — one might surmise — are more attuned to social media and other 21st-century technology.

Nice going, students. You have made many of your journalism elders — including yours truly — quite proud of you.

media news

Why is it only you, Mr. O’Reilly?

I keep circling back to a single question as I ponder the growing controversy surrounding Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly.

The commentator has been accused of sexual harassment by a number of women. O’Reilly has settled many of the complaints, shelling out several million dollars; Fox News Channel has kicked in several more millions to these women.

O’Reilly says he is a target because he is rich, famous and controversial.

Really? Why, then, haven’t other rich, famous and controversial news commentators been hit with the kinds of allegations have been leveled against O’Reilly?

O’Reilly says the women are looking for money. I heard at least one of them say this week she doesn’t want a dime; she wants to hold O’Reilly accountable for the harassment he has leveled at her.

If he’s a target, then why haven’t scores of women targeted other men who also occupy high-profile public figure jobs in the national media?

From my vantage point, the only thing these complaints have in common is one man: Bill O’Reilly.

media news

O’Reilly costs his employers a lot of dough

Hmmm. Let’s see how this goes.

Bill O’Reilly, the controversial and garrulous Fox News Channel talk show host, has been accused by several women of sexual harassment. None of the cases has gone to court; no one has proven anything against Bill O.

But he has settled many of the cases for a total estimated at $13 million. Some of those millions have been paid by the network where he has worked for the past two decades.

These types of “settlements” always trouble me where they regard the person against whom complaints are made.

If he’s truly innocent of sexual harassment, why doesn’t take the accusers to court and force them to prove what they have alleged? O’Reilly isn’t doing that. He and his bosses at Fox are shelling out a sizable chunk of cash to bring these episodes to an end.

How come?

I get that O’Reilly is employed by a private, for-profit news organization. Thus, he’s not a public official. He is, however, a public figure, given his status as a cable TV news star — someone who, I should add, is unafraid to remind us of his exalted status.

I guess that’s what makes these sexual harassment matters the public’s business in the first place. Indeed, O’Reilly contends he’s being targeted because he is rich and famous. Really? So are, say, George Stephanopoulos, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Jake Tapper, Chris Wallace, Wolf Blitzer … and any number of other high-profile broadcast journalists. Have any of them faced this kind of accusation?

I just am left to wonder about two related matters: Why settle these cases when you’re innocent of any wrongdoing? And why is Fox still keeping this guy on its payroll?

media news

45th POTUS keeps trying to rewrite the rules

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Listen up, Donald John “Smart Person” Trump.

You cannot tell major media organizations which news to cover and which to ignore. The U.S. Constitution — the document with which you are patently unfamiliar — simply doesn’t allow presidents of the United States to coerce a “free press.”

It’s in the First Amendment. The founders had crafted the Constitution with those articles, then they started to amend the government framework. So they started with 10 civil liberties they wanted to protect.

That First Amendment? It protects freedom to worship, freedom to assemble peaceably to protest the government and — yep! — the freedom of the press to report the news.

NBC News believes the Russian hacking story is important enough to cover fully and completely.

It doesn’t please you, Mr. President? That’s tough dookey, sir. It doesn’t matter whether you’re unhappy with the way the television network does its job.

And quit the tweeting, too

You keep blazing away on your Twitter feed with that juvenile nonsense. You act more like a teenager than the leader of the free world. And do you actually believe that NBC News or any media outlet is going to do what you want just because you’re the president and you can say whatever the hell you feel like saying?

That’s not how it works in this country.

Just so you know, I just watched a great PBS special on KLRU-TV, based out of Austin, Texas. It told us plenty about the presidency, the White House and the families who have occupied “the people’s house.”

One of your predecessors, President Lyndon Johnson, was ravaged by protesters during the Vietnam War. What do you suppose the president said at the time. He said he wanted to ensure that presidents always work to preserve the right to dissent, to disagree with decisions made in the Oval Office. “I know all about dissent,” LBJ said.

You are occupying the Oval Office now, Mr. President. The dissent? The disagreement? The occasional anger? Get used to it.

Oh, and quit trying to bully the media.

The Constitution protects them from people like you. Honest. It’s in there. In the First Amendment. You ought to read it.

media news, national news, political news

No one saw this ‘trainwreck’? Not … exactly

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Donald J. Trump’s administration has demonstrated with amazing clarity what many of us believed all along: The president does not know how to govern.

The Los Angeles Times has just published the first of a series of editorials in which the newspaper proclaims that no one saw the trainwreck that would occur.

I beg to differ.

Dishonesty reigns in the White House

Here is part of what the Times wrote: “What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.”

The myriad problems that are plaguing the president — and the presidency — appear to be so much a result of self-inflicted ignorance and hubris.

At some levels, Trump is governing the way he said he would. He boasted that “I alone” can repair what he said was broken.

That is not how the founders structured this government of ours. Then again, the president doesn’t know about that, because he appears to demonstrate no interest in learning about what those great men envisioned for the government they created.

How will the president view the criticism that the LA Times has leveled at him? Oh, he’ll no doubt tweet something about how the paper is “failing,” or how it relies on “fake news,” apparently with no self-awareness that he became the king of fake news when he continued to promote the lie that Barack Obama was born overseas and wasn’t qualified constitutionally to serve as president.

The LA Times — if you’ll allow me to borrow a phrase — is “telling it like it is.”

media news

Another old-school journo calls it a career

Of all the colleagues with whom I worked during my 37 years in daily journalism, I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who fit the description of “ink-stained wretch” better than a fellow who has just retired from a newspaper where we both once worked.

His name is Dan Wallach. He is a native of New York state. He graduated from the University of Arizona and ended up in Beaumont, Texas, where he worked at the Beaumont Enterprise for more than three decades.

Dan represents — to me — the individual who is committed fully to covering his community, of telling the myriad stories that give that community its life, its personality.

What’s more, he is unafraid to reveal the community’s scars and to press relentlessly the individuals who are responsible for inflicting those wounds.

He has just entered my world … of retirement. I welcome him gladly and wish him well, but I am absolutely certain that journalism as we both understand the craft is going to be a good bit poorer without more people such as Dan pursuing it.

I now want to tell a short story that personifies the kind of tribute that Dan earned from news sources over his many years in print journalism.

In the spring of 1995, just a few months after I had left Beaumont to become editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News, I got a call from then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s office. The governor invited me to Austin to meet with him.

I arrived at the State Capitol Building a few days later. Gov. Bush and I  shook hands and he led me to his office. We exchanged a few pleasantries before we got down to brass tacks.

The governor knew I had worked at the Enterprise and he thanked me for the newspaper’s editorial endorsement in the 1994 governor’s race in which Gov. Bush defeated incumbent Democrat Ann Richards.

“It kind of surprised me,” Bush said. “Why is that?” I asked.

He told me about a “reporter you had there who gave me all kinds of trouble” when Bush talked to the media during his campaign stops in the Golden Triangle.

“I can’t remember his name,” he said. I responded, “Oh, you must be thinking of Dan Wallach.”

“Yeah, that’s who it was,” the governor said.

“He was one tough son of a b****.”

We both laughed out loud.

I told Dan not long after that meeting what the governor had said about him. I took it as a statement of high praise and I believe to this very day that’s how George W. Bush intended for it to be taken.

I have wanted for years to tell that story in some public forum. Dan’s retirement has given me that chance.

Well done, Dan.