Tag Archives: media

legal news, media news

Ex-POTUSes are clear … media doing their job

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Listening as I have done for the past few days to the words spoken by recent former presidents of the United States leaves me with the clear impression that they understand the media’s role in maintaining a free and powerful nation.

And that the current president doesn’t get it.

Donald Trump wants media to report news as he sees it, not as they see it or how others see it. He says the nation is doing “great,” and wants the media to foment that lie. Others see the media role differently. They see the media as being faithful to its duty to report the news, even as it contains information critical of Trump.

Republican and Democratic presidents all understand. The GOP’s Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, both presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan all know that the press’s protection in the First Amendment is intended to protect the media from the kind of political coercion being applied by Trump. Same with the Democrats who have held the high office. JFK knew it, as did Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Obama, a Democrat, recently pointed out that he didn’t always like the news reported about him, but he understands the media is obligated to report the truth, even if it runs afoul of what presidents think about their reporting.

Republican and Democratic presidents all sang from the same political hymnal.

Until Trump came along. He doesn’t get it. He never will. He provides a never-ending litany of proof of his unfitness for public office

legal news, media news

Trump lacks knowledge of the truth

These videos keep cropping up showing Donald Trump trying to justify his order banning certain news organizations from the White House, as if that’s going to stop them from reporting “fake news.”

It won’t. Indeed, what CNN, MSNow and Politico have been reporting has been the truth. It’s just that the truth hurts the individual who’s being pilloried — justifiably — for the impact that the truth is having on Americans.

The news outlets being targeted are not peddling lies. They are reporting the news. Its favorability in Trump’s eyes depends solely on the content they contain.

Is it “fake news” to report the Iran war’s impact on goods we buy and the inflation all Americans are feeling? Or what about the collapsing morale aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln? Or the confusion in the Pentagon under the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth? How about the existence of a presidential aide with no high-level security clearance?

Trump wants to keep these items from being reported to the public that has a right to know how its government is functioning. He wants to shield the administration from the scrutiny that a free press can provide.

Every man who has preceded Trump in office has recognized the value of free press to the representative form of government it is covering.

Donald Trump is simply unwilling to accept the media’s role it performs in building a “more perfect” government. He lacks the intellect required to let the media do its job … which is protected specifically by the First Amendment.

 

legal news, media news

Wow! Trump tells the truth!

While ranting about the dangers of a free press, Donald Trump actually told the truth … he uttered a statement that holds up to scrutiny.

“We live in a country that allows people to report things that are negative,” Trump said while invoking a ban on certain news agencies from the White House.

So help me, I didn’t think I could report on this blog an actual truthful statement from the POTUS. But there it is. Holy smokes! Stop the presses!

Trump, of course, issued what is looking like a patently unconstitutional order by banning CNN, MSNow and Politico from the White House. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares that the government cannot “abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The president, therefore, cannot prohibit the media from doing its constitutionally protected job.

Trump will get his comeuppance once the courts get hold of this case and his banning of news organizations will be send to the scrap heap, where it belongs.

As for the ability to “report things that are negative,” what in the world is the alternative? The way I see it, the alternative lies in a totalitarian state where the media are banned by law from reporting negatively on government decisions. Violations of such a law would result in imprisonment or worse.

Thank goodness we live in a country that allows the press to function independently without fear of punishment.

national news, political news

This POTUS takes job lightly

When the president of the United States spends hours each night sending out social media digs at political foes, or concentrates his anger at media reporters, or takes time to lament who’s to blame for a reflecting pool fiasco, or can’t complete construction of a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing once stood …

Well, you have a POTUS who cannot possibly be up to the job to which he was elected to do.

You have in Donald Trump an overfed showman who has started a war with Iran, backed an aggressor in the Kremlin for launching an illegal and immoral war against Ukraine and has alienated just about every valuable ally this nation has worked for decades to count on as a friend.

President Barack Obama recently said that a president who is serious about his job has — at minimum — perhaps 10 issues on his plate that require his undivided attention. And they have nothing to do with beautifying the White House.

It should be abundantly clear that Donald Trump was far more interested in becoming the POTUS than actually being that person. To be the commander in chief, the head of government and head of state requires laser-like focus. Trump exhibits none of that trait as he stumbles, bumbles and blathers his way through each day he is in office.

He continues to bitch about losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden … and cannot bring himself to say a single empathetic word about the former president’s struggle against cancer. He continues to lie about presiding over the “the greatest economy the world has ever seen” when in fact the USA is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

This individual has sought to destroy our democratic republic. He cheapens the presidency every single day he sits in the Oval Office. Donald Trump has no business holding the office to which he was elected twice. What in the world is wrong with this nation?

media news

Simple life gets even simpler

Some of you might recall that I blogged about my life becoming simpler, less complicated than before.

Well gang, I’ve discovered that a simple life can get even simpler. I don’t have much to say today about what’s going on in the world of hard news.

Yep. Simplicity is a good thing. At least it is for me.

I get to devote blog topics to, oh let’s see, about blogging. This particular avocation does require a certain devotion to the news. I follow it some, but not so much these days in newspapers, or in standard commercial broadcast media.

The foolishness at CBS News recently has driven me away from that network’s news team. Yes, I know it still has dedicated professional journalists who risk their lives each day reporting on warfare and street crime. The shitty termination of Stephan Colbert from late-night TV and Scott Pelley from “60 Minutes” is too much to swallow. Even for me.

So … the simple life beckons. I hear its siren call. I’m in all the way.

media news

Trump has ‘murdered’ ’60 Minutes’

At this very moment I am thinking of some of the titans of American broadcast journalism, men and women who sought the truth and told it to us without fear of recrimination.

You know who they are: Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Leslie Stahl, Bob Simon, Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Diane Sawyer, Dan Rather and now … Scott Pelley.

They all worked for “60 Minutes,” the premier TV news show that exposed everything — good and bad — about the government for which we pay. Pelley, a West Texas native, recently spoke aloud about the dangers of censorship and government overreach being inflicted by the Donald J. Trump administration, which seeks to control the news that’s being reported.

Pelley has lost his job at “60 Minutes,” along with reporters Cecelia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi. This is a dark time for American journalism.

Pelley’s ouster hits me in a vaguely visceral way. I don’t know him, but I am good friends with a fellow West Texan who attended Texas Tech University with Pelley. My friend is now retired from journalism and he has told me a story or two about Pelley’s journey into the spotlight.

The First Amendment is supposed to guarantee a free and unfettered press. Congress “shall make no law” that seeks to control the media, the amendment declares. Trump has engineered the takeover of CBS News by MAGA-friendly execs. They have executed the removal of journalists they deem as threats to the POTUS. We are witnessing a disgraceful flouting of the very rights the First Amendment guarantees to maintin our representative democracy.

I just might join that movement to boycott CBS News.

media news

Not missing the TV noise

A while ago I decided to keep the TV turned off during the day while I was home piddling and putzing around the house or playing with my puppies.

My concern at the time was whether I would miss what has become “white noise” associated with the chatter coming from what my Dad used to call the “boob tube.” I am happy to make this announcement.

I haven’t missed the noise. Not one teeny, tiny little bit.

I couldn’t have done this as a much younger man or a teenager. I was addicted to TV. I admit it freely and without reservation. That addiction has cured itself partly because I am much longer in the tooth these days and also because the programming bores me out of my pointy-headed skull.

The news? Hah! Fuhgetabout it!

The news might be the most boring element all the programming I formerly watched. Why does it bore me? Partly because it doesn’t tell me what I don’t already know. I am not being snobby. I merely am telling the truth. I follow issues of the day pretty closely through a variety of media forums. TV doesn’t provide much context or new info for me to digest.

Anyhow … the decision awaiting me now is whether I continue to keep the house quiet during the day. Hey, there’s no real decision to make. Of course I intend to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

The news? I’ll stay ready to weigh in when the time is right for it.

local news, media news, Uncategorized

If I had a dollar …

You’ve heard others say it, or perhaps you have said it yourself, that “if I had a dollar for every time … blah, blah, blah.“

I am an old-school media guy. I grew up reading the newspaper that was delivered to our home from front to back. I did so each day. Every day!

My love of newspapers didn’t end when I left home when I was in my quite early 20s. I got married at 21 to a young woman who was 19. We built a nice life together and it involved newspapers. I worked for four of them over the course of nearly 40 years. Two in Oregon. Two in Texas.

My full time career ended in August 2012. The media world was in the midst of a huge change. It’s still underway.

Americans aren’t ready newspapers the way we all once did. So, when someone tells me they still “prefer to read an actual newspaper” that blackens their fingers with printer’s ink, all I can do is chuckle.

Why? Because if I had a dollar for every person who said such a thing to me I’d be a gazillionaire.

I hang out, I reckon, with too many old timers like me, folks who grew up as I did reading newspapers. That includes the advice columns and the horoscopes, man.

I’m all but absolutely certain that were I to hang with younger folks that I would see a much different world than the one I have left behind. Which I suppose brings me to my point. The media are looking for ways to appeal to the younger among us. They are the future. People like me are part of the fading past.

I get it. Totally and completely.

I want to wish the media companies well in their quest for new readership audiences. I also want to wish the younger Americans out there looking for sources to inform them of the events of the day. They’re out there. You just have to look carefully and decide who among those sources are giving it you straight and which of them are foisting their own world view on a gullible ocean of empty skulls.

local news, media news

Explaining changes in the media climate

In just a few weeks, I will receive an opportunity to do something I haven’t given much thought about doing … which is to tell a group of friends, associates and maybe even a stranger or two about why the media climate has changed so dramatically in the United States of America.

I will speak to the Farmersville Rotary Club, of which I have been a member for the past few years.

I told our club president this week that I have come up with a concept of the talk I intend to deliver. My task now is to organize it into a document that spells out what I have witnessed and what I have experienced.

I have told friends over the years that I was a victim of the changing media climate. Readers of this blog have read about my tale already. My daily newspaper career came crashing to a halt in August 2012. I have moved on and have rebuilt my life. I had hoped to retire gracefully from my job in Amarillo, but I was denied that opportunity when the publisher decided to hire someone else to do the job I had done there for 18 years. But, hey … that was then. As for the here and now, I am still writing for newspapers, as a freelancer who writes for a group of weeklies in Collin County. Therefore, I am not extinct!

I am not alone among journalists who have been shown the door in unceremonious fashion. Declining newspaper circulation provides plenty of testimony to what has happened to that medium.

Now I get to explain it all to my friends in Farmersville. Why write about this in my blog? I just want to share with you the opportunity I have received to put a little personal perspective on on a worldwide phenomenon.

The good news for me is that my talk will be brief. The difficulty might come in trying to condense it into a bite-sized tale that I believe will have a happy ending.

media news

Living the editorialist’s dream

I guess you can date this phenomenon back to around 9/11, the day the terrorists declared war on the United States of America and thrust us into the global war against terrorism.

It fell on the laps of people like me — who was writing editorials and columns and editing the pages on which we would publish them — to seek to provide context, perspective and leadership through the written word.

The phenomenon of the moment took place in this fashion: Hardly a day went by while I was working as a full-time opinion journalist where I didn’t have something on which to say. That’s right. The task I faced almost every morning when I reported for work was to decide what to set aside for a later publication date.

Many of those who have done what I did for a living for nearly 37 years faced the opposite … finding topics on which to comment to fill a gaping hole on the page. Not me, man! 9/11 introduced us to a whole host of terror-related and national security issues that required commentary from the newspaper. This occurred during the time when newspapers actually meant something to the comunities they served.

Writer’s block? Fuhgettaboutit!

I had a brief bout with writer’s block. It’s passed. My A-game has returned. I am grateful.

I now will continue living the dream … a life as a semi-retired blogger who gets to foist his views on the rest of the world.