Tag Archives: media

media news

House turns quiet

This is difficult for me to admit, but the lack of TV noise has served to settle my emotions and provide me needed peace.

I am thinking of keeping the TV off during the day and most of the evening … except to watch an occasional movie on one of the several streaming channels for which I already am paying.

I once was an avid TV watcher. I turned the damn thing on first thing in the morning and kept it on throughout the day. After a time, it got to where I hardly could hear the noise emanating from what Dad called the “boob tube.” Dad had a weird sense about TVs. He sold them for a living, made a lot of money peddling boob tubes to dealers throughout Oregon and much of Washington.

I guess I didn’t inherit his peculiar devotion to an appliance that has become something of a distraction.

We had one of the first TVs in Portland in the early 1950s. Then Mom and Dad acquired one of the first color TVs in the later 1950s. My sister and I would welcome our friends over to watch TV shows “in living color.” We marveled at it.

The climate today has changed dramatically from what I remember as a boy.

These days, I don’t miss the chatter. I don’t miss the background noise. I don’t miss the annoying commercials that seem to be never-ending. I don’t miss, in particular, those ads pushing all those prescription drugs — with names that sound like they’re from another planet — designed to cure everything from diabetes to erectile dysfunction.

I am enjoying the quiet time. Now comes a test to see how long the enjoyment lasts. I am hoping for a long hiatus.

media news

Spared the news of the day

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Times like today fill me with a mixed blessing of sadness and relief.

Sadness arrived about 9 a.m.  when I learned my sister died this morning of heart failure brought on by the acute COPD she suffered. I wasn’t surprised when the call came. It still saddens me beyond all I dare seek to measure.

The blessing? I have zero interest in what’s happening in the world. I have kept my TV quiet and dark all day as I have gone about my personal business here in Princeton.

I do not give a sh** what Elon Musk, the de facto POTJS, wants to slash from the government. Nor do I give a rat’s royal red ass what Donald Trump is bloviating about today. I don’t care about the Democratic response. I don’t give a sh** about the political consequences of all this mayhem.

I care instead about my brother-in-law and the loss I know he is feeling. His best friend has left this good Earth. I am going to worry only about him and I will let the other crap just fester without me.

media news

Media war is a loser

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Presidents of the United States, almost to a man, have acknowledged publicly the value that an independent press brings to the world government.

Many of them have not always liked the coverage they get from the media — be it broadcast, cable, print, radio or Internet — but they accept it as part of governance. The media keep the pols on their toes.

In the age of Donald Trump, though, the media have become the “enemy of the people.” They become targets of the president, of the Department of Justice, of politicians at every level. Trump now seeks to ban The Associated Press from White House press briefings because the AP refuses to describe the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Trump also has banned from the White House all media outlets that report issues with a critical eye. He wants to shutter networks such as MSNBC and CNN. He wants the public to receive only coverage he deems favorable to his policies.

This is one of the more frightening aspects of Trump’s return to the pinnacle of power. He is unhinged, unfettered, unbound and unambiguous about his disdain for the media.

The nation’s founders sought to provide press protection among the civil liberties they wrote into the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees that the government “shall make no law” that impinges on a free and untethered press.

Donald Trump, the ignoramus in chief, needs to understand that a truly conservative government respects what it has identified as the founders’ “original intent.”

And the president should take his lumps just like his predecessors have done. That’s how democracy works.

media news

Trump can declare a form of victory

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Win or lose when they count the presidential election ballots on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump can declare an important victory in one of the side battles waged in this campaign.

I believe the Republican nominee has managed to bully major newspapers into forgoing a presidential endorsement in this most consequential election.

The Washington Post will be quiet on who it prefers to see elected. So will the New York Times. So will Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Major metropolitan daily news across the land have made the same decision.

Why is that? I believe that the GOP nominee’s insistence that the media are the “enemy of the people ” has managed to sink in. Publishers and senior editors have sought to explain themselves. No explanation is necessary.

They have been cowed into fearing how readers might react were they to recommend the election of Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. This election, though, cries out for some media leadership, particularly when we have a major-party presidential nominee who is so demonstrably unfit to serve in the office he seeks.

I take no joy in recognizing what I believe is a tactical victory for Trump. I’ll just have to swallow hard.

media news

Profiles in cowardice!

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John F. Kennedy is doing somersaults in his grave at Arlington National Cemetery, given the news that has come out this week about the Washington Post.

The Post has declared that it will not issue an endorsement in this year’s presidential election. That’s right, the newspaper that once exposed the Watergate scandal to the world and which has prided itself on providing editorial page leadership on key issues and the people who make policy decisions has decided to sit this election out.

JFK, who wrote “Profiles in Courage” — and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work — would be a profoundly unhappy man.

The Post has just become a poster child for a profile in cowardice.

The Post isn’t alone. The New York Times is turning its back on this formerly essential duty that print journalists used to cherish. And … I am sure that there are many others out there that have been cowed by the blathering of Donald Trump and other blowhards who have persuaded millions of gullible Americans that the free press is the “enemy of the people.”

It isn’t. A free press keeps its eye on those who make policy decisions for all Americans. It serves as a watchdog on the alert for corruption. It also helps provide leadership in recommending who it believes is best suited to seize the reins of power.

No one really believes editorial endorsements determine electoral outcomes these days … if they ever have. What they do is put newspapers’ thoughts on the record and they leaven the discourse.

This election in particular cries out for leadership and for leading newspaper editorials to forgo that responsibility is an act of cowardice.

media news

Feeling like a dinosaur

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Some days come and go but while they’re around, I am feeling like the dinosaur I have become.

Today is one of those days. Nothing precisely triggered this ancient feeling. I survey the political landscape daily. Sometimes, in fact, for several hours on a given day.

I feel compelled to comment on issues of the day. Then I stop. What’s the point? I figure no one is going to care about the thoughts of a washed-up newspaper reporter and editor.

Then it occurs to me that younger versions of myself are still toiling away, studying the issues of the day and chronicling what they learn each day on various media platforms.

Then I don’t feel like a retread.

At a certain level, though, my nearly 37 years as a print journalist make me feel older than I am. I turn 75 in a couple of months, which is many more years than either my Mom and Dad were able to celebrate. Dad’s death at 59 in a boating accident shocked us to our core. Mom’s slow decline over many years to Alzheimer’s disease was impossible to stop, but no less tragic when she finally let go at age 61.

The career I pursue with gusto and vigor bears little resemblance today than what it looked like when I began. Then again, the career I started in the late 1970s already was undergoing massive change. My journalism forebears no doubt felt like prehistoric creatures when we young punks took over.

So, what goes around surely comes around.

You know what? I don’t feel so old right now as I did when I began this message.

Who knew?

media news

Found: a title for memoir

Some of you know already that I am working on a memoir that I intend to give to my immediate family.

I have some good news. First, I am making good progress on it. Most of it is drafted. I still have some more entries to include in the finished product.

Second, I have come up with a working title for it. I am calling it “My Life in Print.” Snappy, eh?

This memoir intends to chronicle all the people I met and some of the occasionally harrowing, but always zany, experiences I had during my nearly 37 years as a print journalist.

It started in Oregon, the state of my birth and where I lived for the first 34 years of my life. I took a couple of years away from home to serve my country in the Army, went to war for a time, came home and re-enrolled in college. Dad asked me what I wanted to study. I told him I didn’t know. He suggested journalism. Why? Because he said the letters I wrote from Vietnam were so “descriptive” that he thought I had a talent I needed to develop in college.

OK, so I enrolled in some journalism courses … and fell in love with the study and the craft.

My beloved late wife, Kathy Anne, proposed the idea of a memoir shortly after I left my craft behind in August 2012. So, I am writing it for her and for my sons, my daughter-in-law, my granddaughter, my sisters and anyone else who might want to know how I spent my days — and many nights too! — for more than three decades.

It is “My Life in Print.”

Now, I have to get busy.

media news

Retirement allows for mind expansion

As I ponder the direction my life is taking since retirement arrived nearly a dozen years ago, I am left to consider one of the benefits of all this free time.

It allows me to expand my mind.

My noggin had been cluttered and filled with daily responsibilities associated with putting out a newspaper every day. I spent nearly 37 years in various capacities as a print journalist. I was on deadline every one of those years. I started out as a sportswriter; I gravitated to a general assignment reporter; then I became an editorial writer; then I became the editor of an editorial page.

I held that last job description for more than 25 years before I was (more or less) shown the door on Aug. 31, 2012. I have enjoyed a grand time ever since. The final years of my journalism career became decidedly less “fun” than they were for the entire time preceding the final laps I took.

That was then. I have been liberated from the daily grind and have walked with my head held high into a new world that allows me to expand my noggin just a bit beyond where I thought it was possible.

Blogging has been a marvelous avocation for me to pursue. I am allowed to speak my mind without “bosses” setting boundaries for me to avoid crossing. I do follow the rules of good taste and I have avoided libeling anyone with my blathering about this and that.

All told, my new career as a blogger has been a mind-expanding experience. How much more expansion is in store for me? Hey, I’ll just presume the sky is the limit.

media news

Media are supposed to be at odds with government

As followers of this blog know, I enjoyed a modestly successful career as a print journalist, which I pursued with great joy and dedication.

Never once during my nearly 37 years on the job did I ever consider myself anyone’s “enemy.” Certainly not the readers I served while working for newspapers in Oregon and Texas.

The climate today is vastly different than the one I entered in the 1970s. I came out of college intent on changing the world, a la journalists who had done their parts toward that end. I didn’t want to change it to fit my own description of what the world should resemble.

My intent was to report on issues I saw developing and seek remedies to bring changes to flaws I recognized and identified. I don’t believe that’s a nefarious motive.

I just watched a 90-minute documentary on Dan Rather, the former TV news anchor who, in his words, always sought the truth and tried to tell it the best he could. One of the principals quoted in the Netflix piece alluded to the natural tension between government and those who report on it via the media.

The tension was natural, and it was precisely as the nation’s founders intended. Media representatives are assigned the task of rooting out wrongdoing, of reporting on what government is doing well, of telling the human stories that affect every community … and of offering commentary that provides leadership and guidance to a community that seeks it.

I want to take a moment to express my pride in the craft I still pursue and of those who are pursuing full time to this very day. They are facing some ferocious headwinds from those who seek to run our government and therefore set policy on our behalf.

Those of us who know about those forces resisting our best efforts understand fully the need for journalists to keep moving forward. Are we perfect? Do we get it right every single time?

Hell no! We are human beings! We do, though, answer to what I believe is a high calling.

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Should I proclaim my political allegiance?

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I have been pondering a dilemma I have been facing during this election season, which is to what extent to what extent do I want to wear my political allegiance.

For decades I have forgone the displaying of yard signs at my home and bumper stickers on my vehicles. The answer is obvious: I was a journalist, and my craft presumes that its practitioners take an unsigned oath to keep our allegiance to ourselves.

I honored that pledge religiously for nearly four decades. To be frank, even though I am no longer employed by a media company, I am inclined to keep my pledge intact. I will stipulate that I do contribute freelance articles for a group of weekly newspapers in Collin County, but I am not on any payrolls. That means I am free to speak my mind … if I so choose.

I do write on this blog about my political leanings. You know, for instance, that I support President Joe Biden’s re-election. I oppose vehemently and viscerally the election of the presumed Republican presidential nominee, whose name I have been boycotting any mention on this blog.

I’ll need to stipulate that I know emotions run high on both sides of the chasm. Except that I never — not ever! — would damage anyone’s property if they decided to display a sign supporting the former Liar/Philanderer/Idiot in Chief.

Therefore, my angst at displaying my own allegiance has everything to do with how those on the other side might react.

To be candid, I dislike surrendering my First Amendment right to speak freely and peaceably about my government and the politics that produce our elected leadership. Yes, I am able to do so on this forum and for that I am grateful the founders granted us all that right. I just cannot take that expression to the next level, which would be to display a sign at my home or on my vehicle.

It’s just too weird out there … you know?