Tag Archives: media

local news, media news

See you on the other side

I like making command decisions, given that I write primarily for myself, which means I can tell myself what to do … or not do.

Here’s my latest command decision: High Plains Blogger is going dark for a few days. I am taking some time away from the daily humdrum of commenting on issues of the day. And also from the more personal slice of life issues that pique my interest.

Why? Well, I am taking some time away from the house. I will be elsewhere for just a little while. The other reason is that I believe I am getting a bit stale. I kind of let that cat out of the bag a few weeks ago by suggesting I might dial it all back a bit.

I am doing so beginning when I sign off from this post. I just need some time away. I also might re-post some previous blog items. They likely would deal with current issues of the day. Or they might be of the human interest variety. I haven’t decided to post earlier items.

I occasionally go back through the archives to re-read those items. Candidly, they look pretty good to me. I might even mutter under my breath: Damn, I hit a home run with that one!

I long have prided myself on the volume of work I am able to produce each day. Some of my friends have expressed a sort of awe that I can crank this stuff out.

I’ll admit that I am running a little low on fuel. I need to fill the tank. I am taking some time away to do that very thing. I’ll see you on the other side.

media news

Obama: What if I did this?

4 Comments

Barack Hussein Obama, speaking to a crowd of college students the other day, raised a fascinating subject out loud.

The 44th president of the United States wondered, “What if I did any of this?” He explained himself. “What if I had banned Fox News” from the White House briefing room? The outcry from the right, he said, would be vociferous.

He is correct. What’s more, the right would have been justified in expressing anger at a president banning a media organization from access it was giving to other such media outlets.

Then he went on. He noted how Donald Trump has banned some news outlets that have been critical of his policies from access to White House sources. “It’s not a partisan issue,” President Obama said. “It’s about who we are as a culture,” he added.

Indeed, the very people who would be angry as hell at a Democratic president doing such an outrageous thing have grown silent as their guy, Trump, seeks to silence The Associated Press, CNN and MSNBC as they seek to cover the events dictated by the current president.

Obama also noted that “a good many of my predecessors” would be aghast at what is transpiring these days within the White House now run by Trump, the MAGA morons who back him and Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth.

Trump has declared his desire to see MSNBC taken apart. By whom or what, he doesn’t say. The implication, though, is clear. He wants to sic the government on the left-leaning network. Trump, who is astonishingly ignorant of the Constitution, seemingly doesn’t know that the First Amendment declares that a “free press” must be kept free of any government interference.

President Obama was spot on in delivering his rhetorical question. He is right to question aloud where we are as a culture that allows people to accept as normal the machinations of a wildly out-of-control chief executive who exhibits every sign imaginable of wanting to run this country as a dictator.

media news

News boycott continues

Hey, boys and girls, I have an announcement to make, which is that my daytime news boycott is continuing with no sign of letting up.

I mentioned some weeks back that I was turning the TV off for the forseeable future for a number of reasons.

One is that I am sick of hearing Donald Trump’s name mentioned. Two, the news talking heads aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know about or expect to know about him. Three,  I am enjoying the quiet in my North Texas home, with just my puppy Sabol and me making noise.

Truthfully, I have no interest in turning on the Fox Propaganda Channel and listen to those talking heads make excuses for Trump’s behavior or Elon Musk’s bullying of federal employees.

As for CNN and MSBNC, channels I normally tune into to learn the latest and the greatest news of the world, well, those folks are boring me with their repetitious recitals of what I already know about how those folks feel about POTUS No. 47 and his hired gun.

I am able to learn the important news as it develops. For instance, I learned of former heavyweight champion George Foreman’s death online. I learned about the wildfires in the Texas Hill Country and the savage wind that blew in the Panhandle.

So, the news that matters to me the most is getting through. I just don’t have the noise of voices blathering the same ol’-same ol’ through my house.

I’m going to keep it quiet around here for a good while longer.

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

1 Comment

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

3 Comments

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

4 Comments

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!

1 Comment

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

1 Comment

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.