Tag Archives: public television

entertainment news, local news

How did those geniuses do that?

447-438 B.C., Athens, Greece --- The Parthenon at Dusk --- Image by © Colin Dixon/Arcaid/Corbis

The Public Broadcasting System is going to air the second of three documentary episodes this week that compels me to offer a brief comment.

“The Greeks” will be broadcast at 8 p.m. Tuesday on Panhandle PBS. It’s a collaborative effort by National Geographic and NOVA.

Part two of “The Greeks” is going to center on the “golden age” of that civilization. My interest in it, of course, comes from my own ethnic heritage.

I’m one of those rare Americans who can claim be of a single ethnic heritage. Both of my parents were first-generation Americans. Dad’s parents came to the United States from southern Greece; Mom’s parents were ethnic Greeks who came here from the island of Marmara in Turkey.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Greece three times, in 2000, 2001 and 2003. The first two trips were with my wife.

We visited many ancient sites during our trips to that magical place. One of them, quite naturally, was the Acropolis in the middle of Athens.

I hope this special will answer a question that has lingered in my mind since the first time I laid eyes on the Parthenon, the temple designed by Pericles during the golden age of the Athens city-state.

My question deals with the columns. If you see the Parthenon’s columns up close you are struck by tapering of the columns. They are wider at their base than they are at the top.

Thus, the question: How did the ancient Greeks create those tapered columns five centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ?

One of my uncles — my mother’s youngest brother — once lamented out loud that he was proud to be “descended from those geniuses.”

So am I.

local news, media news

Getting yet another new lease

Chance meetings with friends can — and do — produce opportunities one never expects to receive.

So I was a few months ago when my wife and I stumbled into a meeting with a friend of mine who happens to run a television station here in Amarillo. That meeting has evolved into a marvelous opportunity for me to get back into the journalism game I “played” for 37 years.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing a blog for NewsChannel10.com, the website for Amarillo’s CBS-TV affiliate.

News Channel 10 calls the feature “Whatever Happened To …” and it involves news stories I get to sniff out and write for the website. The stories are of an unfinished nature, the kinds of stories that gained traction, but might have dropped off the public grid. They involve promises and pledges. They seek to answer whether those pledges have been met. A recent story involved a cold case at the police department involving the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy in 1998; the boy, Dorien Thomas, would be 26 years of age and the police have found nothing, not a trace of him, since he vanished.

The chance meeting occurred in the summer of 2014. My wife and I were garage-sale shopping. We walked into the garage of Brent McClure, the general manager at News Channel 10. “Hey, what are you doing these days?” McClure asked. I said I was working a couple of part-time jobs, including a blogging gig at Panhandle PBS, the public TV station affiliated with Amarillo College.

“Why don’t you write for us?” McClure asked. Huh? Are you kidding? “No, I’m serious,” he said.

We chatted for a few more minutes, then we left. I told him I’d call him later.

Well, I did … later that day. My question went like this: “Hey, Brent, was that request for real or were you just making conversation?” He assured me he was sincere. With that, I made an appointment to visit him at his office, where we chatted in general about what he might want to create at the station. We agreed to take it forward, but not until McClure finished a couple of huge projects at News Channel 10.

Near the end of the year, we got back in touch. I drove back out to the TV station and we chatted more specifically. Then he made his pitch: Why not write a blog for our website? We then can take that text and we can develop an on-air news report and we can reference the “Whatever Happened To …” feature on NewsChannel10.com; how does that sound?

http://www.newschannel10.com/

The proverbial light bulb flashed on. I can do this. We shook on it.

I’ve been writing the blog since early February.

I’m still writing for Panhandle PBS, which I’ve been doing since October 2012, about two months after my daily print journalism career came to a crashing halt. That gig remains a huge kick for me and I enjoy the relationships built at Panhandle PBS. The beauty of writing for two TV stations — one commercial, one public — is that they aren’t competitors. The PBS work involves writing about public affairs TV programming; the News Channel 10 work involves more straight reporting, which I believe is a skill journalists never lose once they learn how to do it.

McClure’s hope, as I understand it, that we’ll be able to blend print and broadcast journalism into a new creature that hasn’t yet been defined.

I’m still trying to grasp the impact of all this. I tell people I see all over Amarillo how good it feels to get back into the game.

I am having a serious blast.

national news

Yes, there's intelligent discussion out there

Public television, as well as public radio, get vilified by those who object to a so-called “liberal bias” in both media.

I don’t see it. Then again, perhaps my own bias clouds my vision.

A recent discussion by two noted pundits — one liberal and one conservative — points out, though, that common ground can exist and that two ideological foes can actually agree.

David Brooks, the conservative, writes a column for The New York Times; Mark Shields, the liberal, writes a syndicated column distributed by newspapers around the country.

They took up the issue of President Obama’s speech this past week at the National Prayer Breakfast. Speaking on the PBS NewsHour on Friday, I was struck by Brooks’s comments in particular.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-brooks-politics-vaccination-using-religion-justify-evil-acts/

The president said Christians shouldn’t be too quick to cast stones at Islamic terrorists because Christianity has been used by radicals to do bad things “in the name of Christ.” Obama cited the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples.

Obama’s remarks have drawn considerable fire from the right. Brooks, however, takes a different view:

“I think, if the president had come as an atheist to attack religion and to attack Christianity, the Republicans would have a point. That’s not what a president should be doing.

“But that’s not how he came. He has used that prayer breakfast year after year to talk about his own faith, his own faith journey, his own struggles. He’s used it — he has come as a Christian. And the things he said were things — I have never met a Christian who disagreed with what he issued, that the religion has been perverted, that we have to walk humbly before the face of the lord, that God’s purposes are mysterious to us.

“This is not like some tangential, weird belief. This is at the core of every Christian’s faith and every Jew’s faith. And so what he said was utterly normal and admirable and a recognition of historical fact and an urge towards some humility. And so I thought the protests were manufactured and falsely manufactured.”

This kind of view illustrates, in my opinion, what makes public television so valuable. You do not hear the screamers — on the left or the right — trying to outshout the other side. Oh sure, you have the McLaughlin Group, but even those discussions are mild compared to what one hears on MSNBC or Fox.

As for Brooks and Shields, these two men are known for their agreeable disagreements.

I’ll take that level of civility over the scream fests any day of the week.

 

Uncategorized

Sports journalism takes a big hit

ESPN prides itself, we’re led to believe, on its courageous reporting on sports-related issues.

Which brings up the question: Why did the nation’s No. 1 sports network bail on a PBS project that examines the outbreak of concussion-related trauma being suffered by professional football players?

Was it pressure from the NFL, with which ESPN has a long-standing — and highly lucrative — financial partnership? It smells like it.

Frontline is an award-winning documentary series broadcast by PBS. The program, based out of WBGH-TV in Boston, is set to air a two-part series called “League of Denial,” in which it looks at the concussion rate among NFL players and examines whether playing professional football has become hazardous to the health of its participants.

The early indicators are that the concussions are becoming a grave concern.

ESPN was supposed to be a partner in the project. It backed out this past week. ESPN said the NFL applied zero pressure to the network, even though there have been reports of a extremely testy meeting between ESPN and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Two plus two still equals four, correct?

OK, the news isn’t all bad.

Frontline will present the broadcast, even without ESPN’s participation. It airs on Oct. 8 and 15, and will be shown in the Texas Panhandle on KACV-TV, the region’s public television station operating on the Amarillo College campus.

ESPN does its share of in-depth sports journalism, particularly with its “Outside the Lines” specials. They produce occasionally riveting and, if you’ll pardon the pun, hard-hitting examinations of the lives of prominent athletes.

As the network has shown, though, in cratering on the Frontline project, it is capable of missing a tackle or two.