I suppose there are two periods of my father’s life. Before unemployment. And afterwards. Continue reading
Why I will never be a Conservative
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Tag Archives: CBS News
Frank Rich sees the future…
NYT columnist Frank Rich, who must lack a tiny bit of self-irony, takes aim at the ‘bloviators’ covering the Obama campaign. But in the course of his musings a little internet-inspired doubt creeps in. :
Journalists are still Americans — even if much of our audience doubts that — and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Continue reading
TV News: faking it in the good old days
I stumbled upon this TV news “fakery” classic from the early 1960s, which comes care of CBS veteran Daniel Schorr’s memoir, Clearing The Air. Schorr is lunching his boss, CBS chief, Bill Paley. Continue reading
My tiny part in Charlie Wilson’s War
And I mean barely discernible. Towards the end of Charlie Wilson’s War, Texan congressman Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) having helped finance the covert war in Afghanistan looks up at a TV screen and sees Dan Rather introduce a piece that begins with the final column of Red Army tanks crossing the Friendship bridge back into the old Soviet Union.
There is a brief upsot and the voice of CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen comes through, narrating their departure. Watching it took me instantly back to February, 1989.
I took in Petersen’s piece as a very junior CBS staffer, track and rushes. I remembered the shots and the script. Barry always did an on-camera countdown into his pieces to camera: “In — uh — three — uh — two — uh — one…”
But what I most remember from those day of multiple telexes to arrange satellite paths, microwave hops to earth stations, and unreliable landlines, is the sheer number of people involved in co-ordinating the whole process. Staggering.