Media
What Does the Media Really Want in Ukraine? – 7
Unless you’re spending hours a day scouring the internet in search of critical news from Ukraine, you probably missed President Volodymyr Zelensky’s essential compromise that his nation is now willing to forgo membership in NATO. That should have been the lead story on all platforms around the world. Instead, we heard Zelensky evoke Churchill by…
Read MoreSupermarket Bulletins
In supermarket checkout headlines and color photos pronounce this star’s fatter than you, that one’s more wrinkled, both had botched plastic surgery, another’s anorexic, he’s drunk, they’re addicted, she’s in treatment, he’s in jail, she’s spendthrift, he’s abusive, she’s vain, he’s unfaithful, she’s gay, wonder what rag publishers are like.
Read MoreWomen in Television News
In the vast and luxurious clubhouse of Seven Oaks Country Club, the League of Women Voters of Kern County hosts three female veterans of television news broadcasting in Bakersfield. Prior to their appearance the audience is treated to cashews and cake and a political history lesson: eleven states allowed women’s suffrage before the Nineteenth Amendment…
Read MoreOld Newscasters Never Die
The chronology unfolded about like this: I recently visited my hometown Sacramento, which I’d left in 1991, and was as ever moved by familiar places laden with ancient memories, and shortly after returning to Bakersfield I wondered what had become of several television newscasters from my youth. And in particular I was interested in Harry…
Read MoreSon of John Gotti
I hereby celebrate avoiding every commercial during the Super Bowl between the wildcard Green Bay Packers and the hardscrabble Pittsburgh Steelers. I didn’t have to dodge any pitches during the first third of the game since I overslept as I battled sinusitis. Joining the showdown with the Pack leading fourteen to three, I thereafter held…
Read MoreLetter to my Cable Company
Dear Cable Company, Please excuse me for annually asking you to send a technician to upgrade my service from a “limited-basic” menu of twenty-one channels to the still-merely-“basic” package of seventy-five, and then a few months later recalling your cable guy, always a different one, to climb the telephone pole in my back yard and…
Read MoreRichard Nixon Rebuts Frost/Nixon
Don’t for a second think I’m upset by this new Frost/Nixon movie. My enemies again tried to get Nixon and again they failed. Watch documentary films of my speeches and interviews and you’ll hear an unusually articulate politician. Actor Frank Langella portrayed me as a stiff-necked and tormented bumbler. If you know Nixon the leader,…
Read MoreHighlights from the 2008 Olympics
I see many noble commentators have downplayed if not altogether ignored Olympic sports in order to rebuke China for a range of civil rights concerns and thereby imply the nation today is as ill as in the era of Mao, who shred at least as much flesh as Hitler and Stalin. China has in fact…
Read MoreBob Costas Explains Olympic Coverage
BEIJING – Every night during the Olympic Games I’m frequently overcome by sensual gratification and the release of absolute power: this invariably occurs as I tell billions of inconsequential viewers that, in essence, their time matters not, and fragments of headline sports they’ve waited months to watch will be shown in two or three hours,…
Read MoreSkipper Stu Nahan
Wednesday night, after I’d scurried around the airport in Fresno, looking for luggage that wasn’t there, my cell phone vibrated but I ignored it and instead stepped to customer service and politely scolded the airline representative for shoehorning me into a connecting flight that, especially during holiday season, was unlikely to receive bags from my…
Read MoreWilliam Bennett on Ultimate Morality
“It is most ironic and unfair that I, a supremely righteous man and the epitome of moral rectitude for a generation of divine white conservatives, am currently being pilloried for making an immoral statement. My statement was in fact taken out of context. And that is the only immorality in this tale. What I said…
Read MoreLiberals and Conservatives Calling each other Nazis
A few days ago I opened my email inbox and was surprised to see a message, from a member of a conservative online publication, stating they’d used my column “Sixty Years after Hitler” but had forgotten to tell me – much less ask permission to use it. The member further noted that many people had…
Read MoreMichael Savages the Nation
Perhaps I shouldn’t have. I knew what could happen if I switched radio stations during weeknight time slot. But I was desperate. PBS, oasis of thoughtfulness and moderation, was not less so at moment but I was bored by voice of gentle man chronicling love of cartoons. So I pushed button for ESPN radio where…
Read MoreNavigating the Amazonian Universe
“Find Hitler Here,” I said to the computer expert. “It’s right there,” he said. “Not the old, out-of-print edition with the swastika on the cover. The current edition, with Hitler’s menacing portrait on the cover, the one you designed.” The expert, who in his living room has two monitors as large as respectable television screens…
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