Waking Up Serious Instead of Silly

George Stephanopoulos

Not that I watch morning teevee, but I like George a great deal, have gotten to like Charlie Gibson, and have never liked Diane Sawyer (she worked in the Nixon White House). I shall miss Charlie.

ABC News hopes that its anchor shakeup will help close its ratings gap with NBC News, but new faces are not necessarily a guarantee of success: the anointment of Katie Couric as the first solo female network anchor has not budged CBS’s evening news out of a distant third place.

Despite ever-dwindling audiences, network news programs cling to established formula and cookie-cutter formats. Changes in personnel don’t radically alter the program, but personality does have an effect on its content.

Ismael Roldan's Uncanny Caricatures

For many years, illustrator Ismael Roldan created witty and original drawings of people in the news, from politicians to pop stars. Mr. Roldan died last week at the age of 45. Here are some highlights of his work that appeared in the Journal's Leisure & Arts and Editorial pages.

Walter Cronkite

I watched him for years. CBS News was the one news report I watched. It was simply the best. Cronkite was a trustworthy journalist, the very idea, the model, the paradigm, of a journalist.

LBJ is reported to have said, in the context of Viet Name, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." He had lost both and the War, as well.










Unsurprisingly, yet still annoyingly, someone at the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece using Cronkite as a weapon to spank the Journal's favorite foil; the Left.

It was fitting that the death of Walter Cronkite should have occasioned tributes more straightforward, more connected to a recognizable reality -- more reportorial (there was everything to tell) -- and more uplifting in tone than that of any celebrity in decades. They were, these evocations of the man, that life's work and the times that bred them, something of a last gift to his fellow citizens. Those stories about his career as a reporter and then a network anchor that came flooding forth unstoppably from former colleagues and friends in the news business on Friday night were more than just reminders of what broadcast journalism once was and is no more in the age of news as entertainment. The band of network news people who paid homage to him over the weekend—who cited his passion for getting the facts, and who described him as "the gold standard"—understood that between the values of his world and theirs lay a great, gaping chasm.

more than just reminders of what broadcast journalism once was and is no more in the age of news as entertainment. Indeed: Edward R. Murrow himself decried the subordinating of news to ratings, the creeping commercialization of network news.

The columnist escapes the clutches of the monsters of the Left long enough to hold up Mike Wallace as a poster boy for the folly of liberals. Eric Sevareid seeing Rudolf Hess in the 1930s (one wonders why the writer could not be a mite more specific) and declining to give the Nazi a platform for propaganda is held up as exemplary behavior.

But it is used only as a setup for another point. To wit:

It was impossible, rereading this [Sevareid's 1946 memoir, "Not So Wild a Dream"] last week, to think of more than a very few journalists today who would make a choice like this, and on such a basis—the well-justified certainty, namely, that the famous subject would only make the same familiar pronouncements. Whom might those select few be? Alas, it is left unsaid. For that is not the point.

This, it hardly needs saying, is a prospect that poses no problems for journalism today, especially the kind on display in Sundays' TV talk-show fests: interviews that require nothing by way of producing news, and from which nobody expects any news—the mere presence of a guest wearing the mantle of newsmaker being quite enough to satisfy all requirements.

Daily fare on Fox News not included? Perchance, why?

No newsmaker, of course, has proved more enticing a catch, or provided less news, while making the round of talk shows than the 21st century's foremost apostle of Nazi-like doctrine, Iran's own Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nazi'like doctrine? Oy vay. Ahmadinejad does espouse ridiculous ideas and policies, perhaps most prominently his denial of the Holocaust. But to call his doctrine Nazi-like is absurd. Nazis put people in concentration camps, then systematically annihilated them.

And, why not a swat at Cronkite himself at the end?

He may not have been, in fact, the most trusted man in America, but he was something more important—a representative. In his bearing, as well as the proofs of a long life, he seemed to speak for the best in the American character. America always sensed that about him and was, rightly, grateful.

Former CBS Newsman Ike Pappas Dead At 75

I remember him from the days CBS News was the one news show I'd watch.

IAC's Minority Interest

Here is a twist I knew nothing about: a black search engine. IACI, Barry Diller's company, will own it. Diller is also backing a news site run by Tina Brown.

The project [a search engine named RushmoreDrive that targets U.S. blacks] addresses an unmet need for a population that exceeds 50 million, half of whom are regular Internet users, says RushmoreDrive CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr.

Huh?

Taylor says that program aims to do "identity search." Algorithms sift the Web and deliver results deemed particularly interesting to black users, drawing from both mainstream sources and black media and blogs. Taylor sees RushmoreDrive's role as aggregating all that content. "Black sites aren't competitors," he declares. "They're content providers."

Not competitors? I don't get that.

Some commentators, including blogger Jeff Jarvis, question the value of specialized search engines, likening them to fences that disrupt the "open prairie" of the Web. "Isn’t there a danger in creating a search engine segregated along racial lines? Does it create more separation? … Does it limit the world reached by the search?" Jarvis wrote on his blog, BuzzMachine.

Sort of my thinking: a kind of separation, segregation. I do understand the concept of identity, but I am not comfortable with separateness.

Taylor says the concept and patent-pending technology could spawn other identity group sites, including for women, Hispanics and the gay community.

I can understand that. So I ventured over the search engine, http://www.rushmoredrive.org/, and took a look. Found a story entitled The Sub-prime Crisis Affects Bourgie People Too. Bourgie is defined in Urban Dictionary as an adjective form of bourgeoisie or aternate for bourgeois (as used in Marxist analysis, rather than its French origin) usually employed in a pejorative sense. alt. spelling bougie. Yes, does say aternate. I suppose it is supposed to say alternate.

There's another definition for bourgie: Stemming from the French word bourgeoisie. Pronounced "boo-zhee" Someone who is class-conscious, with educated and discerning tastes, and interested in enjoying the finer things in life. It is definitely not high-class, aristoratic, snooty, or snobbish. “Bourgie” is as much an idea, and a state of mind, as it is an attitude towards enjoying good food, good friends, and good conversation, everyday. It evokes a mood of simple elegance, casual yet sophisticated—modern.

Yes, aristoratic; I suppose it should be aristocratic. Oy. Quality control is not a strong suit of this site.

MTV Newsroom

MTV gets into the act.

“Kristen,” the high-priced prostitute involved in Eliot Spitzer’s resignation, is the latest civilian to remind us what those “private” settings on Internet profile sites are for. Once her real name got out, Ashley Alexandra Dupre (OK, it’s a stage name) became a lot more popular, as proven by a spike in MySpace page views. Luckily for Dupre, she has a music career to develop, but others weren’t so fortunate. Check out this list of people who should’ve kept the personal info to themselves.

10. A substitute teacher in New Jersey was fired for accepting friend requests from students on the MySpace page for his band, Ian of Fire. Fortunately, he had an internship at a record label to fall back on.

9. A California middle school student faced expulsion after posting graphic, anti-Semitic threats against a classmate. Meanwhile, twenty of his classmates were suspended for … looking at the page.

8. This sheriff’s deputy was let go after the department’s Youth Internet Crimes Unit found his MySpace page, which listed his favorite things as “female breasts, swimming naked and drinking heavily and often.”

7. Maybe this Texas art teacher shouldn’t have posted topless photos of herself on Flickr. Still, if I were a parent I’d be more concerned about her colleague, who told students about the site in order to get her in trouble.

6. A 27-year-old woman was denied her education degree and teaching certificate because of a Halloween photo on her MySpace page that allegedly promoted “underage drinking.” Because nothing says, “Hey kids, drinking is cool,” like a pirate drinking out of a plastic Mr. Goodbar cup.

5. The Miss Universe Organization stripped Miss Nevada USA Katie Rees of her crown after semi-nude photos taken at a nightclub were posted on a friend’s MySpace page. A year later she was arrested for assaulting a police office. Good call, Miss Universe Organization.

4. A Wal-Mart cashier was fired for joking on his page that the country’s average IQ would increase if a bomb were dropped on the company’s stores. “I told them that this was crazy,” argued the employee. “It’s not like I have a fighter jet in my backyard to drop a bomb with.”

3. It wasn’t the heroin addiction that lost this meteorologist his job, it was a naked photo on MySpace. As the station’s general manager so astutely put it, “You don’t want to see Jamey Singleton getting out of the shower, you want to see him doing the weather.”

2. Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, former mayor of Arlington, Oregon, lost her job after posting a picture of herself in her underwear. Her defense: “That’s my space, that’s why they call it MySpace.” On the bright side, she’s now selling 500 autographed copies on eBay.

1. Bank intern misses work for a “family emergency.” Photo of bank intern dressed as Tinkerbell (taken at the Halloween party he skipped work to attend) shows up on Facebook. Bank intern’s boss sends photo to entire office.