California Novelist Songwriter Rick Alan Rice Offers Music, Literature, Essay, Biography and Verse

by RAR

Despite, or possibly because of, the popularity of commercial television, there have always been people in the world who will tell you that watching television is a complete waste of time and probably the single most likely source of the downfall of human kind. I wouldn't, for the most part, argue with that assessment. The vast majority of television is not worth watching, and some almost certainly does more harm than it does to entertain. I would say almost everything on MTV, for instance, falls into that category.

That said, there are some shows on television that yours truly watches more or less religiously, including:

PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer"

American news broadcasts offer little in the way of in-depth reportage, and even less of adult discourse. The one place news hounds can go for relief is PBS' "News Hour with Jim Lehrer". The show's formula is to focus on a few important events of the moment, exploring them with subject matter experts selected not for their partisan political views, for the most part, but for their studied insights. Judy Woodruff, Gwen Eiffel, Margaret Warner, Jeffrey Brown, and Paul Solman ably support the venerable Jim Lehrer in examining important issues. The finest moments of the show, however, come on the Friday edition when reporters Mark Shields and David Brooks discuss the week's events in a fashion that could make you proud to be an adult.

HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"

I don't always find comedian Bill Maher to be clearest thinker in all of opinion politics, but he is often funny and he brings on guests with wide ranging points of view, some more entertaining than insightful. The show has seemed more listless this season than in previous years, and one senses that Maher may be running out of gas. Still, it is a show broadcast "live" from the west coast and it has a spontaneity and timeliness that is usually fun, if nothing else. Maher does seem to struggle to find guests who are either self confident enough, or like Ben Affleck, too oblivious of their short comings to guard against their own train wreck. There is a certain schadenfreude about this show that gives it an edge, with guests' eyes darting about nervously to see if anyone has noticed that they've said something stupid.

NBC's "Saturday Night Live"

For me, the world is divided into just two kinds of people: those who cannot understand why SNL is still on the air, and those who value it as an important national institution. I fall into the latter category.

To my mind, the brave cast of SNL performs a service to the nation every time it hits its assorted stages to present live comedy (in a canned age) that is sharp, funny and hopefully captures something of the gestalt of our times. This is what SNL has always done best is act as a barometer of our days, checking the pressure under which we are all living and adjusting to accommodate. It is the "adjustments" that SNL captures particularly well, when it is working; the neurotics we have all become, formed by the zeitgeist of the modern age. Sure, the show's skits are hit and miss, but I love that they go with what they have, sometimes changing dialogue right up to air time, and they let the chips fall where they will. We have too little of that on television these days.

Lorne Michaels must be credited with constantly resupplying SNL with cast members that are equal to the task of keeping this franchise afloat. The current group is particularly sharp, even with the major losses over the past two seasons of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Tracy Morgan, and the vastly underappreciated Maya Rudolph. They still have Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, Will Forte, Kenan Thompson, Darrell Hammond and Seth Meyers, with a promising supporting cast backing them up. I appreciate and admire these people. It is also worth noting that SNL has supplied us with virtually every major comic actor we have today. Virtually all of them, from Bill Murray and Steve Martin to Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller have been cast members of SNL at one time or another.

NBC's "30 Rock"

"30 Rock" is the natural extension of SNL, executive produced by Lorne Michaels and starring SNL veterans Tina Fey (writer/producer/star), Tracy Morgan and the brilliant comic actor Alec Baldwin, who still hosts SNL on a regular basis. This show portrays the behind the scenes story of a Saturday Night Live type of show, but that alone doesn't account for its success. Being smart does. Tina Fey has given us the penultimate icon of the single working professional, overwhelmed and reliant on some none-too-cool coping mechanisms for the pressures she endures. These include managing a stable of nut-case talent, a hopelessly disconnected support staff, and a cabal of writers whose greatest pleasure is watching Fey's character Liz Lemon disintegrate before their eyes. It is an inspired ensemble cast and a wonderfully sharply written show that always offers a knowing wink to its intelligent viewers.

FOX' "House"

"House" is quite possibly the most perversely brilliant show on television. Quite apart from the other favorites mentioned above, which focus on the issues of the day, be they political or personal, "House" is all about the "medical procedural". This show is, in fact, a Sherlock Holmes series in many ways. Dr. Gregory House, a misanthrope played by British comic actor Hugh Laurie, with an impeccable American accent, explores patient symptoms, trying various approaches to solve cases masked by multiple sets of circumstance, and often by multiple medical anomalies and problems. Along the way he tortures everyone else in the cast, which includes a powerful set of actors whose jobs are mostly to survive House's cruel manipulations. It probably wouldn't work at all if the cast wasn't so good and the writing wasn't so sharp. The House writing staff constantly surprises, working several episodes ahead to subtly build storylines that somehow still land with impact and surprise, even on the most dedicated viewers.

NBC's "The Office"

"The Office" is another show dependent upon its extraordinary ensemble cast, led by the train wreck that is comic actor Steve Carell. The Sancho Ponza to Carell's Quixote is Rainn Wilson, and he and Carell, often working together, just as often in opposition, are two of the greatest characters in modern television history. Their purpose is to portray, in the most painfully obvious ways, those human responses that would register as "trauma" in the lives of real, ordinary people, but play as catharsis through the talents of these skilled actors. They are, in their characters, similar sides of the same guy, driven by neurotic fear that they may be discovered as inadequate even while they exhibit out-sized brio. The amazing thing is that the writers of this show have provided equally fully-developed characters for each member of this large ensemble cast, an odd lot of "marginal" people whose presence on camera is consistently surprising and rewarding. It is no easy trick to make satirical subjects of one's co-workers - and of course the key with "The Office" is that we recognize aspects of these personality types in our own lives - and have it come out consistently funny, but also perversely entertaining and "fun". The credit, in large part, must go to the absurdist humor of the show's Producer Greg Daniels, whose previous contributions have been as a writer for "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons". And, of course, "The Office" owes much to comedian Ricky Gervais, who invented the show for British television.

CBS' "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson"

The first time I saw Craig Ferguson, I felt like I had dropped unexpectedly into an alternative universe. In fact, "late late" night TV is that, in almost every respect, and my schedule doesn't typically allow me to explore it. But when I finally found Craig Ferguson there, I nearly flipped. I didn't think it possible that there could be something hiding there, in the dark of night, that was so wonderful. First off, Ferguson is Scottish, so his delivery is a far cry from the Midwestern drawl that has been a staple of U.S. late night fare (think Johnny Carson, David Letterman). Ferguson's show is another of Letterman's World Wide Pants productions, and learning he had selected this inspired Scot added to the high regard I have always had for David Letterman. He didn't choose an off-the-shelf model for the Late Late Show following "CBS Late Night with David Letterman", he chose a horse of a different color. And what a color! I believe that Craig Ferguson is the most electric and most talented force of energy on American television today. He is a high wire act of high energy free styling, and he is wickedly funny in his timing and delivery. He is so quick that you may feel slapped around by his darting jabs, that run the gamut from awful puns and gender humor to references ripped from today's mail. He is a masterful conversationalist, if your idea of such is a smart alec who never misses a chance to bend his subjects' words into one of his trademark three-second routines. Ferguson can do that. He is all rapid fire tangents that are not meant to go anywhere other than toward silliness. They flash, beginning and ending in a heartbeat, and when suddenly they have passed it dawns on one that this was a wonderful moment. Craig Ferguson does this time and again and with immense cocky charm. Ferguson's greatest performance pieces are the quick-change stunts he pulls, portraying characters in costume and disguise, often transforming into character before your eyes and so quick that you don't see what is happening. Then Ferguson himself transforms, and his range of characters is great and gifted, from his flighty Prince Charles to his reptile-like Larry King. Ferguson is the best on TV, without a doubt.

Other Television Worth Watching:

"My Name Is Earl" (NBC)

"The Simpsons" (Fox)

"Family Guy" (Fox)

"South Park" (Comedy Channel)

"The Daily Show with John Stewart" (Comedy Channel)

"The Colbert Report" (Comedy Channel)

"24 Hours" (Fox)

"Fringe" (Fox)

"Late Night with David Letterman" (CBS)

"Weeds" (Showtime)

"Breaking Bad" (AMC)

Cable News Network (CNN)

- THE LAST WORD IN NEWS

by RAR

Many thousand years from now, when the remnants of human kind, or possibly archaeologists from alien worlds, sift through the remains of our former existence, they will find these letters - CNN - and begin to draw inferences. As they dig further and find artifacts they can link back to the finding of this critical initialization, some fanciful thinkers will wonder if this entity, this odd organization was the chronicler, perhaps even the progenitor, of our demise.

As a guy who primarily works from home and plays CNN in the background, all day long, five days a week, like monitored wallpaper, I am inclined to wonder in advance of this historic find. I feel pretty certain that CNN and its 24-hour sisters "Fox News" and "MSNBC" are at the cutting edge of human devolution. It doesn't seem like it should be that way. And I am constantly in wonder at whom and to what this responsibility has been assigned.

To think it began with Ted Turner, who in 1980 founded CNN Center in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia and married it to studios at the Time Warner Center in New York City, and others in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, introducing the concept of a 24 hours news network. The founding of CNN soon spawned Headline News, later Prime Time News, which condensed the news being reported on CNN into a loop that repeated every 30-minutes throughout the 24-hour day.

Turner has been a loose cannon in the Georgia and broader media woods since he went high profile with CNN, which began life as an underfunded experiment. The first anchors, David Walker and Lois Hart, were a husband-wife team - remember them? - and the network quickly gained a reputation for hiring cast-off on-air talent for low pay, and offering even less to staffers. It's cross to bear was that it was "cable news", the new media at a time when cable television was only available to just more than 10 million subscribers nationally. Deregulation begun during the Nixon Administration (1972 "Cable Television Report and Order") lifted restrictions on cable television's expansion to new markets, and allowed the importing of distant signals, known in the cable industry as "leapfrogging") created a boom in new-build cable business, opening new markets in new cities. (Yours truly was involved in the San Francisco new-build campaigns of the early 1980s.)

Today, cable television is available to 95 percent of U.S. households, and about two-thirds of those "potential" households subscribe.

CULTURAL DISSOLUTION: The rapid expansion of homes with cable, and the dissolution of two-way broadcast requirements that had once reserved a certain amount of band width for input from local stations, was accompanied by an explosion in content, with offerings expanding 300 percent in the 1980s. CNN came along at the advent of "Superstations" out of Atlanta (WTBS, another Turner Broadcasting product), Chicago (WGN), and New York City (WOR). The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN, later renamed "The Family Channel") was also an early entry in the new national media made available through the cable delivery system. By 1980 there were 28 national broadcasting services in the U.S.

That expansion in television broadcast hours created a huge content requirement that the ever more vast wastelands of television has been forever more hard-pressed to meet with content of value. In fact, as the quality of product has diminished, the mere fact of its fore-to-aft presence has brought inestimable change to the generations of young people who have now been nurtured on its offerings.

MAJOR COVERAGE OF MINOR MARKET: CNN, among all of these viewer choices, and amid all of these viewers systematically dumbed down by the rainbow offerings of cable television, is dogged by the very nature of its business. News has never been a big draw and has traditionally been a loss center for the networks (initially NBC, CBS, ABC), who have paid for its overhead with revenue from profitable commercial programming. CNN has had no alternative programming to borrow revenues from, and they have been forever in search of a "star" who might bring an audience (and revenues) to their broadcasts.

You ever wonder why CNN is couched in tacky, cheapo commercials? It's because "no one" is watching.

According to Bloomberg.com, CNN only reached 638,000 viewers per day in March 2009, which was up 17.2 percent from the same time last year. Fox News got 1.2 million viewers per day in March, while MSNBC pulled 446,000. Contrast that to television's most popular show, American Idol, which even in its current waning year pulls 25 million viewers in a single hour.

BEING THERE: However limited the commercial prospects of 24-hour news, Turner and company's futures were made concrete by virtue of having their network of reporters on the scene of unique stories like the 1987 Baby Jessica "live rescue", and the play-by-play coverage of the 1991 Iraq War. Then came the O.J. Simpson chase and CNN, the once weirdly-positioned national station of last resort, was knighted stateside as the world's preeminent news gathering organization. In fact, only the BBC News has more correspondents in the field world-wide than does CNN (including the CNN International staff).

AMERICA GOING SOUTH: CNN's advantage in coverage time has had the effect on mainstream "network news" (NBC, CBS, ABC) that Wal-Mart has had on retail in Main Street America, which is to substantially collapse its viability. It is significant that both of these corporate innovations emerged from the American southlands - Wal-Mart from Arkansas in 1970, and CNN from Georgia in 1980 - and overtook their respective competitor domains in the same era of corporate expansion. The South has had an out-sized negative effect on the United States as a whole, from the Civil War and reconstruction era of the 1860s and '70s through to the erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base beginning in the 1970s as the automotive industry shifted south, away from the United Auto Workers in the North.

Their cultural impacts have been profound, with Wal-Mart propagating a Southern Dollar Store ethos throughout working class America, and CNN marginalizing the original three networks, replacing their "hoity-toity" east coast serious news sensibilities with a style more appropriate for a suburban "shopper". Wal-Mart has always been a tightly calibrated operation, designed to put everything within the price range of the spending-prone poor, and driving down retail wages and worker benefits in the process. The power wielded by Sam Walton and his cadre have reduced many Americans' options to a lowly common denominator of sports paraphernalia and cheaply made synthetic apparel.

CNN, on the other hand, has never figured out how to fill 24 hour days with anything resembling the respect and even reverence once reserved for the news broadcasts of network giants like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Or, for that matter, PBS news giants Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF CNN

American Morning (6 a.m. E.T., 3 a.m. P.T.)	John Roberts and Kiran Chetry kick off the news day in what must be one of television's tougher spots. They are appropriate in tone for the early morning hours and professional in their news presentation. It is the dull best that CNN will get all day, if straight delivery is your thing.
CNN Newsroom (9 a.m. E.T., 6 a.m. P.T.) (11 a.m. E.T., 9 a.m. P.T.) (1 p.m. E.T., 11 a.m. P.T.) (3 p.m. E.T., 12 Noon. P.T.)	Heidi Collins, who came up with Colorado station KUSA, takes the helm for the next two hours of the work day, which kicks off the CNN dead zone that goes on for hours without end (or so it seems). I find watching Heidi Collins to be hard on the senses, her weird red hair and unpleasant mouth creating kind of a nervous condition in me. She seems dyspeptic at all times and I just can't look. If Tony Harris, who takes the CNN Newsroom baton from Heidi Collins, seems a little out of his element, then you are one astute news viewer. Harris, a likeable lout, is a former Baltimore disc jockey who landed a TV job on one of those "P.M. Magazine" franchises and parlayed that into a gig with "Entertainment Tonight" and finally a slot reading news on CNN. He feels refreshingly out of sync with everyone else involved in production at CNN, asking odd interview questions and wondering his way into convolutions for which there can often be no response. These may not seem like great accolades, but it beats what happens next... Kyra Phillips takes over the CNN Newsroom from the affable Tony Harris, and serves up two of the most cringe-inducing hours on television. Phillips came to CNN from the "Special Assignment Unit" at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, which sounds about right. Phillips is always getting "special assignments," like being sent off to Alaska on election night, 2008, to see if she could find anyone in a bar there who would talk to her. She found some Palins. CNN sent her to Antarctica once, and during the most recent Iraq War she reported from a Navy carrier, sort of chumming with the boys. She seems bullish on her ability to relate with men; in fact, seems a little bullish in almost everything. She is an apparent over compensator, seemingly portraying a version of what she imagines a dame reporter should be, accept she puddles into a sticky back-slapper on a moment's notice. She can't stay in character. She seems to be another product of CNN's "Doll House", sharing obvious color characteristics with Heidi Collins. But where Collins seems nauseas, the un-governed Phillips comes off as full of herself and convinced that everyone she talks with wants nothing more than to join her coffee klatch. She really belongs on a peppy "Good Morning Green Bay" type of show. In fact, she used to anchor a news cast in Green Bay - on weekends. A note on CNN news vixens Collins and Phillips: Both of their resumes boast special training in military, aviation and police procedures. One senses there is resume padding here, some reach to try to create professional legitimacy for these weak sisters of cable news. Certainly the Edward R. Murrow awards each have received don't signify much, and is a blight on the name of the storied newsman who, now that I think of it, was kind of a charlatan himself. Just when you think CNN could not become more unwatchable, and apparently timed to begin just when they let all of the scholars off the little school bus, along comes Rick Sanchez for "our national conversation". To Sanchez, this means the bon mots offered up by devotees of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, obvious gold mines of clear thought and insight. CNN only allocates one hour for this silliness and it is one of the funniest hours on television, if your idea of funny is witnessing incompetence live on national television. While it has gotten smoother over time, Sanchez' hour in the spotlight must be orchestrated through the efforts of unpaid interns because everything that can possibly go wrong on this show goes wrong. Sanchez constantly sets up introductions of people who his producers lose contact with just before they can be put on the air. And Rick Sanchez is an obstacle in and of himself. He rattles on, talking about stuff he apparently doesn't understand at all in hopes that eventually he will say something that makes sense. The looks on the faces of the CNN correspondents who get sucked into his disaster, and of the guests he has on his show, are, as they say, "priceless". My favorite "Rick Sanchez Moment" came several weeks ago, when a CNN International correspondent in South America set him up with a rare interview with Bolivian President Evo Morales. The Cuban born Sanchez is forever going on about democracy and civil liberties and communism, and he set up his Morales interview with a long rant about what Morales represents to Bolivia. Morales, Bolivia's first "fully indigenous" head of state, belongs to a "socialist" party, which apparently red-flags him in Rick Sanchez' finely calibrated mind. Apparently Morales listened to Sanchez' long and windy setup and decided to hang up before Sanchez could finish his introduction. Sanchez was left to fill air time with the CNN South America anchor woman, wondering what happened to his news breaking interview and challenging the long-gone Morales to return to defend himself against Sanchez' half-witted rant. Rick Sanchez is the one guy for whom CNN doesn't seem to post a resume on line. He is a former college football player. And is that a toupee?
The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer (4 p.m. E.T., 1 p.m. P.T.)	CNN finally hits its stride with Wolf Blitzer's show, which is the central feature in the daytime schedule. Blitzer came to everyone's attention back during the 1991 Gulf War, when he was a constant presence on CNN, asking questions at State and Defense Department briefings. He became almost synonymous with information about that event in history, and because of his weird name became a punch line for all of television's late-night comics. In fact, the often wooden Blitzer could probably lay claim to being one of the great journalistic eminences of our time. He started as a Reuters correspondent in Tel Aviv and a Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post in the 1970s. He was editor of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee' monthly in house publication, the Near East Report, and established himself as an expert on Middle East affairs and related U.S. foreign policy. Watching and listening to Blitzer, you might not know any of this. He is far more wooden and unflappable than the famously wooden Ed Sullivan, from entertainment days of yore. In fact, that is somehow charming coming from him. He is so programmatic, almost like a robot, that he provides a stable center to his carnival surroundings. With his notes and papers in hand, Blitzer keeps his show moving doggedly ahead from one set piece to the next.
THE CNN SET PIECE APPROACH CNN can't sit still. Did you ever notice that? They do segments that involve a great deal of looking at displays and panel furniture and computer monitors from a variety of angles and levels. Apparently there is an element in the production designer group who believes that movement equates to urgency that in turn equates to importance. And, of course, if the news isn't important, is it worth watching? Is it even news? That, of course, is a great deal of the problem with CNN programming. It is the Cable News Network, and though they have toyed with various entertainment formats - they had comedian DL Hughley doing an issue-oriented night-time show for a time - they are stuck with a product that is 1 part moment and 99 parts about the moment. CNN is hugely important when it comes to broadcasting the live real time events, but it is in the hours and days thereafter that the quality of their coverage begins to dissolve into indecipherable shades. They have a great deal of time-space to fill and talking about stuff, even reviewing video, bogs down pretty quickly. CNN gets spikes of viewership, but that is transitory in the extreme, so the network producers rely on stagecraft as one way to keep it interesting. They are only a heartbeat away from presenting news with the fabricated technical excitement of a highly produced game show. During election night 2008, they became the first network to present a holographic image of a news person "beamed" in from another location.
	Wolf Blitzer has something of a side kick in the grumpy Jack Cafferty, whose sole purpose on the show seems to be to dream up email questions and report responses from the viewers. Cafferty is well known in the New York City market as a local news personality, but he is a truly odd duck at CNN. One senses he has dirty secrets on the ownership of Time Warner, who now owns the network, because what else would account for his presence? Or is he being held captive? He seems to hate his job and his life, but he has recently been successful with two books about breaking his dependence upon alcohol, his tough upbringing, and the recent loss of his wife, which CNN viewers experienced with him, real time. The dynamic between the cautious Blitzer and the irascible Cafferty is the most human thing that happens on CNN every day. It is like a low-voltage soap opera, with Wolf reaching out to Jack, and Jack rebuffing him with a sharp comment he then seems to feel bad about. And so it goes, at the bottom and the top of the hour, as Wolf and Jack try to be comfortable with one another. GREAT CONCEIT: The Situation Room has the best "conceit" on CNN, that being that it is modeled after the "situation room" in the White House, where all of the King's men gather to discuss crisis issues. Wolf Blitzer and The Situation Room producers do a great job of portraying timeliness and urgency. When their show starts this viewer feels "at the command center of breaking news".
FAIR AND BALANCED REPORTING CNN's biggest nemesis, the top-ranked Fox News cable network, bills itself as "Fair and Balanced" in their reporting, though their recent refusal to provide air time for Barack Obama's 100th day press conference - the first time a U.S. television network has ever denied such a request from a White House - has pretty much confirmed that the boast is intended as irony. Fox News, whose average viewer is 67 years of age, is the voice of the far and fading "Right". CNN's claim is to the balanced middle, where ideology is trumped by pragmatic decision making. To achieve that delicate balance, CNN attempts to bring on commentators from both sides of the political spectrum. From the Left you get James Carville, Paul Begala and maybe Roland Martin. From the Right you get Bill Bennett. From the Center you get David Gergen and Gloria Borger. In fact, Slate.com recently reported: "A recent FAIR report studied guest bookings on CNN's prime-time news show "CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports," and found that of Blitzer's 67 partisan guests between January and May of this year, 39 were Republicans and 28 were Democrats. By contrast, 50 of the 56 partisan guests booked during the same time on Fox News' nightly "Special Report with Brit Hume" were Republicans." So, CNN brings on people from "both" camps to try to provide something that actually does seem "fair and balanced". The problem with bringing people on to achieve something intended is that tends to be just what you get. Poor Wolf Blitzer finds himself marshalling through comments that couldn't be any more expected were he Nostradamus. That is tedious TV and a disservice to the few people who are actually watching. You would never know it if all you ever watch is CNN, but none of the CNN contributors are really particularly insightful or important to anything outside of the media niches they inhabit. The "CNN Effect" There is a "CNN effect" talked about in military planning, which attempts to calculate the impact of real time coverage of war events and activities. "Live reporting", however managed and from whatever distance, carries the possibility of relaying important logistical information to your adversary. Equally damaging is the impact of perceptions within the viewing public, which increase in number dramatically when CNN starts broadcasting war like a video game. The "shock and awe" phase of the most recent Iraq War was a media event, dramatically staged in the full view of on-scene cameras to capture the moments when the U.S. delivered devastation from the night sky, culminating in a display of fireworks that carried a loud and fiery message: Saddam Hussein and his Bath Party are no match for the power and might of the United States of America. The military quickly learned to optimize the most powerful feature of cable news, which is that focusing on a single event or story, managing the imagery, and squeezing it into that little window frame on the world that is your home television, tends to narrowly define viewer perceptions of what they are shown. When viewers are watching downtown Baghdad explode in the night, right close up and personal, it is truly "awesome" and it tends to blur viewer perceptions of proportionality. When explosions fill your television screen it does not first come to a viewer's mind to wonder what percentage of Baghdad is not being bombed to oblivion. It looks, for all the world, that the entire scene is conflagration, which is the immediate concern. What more need you know? That phenomenon - television's ability to focus a stream of information and thereby amplify the sense in the viewer that this information is important - is one of the most crucial aspects of CNN's contributions to our modern human dilemma. As I write this piece, the morning papers are wondering if press coverage of the Swine Flu outbreak didn't fuel unnecessary panic. The outbreak has been a major obsession of CNN for the past week, since a relatively few number of flu-related deaths occurred in Mexico City and the strain spread as a pandemic virus throughout the world, but with little overall effect. The first days of reporting of the Swine Flu, with the press conferences from the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, and video feeds of people in Mexico City wearing masks while talking to reporters, put yours truly to mind of the opening scenes of many a disaster movie; I Am Legend and 28 Days Later coming immediately to mind. CNN amped up the paranoia with references to the pandemic of the World War I era that killed millions around the globe. Some schools in the U.S. began to close, and anxious parents pulled their kids out of schools and kept them home, just in case. Now CNN's experts are cautioning that in the pandemic of 1918, the outbreak came in waves, with the first passing without great effect only for the flu to come back stronger and with more deadly force months later. See, you can never feel safe. STAY TUNED is the message. Like those 1950s science fiction films, with their cautionary messages, CNN seems to urge us to "Keep watching the skies!" That's right, something is always coming for us, and CNN will be there.
Lou Dobbs Tonight (7 p.m. E.T., 4 p.m. P.T.)	Harvard educated economist Lou Dobbs has been with CNN from the beginning, serving on its Executive Committee and founding CNN Financial, which launched the shows Moneyline and Business Unusual. He is a syndicated radio host and an editorial columnist. Dobbs' hour on CNN mostly affords Dobbs with endless opportunities to rant about issues that vex him, like illegal immigration and the entitlement programs. He is CNN's grumpy old man, a brother in spirit to Wolf Blitzer buddy Jack Cafferty, both of whom create mechanisms to harvest the support of viewers. Cafferty does it with email questions and Dobbs with absurdist surveys that always seem to yield lopsided results that utterly undermine their "value", as if they are intended to have any. Dobbs just likes to have his points of view supported by survey numbers that he would never get were his efforts to survey legitimate. With him they are more of an ornery prank. Dobbs' worst trait is that he is an interview bully. He brings corporate leaders on, ostensibly to interview them, but once they are on camera he just lectures and hectors, often cutting them off and not allowing them to answer his loaded questions. Dobbs is entertaining in somewhat the same way that his apparent model, the Howard Beale character that Peter Finch played so memorably in the movie Network ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"), was. He doesn't, however, do much of anything to add value to the public discourse on issues as important as the bank bailouts and the current state of the U.S. economy.
"No Bias, No Bull" with Campbell Brown (8 p.m. E.T., 5 p.m. P.T.)	Campbell Brown was the babe in the White House Press Corps prior to joining CNN, and she is surely one of CNN's most appealing on-air celebrities. Her natural way with interview subjects and her attitude is fresh air on CNN, particularly after stuffy old Lou Dobbs. Campbell is smart and well informed. Her problem is that CNN has apparently decided that she needs lots of help from lots of sources.
LOST IN A SEA OF EXPERTS Nowhere is CNN's inability to figure out what it can best be more apparent than on poor Campbell Brown's show. It happens from Wolf Blitzer's show on, but especially on the Campbell Brown segment. The network has apparently determined that what she should do is moderate the inputs of panelists, and they often give her more than one set to manage. Why? Who knows? CNN has selected people from opposite sides of the aisle, but they all say the same things that their "side" is expected to say. This leads to some deflating moments. On the occasion of President Barack Obama's 100th day, which somehow became like a momentous day at CNN, two sets of panelists - there were 8 to 10 of them, I can't keep up - were asked to grade Barack Obama on various aspects of his performance to date, while viewers voted in six-minute cycles on various figures from the Obama cabinet. About halfway through the charade, David Gergen and Jeffrey Toobin started to lose interest in the whole thing and, like petulant children, decided they just didn't want to play anymore, that this was silly. And it was, of course, but the segment still had quite a ways to go leading up to CNN's coverage of the Obama 100 Day press conference. It was an event orchestrated by the Obama Administration with the happy assistance of all the network news carriers except Fox, who refused to cover Obama's "summary" moment, his first quarter grades. Somewhere in this mish-mosh of "news and opinion" lies the promise of cable news, and the Achilles Heel of CNN. There is never anything like resolution, only endless discourse from competing sides using specially selected information that supports their points of view. Even Campbell Brown often seems pole-axed by quandary over what one should believe. It is one thing to struggle with this conundrum while reviewing a group of partisan panelists, but quite another to measure the impact of such seeded uncertainty on the verity of the actual news, the reportage of events. THE PROBLEM WITH ALI VELSHI CNN has received a great deal of criticism from media watchdog groups, like Media Matters for America and Accuracy in Media for their mix of news and editorial opinion, which tends to be more or less obvious based on the host. Throughout the current financial crisis, Ali Velshi, CNN's Chief Business Correspondent, has been the best example of this issue of journalistic ethics. Velshi has vigorously championed the bail-out of the finance institutions that have benefited so from taxpayer money, reporting as a matter of fact that the bank bailouts simply had to be done, that there was never any choice. It has been a little disconcerting, the way Velshi has beaten this drum, as if reading from a script provided for him by the banker's lobby for exceptional treatment. In fact, there is a sizeable opposition to that bail-out approach that doesn't get the time of day on CNN, where Velshi is more engaged by reporting whatever gains can be tied back to the "necessary bailout". He is a supply-side economist who is getting away with telling only part of the story of the U.S. financial picture. I would call him an advocate for the status quo.
Larry King Live (9 p.m. E.T., 6 p.m. P.T.)	Possibly the funniest title in all of the Television Kingdom. Is Larry King alive? And does it help CNN if he is? I think having this crypt keeper on between Campbell Brown and CNN heart throb Anderson Cooper is just weird. There was a time when Larry King was doing an all-night radio show, syndicated around the nation, and he was asking those weird, spooky questions that work so well on radio at 3 a.m. Hallucination becomes a King broadcast, but since Larry King became a television celebrity on CNN in 1985 - where people can see him - he has just seemed like a freak, and a much lampooned freak at that. He seems to specialize in the "personality interview", recently spending quality time with the kid who got Sarah Palin's daughter pregnant. Why? One might ask. Imagine how much better served CNN would be by having a Charlie Rose, or some other serious and smartly focused interviewer in this slot in the lineup. Unfortunately, featuring smart, thinking types has just never become a part of the CNN model.
Anderson Cooper 360˚ (10 p.m. E.T., 7 p.m. P.T.)	CNN has looked for an audience-magnet star for years, and Anderson Cooper, the son of socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and heir to the Astor family fortune, is their current entry in that department. Anderson is a likeable guy, quick-witted and amiable, smart but not in a particularly out-sized way. He seems a little "lite" for the challenge of attracting viewers to CNN after 10 o'clock on the east coast, and during Prime Time on the west coast. In fact, that seems utterly hopeless.
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: DR. SANJAY GUPTA CNN does have one truly legitimate "star" in neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who is a gifted media presence. Handsome, likeable, with a personality that inspires trust, Dr. Gupta is truly a cut above anyone else on television who might challenge for the mantle of top TV Doc. However staged and manipulative, he achieved hero status by performing surgeries on the front lines of the Iraq War, reporting live from the front. His star is shining so brightly that it was reported that the Obama administration considered him as their appointee to become Surgeon General of the United States. Dr. Gupta announced that he wasn't interested in the post.

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Published September 6, 2008

How Smart is Bill Maher?

I never miss an installment of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," which I enjoy for being one of the few places in the media where one can listen to pundits and celebrities rattle on about current issues outside of the brief-exchange sound-bite formats you get on news outlets like CNN. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and whatever else you may watch from the 24-hour news bucket are amazingly void of free-wheeling opinion and insight; most of what you get are Democrat and Republican talking points, with a little bit of third party chatter allowed in for seasoning, I guess.

Maher's show, on the other hand, is a bizarre confection of panelists from the worlds of politics, entertainment, literature, and media along with left-of-center "journalists" (e.g., sex advice columnist Dan Savage, Mark Taibbi of Rolling Stone). There you get mostly entertainment, not a lot in the way of actual information about the issues, but on a Friday night, after a week of listening to the mind-numbing bullshit of the mainstream media, "Real Time with Bill Maher" is a catharsis that I look forward to enjoying.

It isn't that I find Maher to be particularly astute or insightful, and he is hit-and-miss funny, playing to a "loaded" house of Maher enthusiasts who will support almost anything he spouts.

I haven't always been a fan. I found his earlier TV incarnation as the host of "Politically Incorrect" to be unwatchable, primarily because its raison d'être seemed to be to bring on half-wits like Ann Coulter to say ridiculous and provocative things to upset the other panelists for the evening. I thought that show suffered from lack of being anything other than a thoughtless free-for-all that Maher seemed inadequate to moderate, not that he really tried. The show boasted a writing staff that included Scott Carter, Al Franken, Arianna Huffington, Chris Kelly, and Chris Rock, and it ran on Comedy Central from 1993 to 1996 before moving to ABC in 1997. Maher ironically hit the jackpot in 2002, when he got canned for disputing President Bush's assertion that the "9-11" terrorists were cowards. Maher famously stated: "We (the U.S.) have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." This is a point of view with which I agree.

Getting axed for having an opinion in "free speech" America really galvanized Maher's credential as a political opinion leader, and he turned that into "the act" he is today, which is a sort of "Lenny Bruce lite" commentary on current events and issues. He tours the country skewering the political establishment and does a split season of "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO.

Maher has gotten better over the years, though my criticism of him has always been that he doesn't seem to try very hard at educating himself to the issues. He doesn't seem very well read. In fact, if he seems dedicated to reading anything it is books about diet, which strikes me as odd. He doesn't exactly project as the healthiest looking guy in L.A.; in fact, he always seems a little sickly. He is also a board member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which is one of the weirdest organizations on the planet, famous for their controversial and aggressive publicity stunts aimed at outing people who wear fur and leather. I am all for the ethical treatment of animals, but not at all for PETA, which as an organization is about as shady and secretive as they come. It is like a cult of fanatics closely aligned with the ultra-aggressive Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which they help finance. PETA has been subject to charges of hypocrisy for the number of animals they euthanize annually. PETA also has ties to the extremist "Earth Liberation Front" (ELF), which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization. This is a truly destructive group of nut cases.

The writer's strike of 2007 seemed to reveal a lack of depth in Bill Maher. He attempted to do his show without writers, which was abysmal. Left to his own devices, he just wasn't really able to mount a program worth watching. In fact, he was regularly skewered by his own guests, who ribbed him for having no material worth using sans his writing staff.

In fact, Maher is an Ivy League graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in English. He started doing stand up in college, making political wisecracks, and it became his career. He has expanded his range with humor books, acting roles, a Broadway show (ran for three weeks) and this year he is releasing a documentary on religion (Religilous). He has stated that religion is the source of much of the world's woes, a point of view with which we share agreement.

Maher has been all over the place in his political affiliations, committed to Libertarian candidates, Ralph Nader, and old-fashioned Republicans like Bob Dole, who he respected for his service in the armed forces.

This election season, Maher is a Barrack Obama man. On last night's show, he defended Obama's qualifications for the presidency, pointing out that Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, where he was also president of the Harvard Law Review. He also expressed his miff at the Republican's laughing aloud at the "community organizer" jokes that were so prevalent at the Republican nominating convention. VP nominee Sarah Palin scored big with her assertion that she had been a mayor, "which is a lot like being a community organizer accept that you have actual responsibilities."

Touché.

Maher's assertion that Obama's college record somehow qualifies him for the highest office in the land re-doubles my suspicion that Bill may not really be all that bright. Perhaps it is the shared arrogance of a fellow Ivy Leaguer, but these prestige university credentials have been subject to a great deal of speculative doubt of late. Much of this revolves around the spiraling costs of education and the huge debt incurred by students of all disciplines, many of whom struggle for years into their professional careers to get out from under their school debt; particularly true for liberal arts majors, who don't really graduate with any "bankable" career skills. (I know, I was one, graduating with a degree in English/Journalism.) Barack Obama routinely reports how much he is "one of us" by talking about how he and his wife, both of whom went to school with the help of scholarships, only recently completed paying off their student loans. They are in their mid-40s.

The general observation, regarding high value paper from prestigious private schools like Harvard, is that these credentials mean something only at the start of a young person's career, when it helps them land a first job. Two years later the diploma doesn't mean much at all, because universities do little in the way of actual job training. (I will never forget Tommy Lee Jones pointing out that he never got any theatre training at Harvard, where he was roommate to Al Gore, because "we are not a vocational institution.") It is how well the person actually performs on the job that determines future prospects.

There are other unique aspects to education at prestigious (particularly Ivy League) private schools:

n A person's chances of getting into one of these institutions are improved considerably if your family has a history of attending these schools. This is how George W. Bush, hardly an intellectual giant, was able to get into Yale and Harvard Business School. (Has this made him a qualified executive officer?) The same could be said of Barack Obama, whose father was a Harvard grad. I don't doubt for a moment that Obama, who is reported not to have gotten particularly great grades in high school, also benefited from affirmative action. In fact, he probably should be the poster boy for that benefit.

n Once in to one of these prestige schools, you pretty much have it made. They don't accept your tuition money to then get all picky on you about grades. In fact, grades don't mean much of anything at these places, "grade inflation" having become an accepted practice years ago. This makes Maher's assertion that Obama, as a magna cum laude graduate, is obviously qualified to run the free world a laugh-out-loud joke. Maher may be too old to have experienced grade inflation at Cornell, and may just not know the abysmal truth.

It is estimated that about 33% of those who start a degree at Harvard Law never finish. They don't flunk out, they quit because they don't feel they "fit in" among the Harvard elites.

I used to know a Professor of Political Science who was utterly cowed by Harvard grads, though he was himself a graduate of the prestigious London School of Economics. (People who graduate from prestigious schools are always hugely respectful of other prestige school graduates, which I am sure is a subtle self-aggrandizement.) He used to love to point out that something like two-thirds of the world's presidents, prime ministers and the like were graduates of Harvard and members of the Harvard Club. Somehow all these geniuses haven't really fine-tuned our political world into anything greater than what might have been equally well accomplished by any other sampling of college grads, the only difference being that the rest of the world's average Joes would never get the opportunity to compete and do better at this elite level.

n Money also screams obscenities at the high dollar private schools. If you have the bucks, you can get in anywhere. My experience is that this is especially true at Stanford University, which is renowned for the financial resources it has available for research programs.

I have worked with Stanford grads who start their careers with six-figure incomes while being unable to craft a basic business letter. It doesn't make all that much difference, providing the "specially gifted" come up to speed and achieve some basic level of competence within a reasonable amount of time. There are tons of corporations out there who just love to show staff resumes with the names of prestigious schools on them. It doesn't mean they are going to deliver particularly great services.

A great example of that is the ultra-secretive McKinsey consulting group. Elitist by design, they only hire from the top 1% of graduates from the world's top seven business schools. The young associates at McKinsey, who can make $250,000 a year right out of school, don't earn their pay with genius so much as they earn it with sweat, often being expected to put in 12-hour days seven days a week in service to their clients. Associates survive to thrive, because if they can make it past the first couple of years they are making huge incomes for delivering fairly basic services. McKinsey is notable for "reorganizing" companies, meaning they help downsize firms for the sake of their client companies' bottom lines. McKinsey is also notable for not itemizing their invoices. It is hard to know exactly what the firm is doing for you, but it must be great because these are all graduates of the best schools in the world and they are expensive as hell!

I will never forget interviewing with the McKinsey office in San Francisco, which is the company's headquarters. As I was shepherded down a corridor of offices each of the associates rose from their desks to slam their doors on me as I passed. Lovely, warm crew. They could probably tell I was not a member of their elite and had no business being there.

All of this brings me back to Bill Maher and his unqualified support of the extraordinarily unqualified Barack Obama, "Community Organizer." Maher makes me laugh, but then so does Larry the Cable Guy, and I doubt that I would put much stock in his political perceptions either. - RAR

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First Published July 25, 2008ared in the July 25, 2008 Edition

Death of Turtle Boy

By all accounts, Tim Russert, who for 17 years was the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," and who died in June, was a fine man, apparently liked by all. He was renowned for his work ethic - he died on the job, of a heart attack, for god's sake! - and for his "brand" of journalism. His was a distinctly "televised" style, dependent upon the kind of "schadenfreude" that only TV can deliver. Russert's formula was as simple and blunt as a claw hammer. He and his staff would scour the records of public figures, looking for contradictions or statements that might be challenged under some current circumstance. Then, under the hot studio lights, after the exhibit had been displayed with the guest sitting right there on trial, Russert would deliver his standard line, which would go something like "Is that still your position?" or some variety thereof. It was calibrated to peal like a death knell, to do the work of the "revelator," though Russert had a knack for implying great importance when exploring issues of not more than trivial interest. Often the only outfall was for the guest to feel pressured to spend some time clarifying his or her position. The aplomb with which the person in Russert's hot seat responded to his challenges was the lasting impact of each segment.

Heartland America and government types ate it up, as was apparent from his funeral, which had all the trappings of a "state service." Inside the Beltway types ate it up too, and followed his Pied Piper lead like rats and children.

During the weekend of tributes that followed Russert's Friday death, NBC icon Tom Brokaw hosted "Meet the Press" and did the expected tribute to its fallen moderator. During that show there was an exchange that, to me, confirmed everything I had always suspected about Washington political journalism as practiced today. It was an ironic and accidental "gotcha" moment in which "Meet the Press", Russert, and the entire Washington D.C. press corps were the object of the inquisition. From the transcript for the June 15 "Meet the Press":

TOM BROKAW: I think one of the real benefits of having MEET THE PRESS on the air is that, for the rest of the week, other Washington journalists would have something to operate from. They would have a whole foundation, right?

GWEN IFILL: It's true. Everybody would come to work on Monday morning and decide, OK, the, the plate had been reset, especially in politics, every week based on what had happened on MEET THE PRESS. And for the politicians you covered, the plate had also been reset.

To me that little exchange completely captures what is so wrong about Beltway journalism as it has been practiced for, say, the last 17 years, and particularly the way television journalism has evolved in that time. And it clarifies something for me that I always felt about Tim Russert and the rest of the Washington press corps.

Whether it is the formats they are trapped in, or a lack of historical perspective, they are not doing the thing we the viewers need for them to do, which is to be the adults in our public conversation.

Adults, one would like to think, think for themselves. I say that knowing that there is substantial evidence to the contrary.

There is, for instance, that plague that befalls people when they mimic the "success" behaviors of their peers. You see it in every profession, people getting on the current bandwagon, committing to the current school of thought. It is a strategy that slaps a certain veneer of "pre-approval" on one's work but ultimately produces a stream of second rate endeavor. That is at least part of the reason television network journalism is in its moribund state.

I started calling Tim Russert "Turtle Boy" back in the 1990s, angry at him for his promulgating of "impeach Bill Clinton" sentiment. I thought Russert, more than anyone else, gave wing to what was an absurd and ultimately destructive Republican attack campaign, one that took its toll on everyone it touched. Not the least of its "victims" was the Washington press corps itself, who during that period became hopelessly disconnected from the American public. Week after week "Meet the Press" brought Bob Barr and the other Clinton accusers on to show their outrage at Clinton's defilement of the Oval Office, and seemingly without a compass to gauge whether it was all going anywhere of benefit to the annals of journalism or, indeed, to the nation, Russert orchestrated its continuance, stupidly moving forward like a creature under the control of a reptilian cortex and unable to veer away from its dumb lead. Even while pointing out that the impeachment crowd was out of sync with the American public, polling data for whom was showing minority support for removing an otherwise successful President from office, Russert kept banging the drum and moving forward week after week down this destructive stream of character assassination. I called him "Turtle Boy" because of his looks, but the nature of his obsession was really single-minded pursuit of prey.

But what exactly was Tim Russert pursuing? I gave up wondering years ago, though I have watched "Meet the Press" since Lawrence Spivak was its moderator (beginning in 1966). That show seemed to me to be important at one time, like the one oasis on the television dial where real adults cut the crap and talked about the gut wrenchingly important issues of the day, the stuff that mattered. Tim Russert crushed all that with a fool's focus on his "gotcha" form of journalism. I never sensed any real wisdom in Tim Russert, was never impressed by any particular incisiveness in his line of questioning. There is a reason that he is spoofed so successfully on "Saturday Night Live," parodied as a wild-eyed interrogator nearly salivating at the thought of entrapping his subject in a lie or a contradiction, repeating the same question over and over. The bottom line is that Russert wasn't really doing anything that added up to anything more than "entertainment," if you find squirming pols entertaining.

Worse, he and his peers have seemed completely oblivious to his role in the diminishment of television journalism and political journalism as a whole.

As for the phalanxes of second rate journalists who held Tim Russert up as some shining light, maybe they are turtles too, all shelled up in the dark world of Washington politics, having no capacity for thinking outside that box and certainly no awareness of where we are right now, on the edge of losing our last vestige of hope, which is the vitality and verity of the Fourth Estate.- RAR

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