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Marlow's Home!
Marlow's home! A rising junior at Columbia, my older daughter took four courses at summer school, and is now home for two weeks. The whole family is leaving for Santa Catalina (The Island Of Romance) on Monday, for a week in the sun and the waves. The following week, I'll be going to NYC with her to help her move in and to see some old friends. So, it is quite possible there won't be a column for--GASP--two weeks. I have no intention of taking my computer to Catalina (a favorite childhood vacation spot of my wife because her family had a summer home there), although I'll probably take it to New York. Sometimes R&R has to come before my self-imposed column deadlines. I need to unwind. I'll share as much of my vacation experience as I can remember when we return.
Of course, I might whip a column out during the two days I'll be home after Catalina. You can never tell with me. Especially if either a) a lot happens or b) you send a lot of interesting contributions.
Now That's Good Writing
We have a saying in the journalism business, "Never Let The Facts Get In The Way Of A Good Story." I violated that rule two weeks ago when I checked out the essay on presidential intelligence and found out it was a fake. A lovely fake, one that supported my own innate and inchoate feelings about modern American presidents, but a fake nonetheless.
This incredibly well-written decision came to me from a trusted friend of a trusted friend, attributed to U.S. District Judge Samuel B. Kent of Galveston, Texas.
If "trust but verify" is good enough for Ronald Reagan, it is good enough for me. So, I gave it to another colleague, who swears he checked the online databases, and that this is an actual, in the books, decision. It is a hoot! Plow through the legal jargon, and at least read the fourth paragraph, "Before proceeding further" and the footnotes at the bottom.
Honesty in Television
This came over the UPI alumni wire recently:
After Bush's address on stem cell research, Don Rather noted that this was such a complex matter television couldn't properly handle it on a spot basis and suggested listeners to read a good newspaper about it.
A new low for CBS.
I disagreed:
Actually, I think he was absolutely right. if that's what he said, it's a breath of fresh air.
As an ex-print guy who's been trying to explain things in audio and video on the web for 5 years, I've had that driven home to me.
We've been speaking of Cronkite lately, it was during his era that someone took a transcript of the CBS evening news and noted it filled a column and a half of page one of the NY Times.
TV and Radio are very low density media, extremely poorly suited to explanation except in the case of 30-60 minute single-topic shows (such as Terry Gross' Fresh Air). Anything you could say in 90 seconds about stem cell research would be gross simplification of the most propagandistic and useless kind.
Despite the predilections of my lamentable generation, some things you just can't learn from TV unless its a special, and in this century, ain't no one going to do an instant documentary on a subject as deadly dull, and important and controversial, as stem cell research.
Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales praises Rather's decision to send people to print in the last few paragraphs of this column. |
