No comments on 50 years ago at a theater near you
Category: media
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In my optimistic days as a young journalist, I believed that if only the public had access to more information the nation would enter a golden age of better government and more-thoughtful political debates. This was before the internet, cable news, and talk radio came into bloom—when newspaper and TV gatekeepers controlled what we’d read and hear.
Everything I had dreamed about has come true beyond my wildest imagination. Any American can now read the widest range of opinions. In the past, it was nearly impossible to access underlying source documents. Now anyone with a phone can find a trove of legislation, court rulings, studies, and rulemakings. We can watch hearings on YouTube.
Instead of entering a golden age of reasoned public policy, we are descending into a dark age of sensationalism and misinformation. Laugh at my naïveté, but I’ve finally learned that Americans prefer ad hominem attacks and conspiracy-mongering to reading municipal budgets and weighing arguments in amicus briefs. So much for the democratization of news.
Such trends have been obvious for years, but the situation may have reached its apogee in the past week. For instance, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who hosts the nation’s most-popular cable news show, praised right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones by calling him “one of the most popular journalists on the right.”
“Yes, journalist,” Carlson added. “Jones is often mocked for his flamboyance, but the truth is, he has been a far better guide to reality in recent years—in other words a far better journalist—than, say, NBC News national security correspondent Ken Dilanian or Margaret Brennan of CBS.” Criticizing Jones for his flamboyance, by the way, is like chiding Hannibal Lecter for his unique culinary tastes.
Maybe Carlson was just trolling the media, but he has millions of devoted viewers—many of whom take his pronouncements seriously. Last month, a Connecticut judge ruled against Jones in the remaining defamation suits regarding the Infowars host’s, er, flamboyant depiction of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that took the lives of 20 first-graders and six educators.
“Jones for years spread bogus theories that the shooting…was part of government-led plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms and that the victims’ families were ‘actors’ in on the scheme,” The New York Times reported. Some of Jones’ followers “accosted the families on the streets.” Ultimately, he admitted the shooting actually happened, but the damage was done.
Jones has also postulated a variety of theories on his show, including the idea that the federal government is putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay (evidence of the Pentagon’s “gay bomb,” as CNBC reported). His own attorney once described him as a “performance artist”—but I had always figured that free citizens with access to information could distinguish truth from a charade.
“There was a time…when Alex Jones would have been far too toxic and deranged a figure for any influential member of the right to embrace,” wrote Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. Yet Carlson’s praise of Jones “is the kind of tactic that propagandists…have employed so well: making claims that are so brazen, so outrageous, so untrue that they are disorienting, aimed at destroying critical thinking.”
The week’s other big media scandal involved TV anchor Chris Cuomo, who finally was dumped by CNN after, as The New York Times reported, “testimony and text messages released by the New York attorney general revealed a more intimate and engaged role in his brother’s political affairs than the network said it had previously known.”
I had always found it tawdry watching the TV “journalist” do puff interviews with his older brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, during the COVID crisis. But the younger Cuomo committed a major journalistic no-no by actively advising and doing flak for Gov. Cuomo during the disgraced governor’s on the air.
Perhaps we’re just seeing a return to the days of “yellow journalism.” The term springs from a popular color cartoon (the Yellow Kid) published in The New York World in the late 1890s, but came to refer to a sensationalistic, profit-driven news approach. According to the federal Office of the Historian, such coverage had dire consequences by stoking pro-war sentiments after the sinking of the Maine.
You don’t need me to describe the ill effects of a world where viewers can’t distinguish Walter Cronkite from Alex Jones, but here we are. I admit that I didn’t see it coming.
Independent of whether Chris Cuomo or anyone, such as Carlson, deserves to be called a “journalist’ when such a person is actually a commentator, I suppose one school of thought could be that visible bias is preferable to invisible bias, where the reader, listener or viewer isn’t aware of which journalist is shilling for which side. I’m not sure when the trend of journalists seeking to curry favor with power instead of reporting the news began; I suspect it began well before people think it did.
I’m also not sure when the trend of people being interested only in reinforcement of their own views began. We’re certainly in that era now, possibly forever.
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Newsweek writes about this billboard outside of Richland Center:
Abillboard of Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden with the film title Dumb and Dumber underneath has begun to go viral.
The 1994 comedy film, starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, has often been referenced in politics and attributed to elected leaders.
The billboard is believed to be in Richland County in Wisconsin and has been met with a mixed response.
To be precise, outside of Richland Center.
The picture was shared on Twitter by JonCover2 to his over 6,000 followers and has since been liked 14,000 times and retweeted over 3,000 times. Newsweek has reached out to the original poster and Wisconsin officials for comment.
Many critics of the current administration responded enthusiastically to the billboard and replied with their own pictures of anti-Biden signs across the U.S.
One user wrote: “I drive by this regularly in southern Wisconsin. Makes me smile.”
Another added: “This billboard is needed everywhere from East to West coast.”
While another wrote: “I disagree – clearly Biden is the dumb and Kamala is the dumber.”
And another added: “Cool, I like to call them Sh**s and Giggles, but this works.”
However one person in the comments argued against the mocking of Biden and Harris. They wrote: “Talk about disrespect. These are your elected leaders. Reaching a new low… if that is possible.”
That’s rich coming from people who ripped to shreds Reagan, Bush, Thompson, Walker and Trump voters at every opportunity.
The billboard picture was also shared on liberal Twitter page PatriotTakes which has over 430,000 followers.
Comments on this page steered more towards confusion and condemnation.
One social media user wrote: “They have no personality outside of worshiping their cult idol.”
“Seriously, they would have no problem with this administration if they didn’t dethrone their king.”
That’s quite a statement from supporters of the party that worships the Kennedys, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc., etc., etc.
And another wrote: “This is someone’s vanity project. It doesn’t serve any purpose except they enjoy it when they drive by.”
President Biden’s approval rating since taking office has fallen significantly and the President has faced constant criticism from former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
It remains fascinating that more than a year after the presidential election there are so many Trump signs outside urban areas. It’s as if Trump voters knew what would happen if Biden won.
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Not long ago Tim McGraw, who once sang about a truck …
… sang about another truck:
Before we go on: McGraw sings about “an old stick-shift dark blue F-150 in good condition.” But if you look at 45 degrees on the steering wheel …
… you will see an automatic transmission shifter. (No automaker has made a three-on-the-tree vehicle in decades.)
It turns out that there are now don’t-want-my-truck-anymore songs on the country charts, thanks to Dylan Scott:
I would suggest that McGraw and Scott trade truck, except that you’ll notice what happens to Scott’s truck at the end of the video.
It is interesting that two artists, or their writers, came up with the same song theme so close together time-wise.
One wonders who will be the artist who writes about a breakup with his truck. As someone pointed out, once trucks become self-driving a truck can initiate a breakup.
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First: Today is, or was …
The number one album today in 1965 received no radio airplay on any pop radio station:
The number one British single today in 1968 was based on, but didn’t directly come from, a movie made in Italy with an American star:
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Today in 1926, Radio Corporation of America — then owned by General Electric Co., Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit Co. (now known as Chiquita Brands International) — created the National Broadcasting Co. …
… which later returned to RCA’s parent, General Electric Co. (from whose name came the famous NBC chimes), and now is part of what used to be Universal Studios …
… and is part of Comcast cable TV …
In a possibly strange way, that makes every Universal-owned show on NBC “pure NBCUniversal,” or something.
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One week from tonight I resume my radio sportscasting side thing on this radio station for at least the next nine Friday nights, with two more Saturday afternoon football games and three Thursday night volleyball matches … before the postseason begins.
I started doing this in September 1988 based on cable TV experience consisting of one girls basketball game and two-thirds of a hockey game. As I’ve written here before, it’s always been a part-time thing — a hobby that brings in money instead of the usual — and having seen a lot of radio from the inside I have concluded that being a part-timer is preferable to being in radio full-time for many reasons.
This is the thing I enjoy the most, and enjoy enough to want to do it to professional (as in network) standards, including the not-so-fun aspect of game prep, which usually takes up at least as much time as the actual game broadcast does. I have never announced beyond NCAA Division III college football, basketball and hockey (plus one semi-pro football championship with NFL rules), and at my age I doubt I will have
I wrote back in late June that I have been uncommonly blessed in broadcasting sports to have announced five state football championship games (where my team was 2–3), three state boys basketball tournaments (no state champion yet, though I have experience at that), three state girls basketball tournaments (one year I called two state championships in two hours, and then added another the next season), one state wrestling tournament, two state girls volleyball tournaments (most recently this year despite my team losing the game before state; then came positive COVID tests for the winning team), four state baseball tournaments (no winner there yet), one state softball tournament (which ended with “And that’s a state championship!”), and one state boys soccer tournament (with the house goalkeeper).
All of this wasn’t actually the motivation for today’s blog. A friend of mine forwarded a joke meme that was previously posted by a radio station that calls itself Steve FM. A long time ago I wrote about my idea for “Steve TV,” based on my temporarily ubiquitous presence on local cable TV due to my being a school board candidate while having announced two pre-state basketball tournament games.
It turns out there are two Steve FMs. One is, to be precise, 96.7 Steve FM in Columbia, S.C., while the other is 104.9 Steve FM (call letters, of course, WSTV, which you’d think would be Steve TV’s call letters, assuming we’re east of the Mississippi River, the W vs. K call-letter dividing line) in Roanoke, Va., a station that refers to itself as “Roanoke’s Random Radio.” Both are owned by iHeart Radio.
Each plays “adult hits,” defined by the always-accurate Wikipedia as “adult contemporary, pop and mainstream rock hits from the 1970s [or late 1960s] through at least the 1990s.” Another feature is that “Due to its broad nature, the adult hits format can be easily automated. This means that the station can be run with little to no on-air personalities (a trait that, in some cases, may be openly promoted by the station), leaving only staff involved in station operations, advertising sales, and promotional presences.”
Wikipedia adds that “A large number of adult hits stations utilize male names as their branding. The practice was popularized by the franchised Jack FM and Bob FM brands, and has been widely imitated with other common male names.” That includes Ben FM, Charlie FM, Chuck FM, Ed FM, Frank FM, Mac FM, Max FM, Mike FM, Rob FM, Sam FM, Ted FM, Tom FM, Wayne FM and, to be more inclusive I suppose, Kate FM.
I am not really a fan of automated radio, though I listen on occasion (until I hear a song I don’t like). Live and local is really the best radio. (It is, for instance, hard to get local weather updates when there is no one to provide them.) On the other hand, if it’s my radio station then I should be the voice, right? (As if anyone would listen to 24/7 Steve.)
Most music radio stations have a playlist of 250 to 300 songs. I have a YouTube playlist called, of course, Presty the DJ …
… with, as of this writing, 712 songs. Since the average radio station plays 360 songs a day, I could go through the whole playlist without a repeat every two days, and, unlike both terrestrial and satellite radio, never hear a song I don’t like.
As long as we’re going through this fantasy exercise, I should point out that I like theme blocks to a point (“60s at 6,” “70s at 7,” “80s at 8,” “Two-for Tuesdays,” etc.) I also like actual news (and entertainment news is not really news unless it has some sort of strange element to it, preferably one that makes a celebrity look stupid).
I also like comedy bits to a point. I grew up listening to Larry Lujack’s “Animal Stories” and “Cheap Trashy Showbiz Report” on WLS in Chicago. Later the former Rick and Len had “Small Town Crime Wave” and other bits on WAPL in Appleton. The most hilarious was probably “PO’d in the Post,” when they would reread segments from The Post~Crescent’s “Sound Off” column, which was nothing more than voicemails of people anonymously complaining about something.
Readers might recall that Rush Limbaugh started as a top 40 DJ …
… and his original idea was to combine rock and roll and right-wing politics. I’m not sure anyone has done that, and therefore I wonder if that’s possible, though combining rock music with libertarian politics is more consistent.
I usually listen to radio for music more than talk anyway.
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To the Person Who Gave Me the Virus:
I have no idea who you are, but our paths almost surely crossed last month in Las Vegas.
Even now I wouldn’t change a thing about that trip, by the way, which was a blast. The existence of the virus, it’s true, made my life a fraction of one percent more dangerous than it was before. But since I don’t have any mental disorders, I hadn’t calibrated my risk tolerance so precisely that such a tiny change would make me radically alter my life.
Naturally if you knew you were sick, you should have stayed home. Of all the advice they’ve given — mask wearing, social distancing, and all the rest — staying home when you’re sick would do by far the most good, yet we hear it urged upon us the least.
At the same time, The Hill reports that you can easily confuse the symptoms of the virus for allergies, so it’s entirely possible not to be aware that you’re contagious. I see no reason to assume bad will on your part.
Every time I leave my house I am taking a risk. We all are. I don’t blame you for the constraints imposed by reality.
If the chance of being struck by lightning increased tenfold tomorrow, this would not affect my behavior in any way. Not being neurotic, I don’t live my life as if the present rate of lightning strikes is precisely as high as I can tolerate.It has become almost impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this. For one thing, most people are shockingly misinformed. Ask the average person what the likelihood is of someone in his age cohort needing to be hospitalized for COVID, and his answer will be off by a factor of 10, if not 100. Guaranteed.
For that matter, I cannot believe how many people think masks are accomplishing anything. The laughable “studies” on masks generally assume what they set out to prove, and/or confine themselves to strangely arbitrary timeframes, before explosions in COVID spread.
Dozens of countries have seen their COVID charts go almost vertical after (not necessarily immediately after, but after) introducing large-scale masking, which is what the charts would look like if masks accomplished absolutely nothing. These places are ignored, because nobody is told about them.
Meanwhile, there have been essentially zero COVID deaths in Sweden over the past month, and the rest of Scandinavia is also doing very well despite very little masking or other restrictions.
The world acts as if these countries do not exist. As usual with the “you’re to blame for the virus” people, success stories like these are of no interest, because there’s nobody they can demonize — and demonizing people is their favorite pastime.
The case of Nepal is interesting, too. After a lockdown that ended in July 2020, they decided essentially to proceed as normal. They’re a poor country, and they chose the radical, unheard-of approach of overturning a policy that would have had them starving to death.
And guess what?
They’re doing fine.
“Public health officials” were stumped, but at this point who can be surprised by that? What we laughingly call our “public health” establishment has made fools of themselves during this entire fiasco.
Nepal is at 340 deaths per million. Compare that to locked-down countries like the UK (1909), Spain (1756), Belgium (2170), or Peru (5883).
Back in the United States, the Sun Belt spike of 2020 came down with zero behavioral changes of any kind. The “COVID is your fault” people are too determined to blame someone to show any curiosity about this, even though it absolutely should evoke curiosity.
COVID comes and goes seasonally and regionally, and blows its way past our silly masks and six-foot floor stickers.
With my friend Tim Scott, I created a website where people can test their ability to determine which alleged mitigation measures accomplished what. If they work, it should be easy and obvious to choose which line on a graph represents a state or country that implemented it and which line represents one that did not.
So go ahead. Try your hand at it. If any of the insanity accomplished anything, it’ll be a breeze: CovidChartsQuiz.com. …
Now it’s true: I was definitely laid up in bed for a while. But not a single kid should have missed a single basketball practice to keep me from getting sick. Imagine the selfishness involved in that kind of demand.
Screw that.
And nor should you, mysterious Las Vegas person, feel sorry for me. I don’t want you staying in your house! I don’t want you refusing to live! I’m glad you were out living your life, enjoying things that make life worth living. Merely preserving your biological existence is unworthy of a human being.
This is especially so when we’ve been given no indication of precisely what would constitute an all-clear. It’s all arbitrariness piled upon more anti-scientific arbitrariness.
We should all be inspired by the words of Lord Sumption in the UK:“What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends. Life is a crowded football match or a live concert. Life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship, an arm around one’s back, laughter or tears shared at less than two meters. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is.”
Thank you, Las Vegas person, for refusing to be inhuman, for refusing to be an automaton, and for saying yes to those things that bring us joy and make our lives meaningful.
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CNN and other alarmist mass media outlets have been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans but nobody seems to care, including those outlets themselves. Throughout the pandemic, CNN and certain other cable news networks deliberately induced panic in order to boost their ratings and the CDC recently revealed that anxiety is the second most important contributing factor to death from/with Covid. Mass media pundits may have been as deadly as Masses or mass meetings.
Anxiety, you see, suppresses the immune system, making panicked people more likely to contract and spread Covid and other infectious diseases and less able to fend off those nasties once infected. It stands to reason, then, that outlets that remain laser-focused on facts, like AIER, and that stressed moderate policies, like the Great Barrington Declaration, saved lives to the extent that, despite suffering sundry forms of censorship, they were able to calm anxieties.
First, CNN et al. It is by now notorious that its producers were caught on tape admitting that its infamous death ticker was a cynical ploy to boost ratings. Producer Charlies Chester told his fake Tinder date that “fear really drives numbers … which is why we constantly have the death toll on the side.” (The video is such a smoking gun that it is technically illegal in Massachusetts and other states that have effectively outlawed the Second Amendment.)
Chester admitted that constantly displaying the seemingly quickly increasing number was not to inform audiences but to get them to keep tuning in. Network president Jeff Zucker, Chester said, used a “red phone” to tell producers to ratchet up the number for ratings effect.
While it remains unclear why anyone would watch cable news for any reason, people did tune in, in large numbers, and many found themselves made more anxious by the spectacle they saw to the point that some semi-responsible mass media outlets, like the BBC, questioned whether remaining informed was worth the emotional costs of the nonstop Covid death cult coverage.
If people had known about the close link between anxiety and death, they most certainly would have turned off the boob tube and maybe the few news executives who still have souls would have toned down the death and despair angle too. Then president Edward Stringham knew nothing good could come of the constant hype and ordered TV coverage turned off in AIER offices during working hours.
Second, the CDC, the putative “science,” has established that anxiety was linked to Covid-19 infection and death. In a study released on 1 July and titled “Underlying Medical Conditions and Severe Illness Among 540,667 Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19, March 2020-March 2021,” a score of Ph.D. and M.D. researchers show that “the strongest risk factors for death were [1] obesity … [and 2] anxiety and fear-related disorders.”
Specifically, obese people were 30 percent more likely to die if they contracted Covid, while people suffering anxiety were 28 percent more likely to pass away. In other words, being anxious was almost as deadly as being fat.
The authors point out, however, that the exact causal connections between anxiety and death by/with Covid-19 remains unclear and “may include a reduced ability to prevent infection among patients with anxiety disorders, the immunomodulatory and/or cardiovascular effects of medications used to treat these disorders, or severe COVID-19 illness exacerbating anxiety disorders.”
In any event, sitting around watching CNN while stress eating was hardly a recipe for immune system health. And that points to one of the many bizarre aspects of the public health policies promulgated during the pandemic, the almost complete lack of calls for improving immune health, which can be greatly augmented through proper diet, exercise, and attitude. Instead, many lockdown policies served to limit exercise and many who tried to discuss vitamins found themselves attacked and censored.
In fact, as clinically nearly useless and environmentally harmful mask mandates begin to creep back into policy discourse, it is important to point out that individual measures, including losing weight and boosting natural immunities, is a much more effective way of “staying safe,” from all sorts of maladies, than top-down policies. Listen to your personal doctor, not Dr. Fow Chi, and for goodness sake read rational sources of news, or better yet listen to them while getting some exercise. And eat a lemon instead of watching one.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 