I will be on WBEL radio, which calls itself The Big 1380, on Big Mornings with Ted Ehlen Friday at 6:45 a.m.
Thanks to the Internet, you can listen, if you dare, online here. WBEL is based in Beloit, home of Big Eight (which now has 10 high schools, but never mind that) Conference rival Beloit Memorial. Up Interstate 90 from Beloit is Janesville, home of the late GM Assembly Division plant that built our 1975 Chevrolet Caprice, all 18 feet 1 inch and 4,300 pounds of 1970s Detroit massiveness.
My own Beloit experience consists of a couple of college basketball games in Beloit College’s Flood Arena, the unusual experience of driving into Illinois for a posted Wisconsin highway detour, and back-to-back trips from Cuba City to Beloit between Christmas and New Year’s Day to cover high school basketball. The latter is where we discovered Domenico’s, delivering excellent Italian food since 1973. (It’s probably a good thing I don’t live in Beloit since Domenico’s has an $8.95 lunch buffet. It was work to leave the 200 Club; too many trips to the lunch buffet, and I might be heading toward the 300 Club.)
It turns out that WBEL carries the controversial Sly afternoons. As you know I’ve been a guest of his on a couple of occasions, one of which went beyond tendentious to unpleasantly tendentious. (There are two people with whom I’ve been on the radio that you will never experience again.) The last time I was on with Sly was following my interesting five minutes with Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, and if that was controversial, well, that was Morlino’s fault.
H.L. Mencken was a newspaperman back in the days when most reporters and commentators were insufficiently cynical about politics. Mencken was certainly not insufficiently cynical.
Indeed, one wonders what Mencken would have thought of today. Four years ago Washington Blog started with a quote:
“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.” – H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken was a renowned newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Sun from 1906 until 1948. His biting sarcasm seems to fit perfectly in today’s world. His acerbic satirical writings on government, democracy, politicians and the ignorant masses are as true today as they were then. I believe the reason his words hit home is because he was writing during the last Unraveling and Crisis periods in America. The similarities cannot be denied. There are no journalists of his stature working in the mainstream media today. His acerbic wit is nowhere to be found among the lightweight shills that parrot their corporate masters’ propaganda on a daily basis and unquestioningly report the fabrications spewed by our government. Mencken’s skepticism of all institutions is an unknown quality in the vapid world of present day journalism.
The Roaring Twenties of decadence, financial crisis caused by loose Fed monetary policies, stock market crash, Depression, colossal government redistribution of wealth, and ultimately a World War, all occurred during his prime writing years. I know people want to believe that the world only progresses, but they are wrong. The cycles of history reveal that people do not change, just the circumstances change. How Americans react to the undulations of history depends upon their age and generational position. We are currently in a Crisis period when practical, truth telling realists like Mencken are most useful and necessary.
Mencken captured the essence of American politics and a disconnected populace 80 years ago. Even though many people today feel the average American is less intelligent, more materialistic, and less informed than ever before, it was just as true in 1930 based on Mencken’s assessment:
“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
You can make your own judgment on the accuracy of his statement considering the last two gentlemen to occupy the White House. His appraisal of U.S. Senators and citizens in our so-called Democracy captures the spirit of the travesty that passes for leadership and civic responsibility in this country today.
“Democracy gives the beatification of mediocrity a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebacks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters — which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.”
People still read newspapers in the 1930s to acquire credible information about the economy, politics and economy. Today’s corporate owned rags aren’t fit to line a bird cage. The mainstream media is a platform for the lies of their corporate sponsors. Each TV network or newspaper spouts propaganda that supports the financial interests and ideology they are beholden to. Does anyone think they are obtaining the truth from Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh? Evidently the answer is yes. The upcoming presidential campaign will be a nightmare of endless negative advertisements created by Madison Avenue maggots and paid for by rich powerful men attempting to herd the mindless sheeple towards their ultimate slaughter. … Fear has worked for 100 years in controlling the masses, as Mencken noted during his time:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
In the 1930s you needed to count on newspapers for the truth. The purpose of those who wield power is to keep the masses dumbed down and paranoid regarding terrorist threats and artificial enemies. By convincing the dense public that acquiring material goods on credit was a smart thing to do, they have trapped them in a web of debt. By making life an inexhaustible bureaucratic nightmare or rules, regulations, forms, ID cards, registrations, and red tape, those in power maintain control and accumulate power. H.L. Mencken would be proud:
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” …
An informed, interested, questioning public would be a danger to the government as described by H.L. Mencken:
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”
There were already two fiscal hurricanes of unfunded liabilities and current deficits churning towards our shores before Obama and his non-critical thinking Democratic minions launched a third storm called Obamacare. No matter how many intellectually deceitful mouthpieces like Paul Krugman and Rush Limbaugh misrepresent the facts, the fiscal foundation of the country is crumbling under the weight of unfunded entitlement promises, out of control government spending and far flung military misadventures. Only someone who is intellectually bankrupt, like Krugman, would declare the National Debt at $8 trillion as a looming disaster when George Bush was President, but declare that a $15.6 trillion National Debt headed towards $20 trillion by 2015 isn’t a danger now that Barack Obama is President. The intellectual and moral credentials required to write for a major newspaper have fallen markedly since the days of Mencken. …
H.L. Mencken understood the false promises of democracy 80 years ago:
“Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. It is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I have written here before about the (largely inaccurate or exaggerated) portrayals of journalists in entertainment, from the heights (“All the President’s Men” and “The Green Hornet”) to the depths (the brief CBS-TV series “Hard Copy”).
(That includes the scare quotes in the headline. Heroes should be rightly identified as soldiers who give their lives for their fellow soldiers, or police officers and firefighters who see one of the World Trade Center towers collapse, and nonetheless head into the other tower to try to save lives, or police officers who headed toward the gunshots last night in Dallas while the people protesting those same police were running in the opposite direction.)
While looking up the old radio drama “Night Beat,” which is occasionally on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Old Time Radio Drama weekend nights, I came upon an entire website, “Newspaper Heroes on the Air,” described by its creator thusly:
“JHeroes.com” or “Newspaper Heroes on the Air” is a nostalgic media-history blog and podcast about old-time radio’s portrayals of journalists, from fictional role models like Clark Kent and Lois Lane to dramatized biographies of Greeley, Pulitzer and other pioneer printers, publishers, editors and reporters. Since 2011, the site also has been a Web-first draft of what may be a printed book someday.
The phenomenon of mid-20th century radio dramatists glorifying newspaper journalists strikes me as ironic and interesting, considering that radio was the “new medium” of the day — competing with newspapers for audience attention and advertising. But, through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, radio’s dramatic writers couldn’t help reflecting just how big a part of daily life newspapers were. Along the way radio offered its listening audience lessons in newspaper history, reporting-practice, newspaper ethics, newspaper business, and newspaper romance. …
I’m interested in how the public formed its opinions of 20th century newspaper journalists: Their ethics, professional practices, personal lifestyles, and importance to society. Obviously some impressions came from what journalists said in the newspapers themselves, but images of reporters, editors and publishers were present throughout American popular culture, from Broadway to Hollywood to best-selling fiction. Numerous books have focused on movie portrayals of journalists, but radio had its own messages, delivered them right into the home, and has been mostly neglected by “image of the journalist” researchers.
Some of Hollywood movies’ newspaper characters were romanticized or heroic; others were presented as sad stereotypes — immature, sexist, drunken and unreliable. I don’t have “quantitative” conclusions, but I think radio’s portrayals of newspaper journalists were more positive, benefitting from broadcasters’ sensitivity to the living-room audience, to advertisers, and to critics who might pounce on antisocial messages.
While some of the programs discussed here are comic-book shallow or soap-opera silly, others explore serious “newspaper drama” themes — media ethics, reporters’ loyalty to a newspaper (sometimes devastating to personal relationships), journalism as a career for women, editors’ civic spirit, citizens’ respect for their local paper, the value of a free press, abuse of media power, and more. You’ll also hear about the value of newspapers’ investigative work, political crusades, muckraking, crime-fighting, and sometimes a bit of cynical frustration about “the system.” (The sort of thing that drove Britt Reid to becomeThe Green Hornet.)
The related areas of portrayal of journalists in films, fiction, comic books, songs, or other manifestations of popular culture “pop” up from time to time in these pages, along with links to media-history research resources. (See the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at USC Annenberg for related materials, especially concerning Hollywood film portrayals of journalists.) …
I also discovered that NPR’s All Things Considered — the best of present-day radio — had posted online 10 minutes of Walter Cronkite reminiscing about another old series I’d been listening to, one that had dramatized his own adventures during World War II.
Opening with a mixture of kettledrums and jazz clarinet, “Night Beat” was a Chicago-flavored 1950s drama about a newspaper columnist, narrating his own half-hour tales of writing a late-night column on deadline.
The well-written series appears to have caught the ear of professional journalists: At the end of one episode, star Frank Lovejoy stepped out of character to deliver praise and congratulations to the real-life officers of the National Press Club. Another week, the president of a fraternity for women journalists presented Lovejoy with a scroll for his “honest and convincing portrayal of a newspaperman.”
Each week, the columnist’s first words set the mood for the episode, which ranged from suspenseful “newsroom-noir” detective-mystery to sentimental melodrama and human interest; an O.Henry twist often took them from one genre to the other. The opener usually began this way:
“Hi, this is Randy Stone. I cover the night beat for the Chicago Star. My stories start in many different ways. This one began…”
Frank Lovejoy played columnist Randy Stone with a cast of Hollywood’s strongest supporting voices, often including the very recognizable William Conrad, Gunsmoke’sMatt Dillon on radio, whose film appearances included the gruff city editor in the newspaper film “- 30 -” with Jack Webb. On Night Beat, Conrad might be a punch-drunk boxer one week, a dying mobster another — or Stone’s boss.
Whatever the setting and cast, Stone told quite a “how I got the story” tale, from his opening summary to his wrap-up remarks, usually accompanied by the clack of a telephone receiver or the ratchet of a typewriter carriage, and a call of, “Copy boy!” Sometimes the idea of a reporter starting work at dusk and delivering his story before dawn provides a frame. …
Frank Lyons, listeners learn, was a career-driven Northwestern grad who had made himself the top newspaperman in town when Stone was “a cub,” but Lyons was set-up, given fake records and tricked into publishing a big story that led to a libel suit and destroyed his reputation.
“I was bounced and black-balled and washed up overnight,” he tells Stone. In classic film-noir fashion, a femme fatale is involved. And so is a hood, involved in the original frame-up years earlier, who slugs Stone when he isn’t looking and adds insult to injury with the line, “They’ve got the dumbest reporters in the world in this town.”
After Stone comes to, he digs up the old details with the help of a researcher back in the Star’s file room, and winds his way to a moral about the dramas and ironies of life and death, and a promise to put Frank’s byline on one last story.
Details like Lyons’ Chicago area journalism school, his reflections on the excitement of a newspaper career, Stone’s willingness to help out another newspaperman in trouble, and his reporting techniques are all examples of the series’ attention to journalistic details. …
Stone reflects on the realities of the newspaper business as well as the details of life in Chicago, from the sound of an elevated train to the jazz clubs and street sounds. Like Chicago columnists from Finley Peter Dunne to Mike Royko, he paints vivid pictures of the city and its people, even if the prose does get a bit purple at times. Lovejoy’s narration sometimes wraps a story around the story.
“Tonight is just about washed up. The sky is getting that tattle-tale grey around the edges. Another hour or so, three million alarm clocks will start yakking against the eardrums of Chicago’s dear hearts and gentle people. A goodly number of said dear hearts and gentle people will stumble to the front door for their copy of the Morning Star.
“I’m wondering what they’ll say when they read the opening sentence of the Night Beat story for today, the line that goes, ‘This is a love story with the happiest ending that I’ve ever heard.’
“I guess they’ll figure spring has got me in its perfumed clutches and more than likely I’ll wind up wrapped around the baloney sandwich and that will be that. Only if they just keep reading, maybe they’ll be in for a strange kind of surprise…”
In the 1958 series “Frontier Gentleman,” radio drama brought a cultured London Times correspondent to the American West of the 1870s — and in the process explored ethics, bravery, style, humor and a sense of adventure that might be hoped for in professional journalists in any century.
John Dehner, a character actor in films, radio and television since the 1940s, starred in the weekly CBS adult Western as J.B. Kendall, who may have looked (or sounded) like a city dude, but proved to be a man of action.
The show’s opening set the tone:
“Herewith, an Englishman’s account of life and death in the West. As a reporter for the London Times, he writes his colorful and unusual stories. But as a man with a gun, he lives and becomes a part of the violent years in the new territories.”
In the 41 available episodes, Kendall meets newsmakers like Jesse James, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, among others. He hopes to interview George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull, but with less success. From the scripts and acting to the cinematic musical score, Frontier Gentleman was an example of mature state-of-the-art radio storytelling just before American radio drama as a genre disappeared in the glare of television. …
Despite the series title and Kendall’s cultivated accent, this mild-mannered reporter was no London dandy. Described as a former British cavalry officer in India, he was shown to be handy with a six-gun, a knife and his fists, while he spun his prose poems from Missouri to Montana Territory. He even had a flair for language when getting the drop on the bad guys:
“You may very slowly and carefully unbuckle your gunbelt and let it drop to the floor. If you try to be foolish and brave, I shall be delighted to shoot you in the stomach.” (Remittance Man)
Alas, “Night Beat” was on for only two years, and there were only 41 “Frontier Gentleman” episodes. Another series was on for 15 years:
“The power and the freedom of the press is a flaming sword; that it may be a faithful servant of all the people, use it justly. Hold it high. Guard it well!” — Edward J. Pawley as “Steve Wilson, fighting managing editor” of the Big Town Illustrated Press
That motto was announced at the start of eachBig Town episode for most of the series’ 15-year run. With such a lead-in, it may seem the most outspokenly “pro-journalism” radio drama, although most episodes involved more crime-fighting than news-reporting.
Even a December 1948 episode titled “Deadline at Dawn” that opens with a star reporter being sent to Washington to cover preparations for President Truman’s second inauguration becomes a typical battle against “racket rats.”
By the end of the half-hour, Wilson is holding a gun on one crook and his photographer is apologizing for slugging another with “$280 bucks worth of camera.” “Cheap at twice the price,” the editor replies.
In its later years, the show’s “fighting managing editor” punched bad guys more than anyone punched a typewriter at the Illustrated Press. Editor Steve Wilson also had a habit of calling his star reporter “Lorelei, my lovely” and inviting her to sit on the corner of his desk for a chat, with a “What’s on your mind, beautiful?” (At least he didn’t ask her to sit on his lap, like Walter Burns did with ex-wife Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday.”)
Judging by the episodes available for online listening, “Big Town” may have spent less time on reporters doing interviews, shouting across the newsroom, or heading off on assignment than “The Green Hornet” and “The Adventures of Superman.” But “Big Town” was still the best known of radio’s newspaper-focused series for much of its 1937-1952 run, according to On the air: the encyclopedia of old-time radio by John Dunning.
“Writer Jerry McGill had been a newspaperman himself but took great creative license, slipping into high melodrama,” Dunning said. Still, he called McGill’s reporters “diligent sober champions of justice.” (p.89)
Instead of showing Illustrated Press reporters tracking down stories with tips, interviews and shoe-leather in a “newsroom procedural,” McGill told newsworthy stories about rackets, wrong-doing and risks to public safety — all woven into dramatic half-hour episodes. His “Big Town” stories used an economically small cast and were limited to a confining half-hour format, unlike daily serials like “Front Page Farrell,” “Wendy Warren and the News,” “Betty and Bob,” or even “The Adventures of Superman,” which took weeks to tell a story in 15-minute installments. It’s no wonder Steve Wilson came off as more two-fisted detective than pencil-pushing editor.
Well, that’s how you know it’s fiction. What overweight editor (the result of too much sitting and not enough getting out of the office) could be two-fisted when he only needs one fist with which to drink his daytime coffee and nighttime adult beverage? For that matter, I know of no journalist who is remotely handy with firearms. Notebooks and cellphones are not lethal weapons. (However, a UW–Madison classmate of mine used a 400-mm telephoto lens as a weapon when, while shooting photos of a White House protest, one of the protesters got too close to her. She, however, was an Army veteran.)
Clark Kent’s Superman was not the only superhero on radio to take advantage of the information flow of a “major metropolitan newspaper.” The Green Hornet’s adventures almost always kept one foot in the newsroom of The Daily Sentinel, a newspaper that offered a reward for his capture — but had an even closer relationship than that.
The original Green Hornet answers the question, “What can happen when a publisher gets frustrated with the failure of his editorials to Bring About Change?”
Almost 30 years after The Green Hornet’s first success on radio, a TV version was launched in 1966 by the same network that had been running the “camp” pop-art juvenile Batman series. The two shows even had cross-promotion episodes, although The Hornet generally attempted a slightly more serious tone. A 1966 cameo, stored at YouTube, has Batman and Robin encounter The Green Hornet and Kato — probably the only time the Hornet said he was “on special assignment for The Daily Sentinel.”
The Hornet, after all, was newspaper publisher Britt Reid’s secret identity. On TV as well as radio, The Daily Sentinel‘s star reporters considered the Hornet a menace — a masked mystery man who always seemed to escape just as the police arrived to corral other racketeers and gangsters.
Radio listeners knew the secret: The Hornet was really The Daily Sentinel’s young publisher, donning a mask and pretending to be a crook to bring down criminals who operated “inside the law,” despite the paper’s editorial campaigns against crime and corruption.
Assisted by his brilliant inventor/valet, Kato, who had provided him with a super-fast car and a sleeping-gas gun, radio’s Green Hornet brought criminals to justice by hoaxing, blackmailing or trapping them in contrived “sting” operations.
The TV version relied more on James Bond or Batman style gadgetry, plus actor Bruce Lee’s martial arts expertise as Kato. The radio series and the quickly spun-off 1940-41 movie serials had Kato deliver a karate chop now and then, but fighting was never his main function until the TV series came along.
Like TV itself, that 1960s Hornet was about visual action, and the newspaper played a smaller role. In fact, by then Britt Reid’s media empire included a TV station as well as the paper; he even had a remote studio in his home, the better to broadcast emergency editorials.
On radio, the Green Hornet had much more to do with traditional newspaper journalism — reporters hitting the street, providing eyewitness accounts, interviewing newsmakers, trying to get at shifty businessmen and crooked politicians. The Sentinel’s meat was the racket-busting, crusading type of journalism popular in B-movies and hit radio series like “Casey, Crime Photographer” and “Big Town.”
Sentinel reporters were an active part of almost every Hornet story, sometimes uncovering crimes while demonstrating solid newsgathering skills, sometimes getting taken in by the Hornet themselves. One reporter, the Irish-accented Michael Axford, was mostly for comic relief — a former policeman who helped cover the police beat for the Sentinel while serving as Reid’s bodyguard. (He was also a spy for Reid’s father, the real media mogul.)
The Sentinel’s racket-busting was rarely comic book “super-hero” stuff. There were no aliens or costumed villains, but plenty of crooked dealings involving corrupt officials, public works projects, protection rackets terrorizing small businesses, and a wide range of confidence games and swindles. During World War II, spies and saboteurs were part of the problem, along with domestic black market criminals… all topics that might be find in a hard-hitting real-world newspaper.
Whie the Sentinel never seemed to run into serious business trouble, some Hornet plots centered on competition with its sensational tabloid competition, the Clarion, and gave Britt Reid a chance to explain the differnce between responsible and irresponsible journalism. At least one story concerned an investigative reporter for a radio station, and the newspaper reporters’ attempt to investigate his murder.
That sentence “The original Green Hornet answers the question, “What can happen when a publisher gets frustrated with the failure of his editorials to Bring About Change?” is the best sentence I’ve read this week.
The website also includes my favorite newspaper movie, “Deadline USA“:
The newspaper is after a murderer. The founder’s daughters are after a profitable sale that will close the paper. Their mother has a change of heart, and tells her daughters, “Stupidity is not hereditary; you acquired it all by yourselves.”
A gangster is after the editor: “You’ve got two Pulitzer Prizes, they say. Are they worth much?”
Editor Ed Hutcheson (Humphrey Bogart in the film, Dan Dailey on the radio) has great lines about good newspapers and bad. …
Memorable scenes:
1. The Day… A 1950s newsroom full of typewriters, pneumatic tubes, rewrite men in headsets, and a AP teletype bulletin saying the paper is being sold.
2. The newspaper wake. The staff “testify” at a journalism saloon… One man remembers being interviewed by the paper’s founder:
“Are you a journalist or a reporter?… A journalist makes himself the hero of the story; a reporter is only a witness.”
Hutcheson describes the competing newspaper, ironically named The Standard:
“It’s wild and yellow, but it’s not exactly a newspaper.”
To a young man seeking a newspaper job:
“So you want to be a reporter? Here’s some advice about this racket. Don’t ever change your mind. It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.”
Later, he assigns the guy to the rewrite desk on the (late-night, red-eyed) “lobster shift,” even if it is only for a night or two before the paper closes.
3. When one of his reporters is assaulted outside the Hall of Records, the editor gets fighting mad. At a meeting with the owners, he quotes the founder’s statement of Pulitzer-like principles, to publish…
“Without fear, without distortion, without hope of personal gain…”
4. Another reporter is sent to investigate the beating:
“From this a fellow could catch a hole in the head…”
“He could. That bother you?”
“Oh no. No. No.”
5. Ed:
“The newspaper has no political party. We support men for office, some good, some bad.”
Even the competing yellow sheet’s publisher is impressed, ordering his city editor to get on the story and do some good old-fashioned journalism. (Coincidentally, the city editor is played by Joseph Crehan, the same actor who — as another city editor — gave an idealistic young news photographer a hard time 14 years earlier in Here’s Flash Casey.)
6. Editor:
“I figured with a story like this they’d never close us down. Well, we showed them how a real newspaper can function.”
7. The closing conversation…
Gangster: “Print that story, you’re a dead man!… (editor holds phone at arms length, toward the roaring presses) What’s that noise?”
Ed:”It’s the press, baby! And there’s nothing you can do about it…”
That is one of the greatest final scenes in the history of film. (Not that I’m Siskel or Ebert.)
Surprisingly to me, one newspaper movie not on the website is “-30-“, the name signifying the end of a story in the pre-computer days, starring Jack Webb and William Conrad:
Everything I’ve listed so far, and all the other depictions on the website, are necessarily spiced up because, well, reporting is not very exciting to watch. How exciting is watching someone write something down? How exciting to watch is typing?
The site, however, also includes real-life journalists, including the one I’m starting to emulate in worldview, H.L. Mencken:
When Henry Louis Mencken died in January 1956, both NBC and CBS memorialized the Baltimore newspaperman who had become one of the nation’s most outspoken magazine editors. Their presentations demonstrate two very different radio approaches to storytelling.
CBS Radio Workshop’s dramatized biography, broadcast in June, was titled “Bring on the Angels.” The cast of at least 10 actors included Jackson Beck — well-known announcer for “The Adventures of Superman,” Luis Van Rooten, and Mason Adams, who was back in a newsroom as editor Charlie Hume on the Lou Grant TV series 20 years later. The program was described as an affectionate revival of Mencken’s earlier writing, and — based on his own notes and published work — captured his love of newspapering, from his first job as a young man in 1899, “with a typewriter, a spitoon of my own, and a beat.”
As city editor in 1904 at the age of 24, he supervised what he called his greatest story — intense coverage of the Great Baltimore Fire — ultimately publishing the paper in Philadelphia after the newspaper building itself was burned out. The radio production is complete with sounds of crashing masonry and crackling flames… and the crumpling papers as the actor playing Mencken rummages through the remains of the office. The fire had destroyed almost everything, he said, “even my collection of pieces of hangman’s ropes.”
The caustic Mencken of later years is not part of the CBS story, but became the focus of the NBC broadcast a month later.
NBC’s Biographies in Sound broadcast its profile in a more journalistic or documentary style, as “The Bitter Byline.” It featured soundbites of Mencken himself, living up to the title of the episode, along with reminiscences and analysis from a variety of experts.
Among others, novelist James T. Farrell, journalist Alistair Cooke and Mencken biographer William Manchester discuss Mencken’s life and works, his respect for truth, his early championing of young writers, his use of language, his hand-washing habits, and his feelings about Germany and Hitler.
The website even talks about going from one disrespected profession, journalism, to another, politics:
From adventure series like The Green Hornet to soap operas like Betty & Bob, comedies like Bright Star, and serious dramatic anthologies like NBC University Theater, radio’s fictional newspaper men and women covered elections, took on political corruption, or went to work for the candidates of their choice.
The DuPont Cavalcade of America’s inspiring stories of American values often featured editors who advised presidents of the United States — Anne Royall helping Andrew Jackson take on the bankers, Horace Greeley counseling Lincoln on what to do with Jefferson Davis, William Allen White lunching at the White House. Other stories showed the political power of the press to mold public opinion: Nast’s editorial cartoons bringing down Boss Tweed, Pulitzer raising pennies to build a base for the Statue of Liberty, Sarah Josepha Hale mounting campaigns to establish Bunker Hill monument and Thanksgiving Day, and many more.
As in real life, journalists portrayed in radio dramas walked the line between covering civic life and becoming a partisan — or actually running for office.
Actress Irene Dunne seems to have been a likely candidate for such parts. As newspaper publisher Sabra Cravatt in the film and radio adaptations of Cimarron, she was elected to Congress. As newspaper editor in the series Bright Star, she ran for mayor. So did Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet, after Clark Kent assured him the paper did not need his daily attention.
Will Rogers Jr., in real life newspaper publisher who was elected to Congress, settled for covering an election or two in his series “Rogers of the Gazette,” except for the episode where he gets to play golf with the president.
The strongest political novel of the era was adapted for radio a few months before it made it to the silver screen.
In the movies of All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford (1949) or Sean Penn (2006), charismatic Southern politician Willie Stark is obviously the main character.
But for the only radio adaptation I’ve found of Robert Penn Warren’s novel — as in the novel itself — the burden is literally on the teller of the tale, former journalist Jack Burden.
NBC University Theater adapted the story for broadcast January 16, 1949, before the firstfilm version premiere that November and a year before its general release. Following the program’s university-of-the-air format, it added scholarly discussion of Warren and his book at the half-way point, presented by critic Granville Hicks. …
Eight minutes into the story, Burden explains how they met when he was covering Stark’s first campaign, trimming his fingernails during the speeches — until the key “a hick like you” speech that showed Stark’s promise as a populist leader, not unlike Louisiana’s real-life Huey Long, who met a similar end.
Burden doesn’t reflect on his shift in role from journalist to partisan hack putting his research skills to work on tasks that come close to blackmail. But students of politics, ethics and the media can read a lot between the lines of the hour-long broadcast.
In the end, Burden is almost a reporter again, lining up facts, asking the key question, “How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?” Historian or journalism student, it’s a good question to keep asking.
You can hear me Friday on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org, which should play “Night Beat” more often on its weekend night Old Time Radio Drama.
On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you’d think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user’s friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain sources over others, but about better “connecting people and ideas.”
But Richard Edelman, the head of the communications marketing firm Edelman, sees something more significant in the change: proof of a new “world of self-reference” that, once you notice it, helps explain everything from Donald Trump’s appeal to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. Elites used to possessoutsized influence and authority, Edelman notes, but now they only have a monopoly on authority. Influence largely rests with the broader population. People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.
For 16 years, Edelman’s company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm’s findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe “a person like me”—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A “person like me” is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “We have a reversal of traditional influence. It is going not top-down, but sideways.”
This is part of a larger divide that has been opening up between “mass populations” and “informed publics” (Edelman defined the latter group as those who have a college degree, regularly consume news media, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group in a given country). The 2008 financial crisis, he argued, produced widespread suspicion that elites only act in their own interests, not those of the people, and that elites don’t necessarily have access to better information than the rest of the population does. The sluggish, unequal recovery from that crisis—the wealthy bouncing back while many others struggle with stagnant incomes—has only increased the skepticism.
The result of all this is deepening distrust of institutions, especially the government and the media, among “mass populations” in many countries. (Among “informed publics,” by contrast, trust in institutions has grown in the years since the economic crash.)
The financial crisis may have occurred eight years ago, but some of its gravest consequences are only now becoming evident. “It took people a long time to come around to the idea that, ‘I’m actually not going to get back to where I was [before the financial crisis]. In fact, my future is actually quite dim,’” Edelman said.
“Between the top 25 percent of income earners and the bottom 25 percent of income earners, there’s a 31-point gap in trust in institutions in the United States,” he added. “Donald Trump comes right out of that statistic.”
The gap persists across countries facing varying degrees of economic difficulty: It’s 29 points in France, 26 points in Brazil, and 22 points in India.
The gap is 19 points in the United Kingdom, where those who recently voted to leave the European Union, generally had lower incomes and less education than those who voted to remain. In the run-up to the referendum, the market-research firm YouGov found that “Leave” supporters were far more likely than “Remain” supporters to prefer relying on the opinions of ordinary people than on those of experts. On the question of Britain’s membership in the EU, 81 percent of “Leave” voters said they didn’t trust the views of British politicians, compared with 67 percent of “Remain” voters. Eighty-five percent of “Leave” voters said they didn’t trust the views of political leaders in other countries, compared with 50 percent of “Remain” voters.
Edelman said that people tend to trust businesses more than governments, in part because “business gets stuff done” while government is seen as “incapable.” People trust technology companies in particular because “they deliver value.”
This is the essential rationale for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He claims to be the complete opposite of America’s “stupid, incompetent, crooked” leaders. He presents himself as a businessman—more an entrepreneur, the head of a family business, than an elitist Big Businessman—who will get stuff done and deliver value. He asks voters to put their faith in him, not in the discredited institution of the government that he would nonetheless need to lead if elected president.
Indeed, a 2015 Pew poll found that Trump is viewed more favorably by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are angry with government than by those who aren’t.
So far, what Friedman writes makes sense. And then he goes off the rails to some extent:
In democratic systems, this deep distrust of government is corrosive. For democracies to function properly, the German journalist Henrik Müller recently wrote, there must be “enough common values that [people] trust their institutions, that majorities and minorities respect one another, and that everyone generally deals fairly with one another.”
The anger currently on display in many parts of the world is borne of anxiety, including concern that “we may not know how to architect trusted institutions at scale in public space,” said Jane Holl Lute, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, at a separate session at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “Our institutions—their weight-bearing effectiveness for social problems of enormous complexity is being called into question now across the board.”
Donald Trump’s message may be a response to this collapse of trust in government, but it also might further undermine that trust. Writing in Foreign Policy, the journalist Valentina Pasquali pointed out that, like Trump, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi mercilessly trashed the media, the judiciary, and political parties. The upshot: During his time in office, voter-turnout rates and public trust in Italian institutions plummeted. “Today,” Pasquali wrote, “Italy’s voters remain as apathetic and embittered as ever.”
“As ever” dates back approximately to 1945 and Italy’s World War II loss, so suggesting Berlusconi is to blame is an overstatement.
A North Georgia newspaper publisher was indicted on a felony charge and jailed overnight last week – for filing an open-records request.
Fannin Focus publisher Mark Thomason, along with his attorney Russell Stookey, were arrested on Friday and charged with attempted identity fraud and identity fraud. Thomason was also accused of making a false statement in his records request.
Thomason’s relentless pursuit of public records relating to the local Superior Court has incensed the court’s chief judge, Brenda Weaver, who also chairs the state Judicial Qualifications Commission. Weaver took the matter to the district attorney, who obtained the indictments.
Thomason was charged June 24 with making a false statement in an open-records request in which he asked for copies of checks “cashed illegally.” Thomason and Stookey were also charged with identity fraud and attempted identity fraud because they did not get Weaver’s approval before sending subpoenas to banks where Weaver and another judge maintained accounts for office expenses. Weaver suggested that Thomason may have been trying to steal banking information on the checks.
But Thomason said he was “doing his job” when he asked for records.
“I was astounded, in disbelief that there were even any charges to be had,” said Thomason, 37, who grew up in Fannin County. “I take this as a punch at journalists across the nation that if we continue to do our jobs correctly, then we have to live in fear of being imprisoned.”
Thomason and Stookey are out on $10,000 bond and have a long list of things they cannot do or things they must do to avoid going to jail until their trials. On Thursday, for example, Thomason reported to a pretrial center and was told that he may have to submit to a random drug test – a condition of the bond on which he was released from jail last Saturday.
Alison Sosebee, district attorney in the three counties in the Appalachian Judicial Circuit, and Judge Weaver say the charges are justified. Weaver said she resented Thomason’s attacks on her character in his weekly newspaper and in conversations with her constituents.
“I don’t react well when my honesty is questioned,” Weaver said.
She said others in the community were using Thomason to get at her. “It’s clear this is a personal vendetta against me,” she said. “I don’t know how else to explain that.”
But legal experts expressed dismay at the punitive use of the Open Records Act.
“To the extent these criminal charges stem from the use of the Open Records Act undermines the entire purpose of the law,” said Hollie Manheimer, executive director of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. “The Open Records Act is the vehicle by which citizens access governmental information… Retaliation for use of the Open Records Act will inhibit every citizen from using it, and reel us back into the dark ages.”
Another expert said the charges against attorney Russell Stookey may also be unfounded. Robert Rubin, president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said it was wrong for the grand jury to indict a lawyer who “is using the legitimate court process for a subpoena to get records relevant for his case.”
The dispute grows out of a March 2015 incident involving another judge who is no longer on the bench. Judge Roger Bradley was presiding over several cases and asked the name of the next defendant. The assistant district attorney announced next up was “(Racial slur) Ray.” Bradley, who resigned earlier this year, repeated the slur and also talked about another man whose street name started with the same slur.
Thomason asked for the transcript after he was told courtroom deputies also used the slur.
But the transcript only noted that Bradley and the assistant district attorney used the word.
According to Thomason, the court reporter told him that it was “off the record” when others in the courtroom spoke the word so it would not be recorded in the transcript. He asked to listen to the audio recording, but his request was rejected.
In an article Thomason quoted the court reporter as saying the slur was not taken down each time it was used.
And then Thomason asked Stookey to file paperwork with the court to force the the stenographer, Rhonda Stubblefield, to release the recording.
Stubblefield responded with a $1.6 million counterclaim against Thomason, accusing him of defaming her in stories that said the transcript she produced may not be accurate. Two months later a visiting judge closed Thomason’s case, concluding that Thomason had not produced evidence the transcript was inaccurate.
Last April, Stubblefield dropped her counterclaim because, her lawyer wrote, it was unlikely Thomason could pay the award if she won.
The next month, however, Stubblefield filed paper work to recoup attorney’s fees even though last last year she was cut a check for almost $16,000 from then-Judge Bradley’s operating account.
“She was being accused of all this stuff. She was very distressed. She had done absolutely nothing wrong,” Weaver said of the judges’ decision to use court money to cover Stubblefield’s legal expenses. “She was tormented all these months and then had to pay attorneys’ fees. And the only reason she was sued was she was doing what the court policy was.”
Stubblefield’s lawyer, Herman Clark, said in court Stubblefield was asking for the money from Thomason or his attorney so she could replace the funds taken out of the court bank account. Clark said it was unfair to expect taxpayers to pick up the cost.
To fight Stubblefield’s claim for legal fees, Stookey filed subpoenas for copies of certain checks so he could show her attorneys had already been paid. One of those two accounts listed in a subpoena had Weaver’s name on it as well as the Appalachian Judicial Circuit.
Weaver said the identify fraud allegations came out of her concern that Thomason would use the banking information on those checks for himself.
“I have absolutely no interest in further misappropriating any government monies,” Thomason said. “My sole goal was to show that legal fees were paid from a publicly funded account.”
This is not about Al Gore, though Al Gore certainly has made money on the irrational fear of man’s effect on Earth.
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. may not be making money off “climate change” directly, but his employer is:
No contributor has written more frequently on the subject of climate change on these pages—45 times over the past 20 years according to the “study” behind a recent series of ads (at $27,309 a pop) assailing the Journal’s editorial page for its climate coverage.
Yet how ploddingly conventional my views have been: I’ve written that evidence of climate change is not evidence of what causes climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees, in its latest report estimating with less than 100% confidence that a human role accounts for half the warming between 1951 and 2010.
I’ve written that it would be astonishing if human activity had no impact, but the important questions are how and how much. The IPCC agrees, estimating that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial times would hike temperatures between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees (Celsius), notably an increasein the range of uncertainty since its last report.
I’ve said science has been unable to discern signal from noise in the hunt for man-made warming. Yup, that’s why the IPCC relies on computer simulations. Indeed, the most telling words in its latest report are a question: “Are climate models getting better, and how would we know?”
I’ve said it’s difficult to justify action on cost-benefit grounds. The Obama administration agrees, acknowledging that its coal plans will cost many billions but have no meaningful impact on climate even a century from now.
So how many columns out of 45 win approval from the Partnership for Responsible Growth, the new group paying for the Journal-baiting ad? Onlytwo, describing the superiority of a carbon tax, the option the Partnership exists to plump for, compared to other climate nostrums.
Here’s what else I’ve learned in 20 years. Many advocates of climate policy are ignoramuses on the subject of climate science, and nothing about the Partnership for Economic Progress—founded by former Democratic congressman Walt Minnick plus a couple of big donors—breaks with this tradition.
Only a nincompoop would treat a complex set of issues like human impact on climate as a binary “yes/no” question—as the Partnership and many climate policy promoters do. Only an idiot would ask an alleged “expert” what he knows without showing any curiosity about how he knows it—a practice routine among climate-advocating journalists.
So Tom Gjelten, host of a recent NPR discussion of the Journal ad controversy, is completely satisfied when Matt Nisbet, a professor of communications studies at Northeastern University, explains, “On the fundamentals of climate science, there is absolutely no debates. The overwhelming majority of scientists . . . strongly agree that climate change is happening, that it’s human-caused and that it’s an urgent problem.”
Notice that he doesn’t cite any science but an (undocumented) agreement of people who agree with him, while conflating three very different questions.
To be sure, Prof. Nisbet then promptly covers his derrière and takes it all back, saying: “In the field, there is some disagreement on the pace of climate change, the severity, its specific impacts.”
By then the damage is done. The discussion proceeds on the basis that anybody who takes part in this disagreement about pace, severity and specific impacts is a denier and enemy of science.
Here’s what you also won’t learn from most climate reporting: Climate models that predict significant warming presume natural feedbacks that magnify the impact of human-released carbon dioxide by 100% to 400%. Models that presume no dominant feedbacks see warming of only about one degree Celsius over the entire course of a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Who knows what future scientific advances will reveal, but models that assume minimal feedback are more consistent with the warming seen so far—and remember, we’ve been burning coal for 200 years and accumulating temperature records for longer than that.
The U.S. political system gets a bad rap but has rationally concluded that it can’t sell large costs on this evidence. More to the point, never has it been the case that major legislation or policy departures are adopted only when all opposition and dissent are silenced. The premise of the assault on Exxon, the Journal, other campaigns against “deniers,” is worse than foolish. The climate crowd has turned to persecuting critics as a substitute for meaningful climate action because, as President Obama has acutely observed, voters won’t support their efforts to jack up energy prices.
Functionally, whatever advocates tell themselves, these attacks end up churning the waters and propagandizing for those niggling little things that actually can be enacted, having no impact on climate but lining the pockets of organized interests who return the favor with campaign donations.
That’s how our political system behaves, on climate and most other subjects—which perhaps explains why voters are so tired of the people who man our political system.
If the Wall Street Journal is selling $27,000 ads from Jenkins’ work, Jenkins either deserves a raise or a commission from the ads.
This being Independence Day, a traditional baseball day, the Wall Street Journal interviewed the greatest baseball voice of our time:
It was another cloudless day in this Southern California canyon, another day for baseball at this idyllic mid-century ballpark. I asked Vin Scully if he felt lucky to do what he does.
“Oh, no, not lucky,” he said, firmly. “Lucky is too cheap a word. I really feel blessed. I truly believe God has given me these gifts. He gave it to me at a young age, and he’s allowed me to keep it all these years? That’s a gift. I say this because I believe it: I should spend a lot more time on my knees than I do.”
You probably know that this is the esteemed baseball broadcaster Vin Scully’s last year in the booth for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He is 88 years old, and after an astonishing 67 seasons, one of the greatest voices in sports—a melody of the American summer for nearly seven decades—will say farewell this October.
“I’ll miss it,” he said. “I know I’ll be very unhappy for a while.”
Then he smiled, because Vin Scully is a human sunbeam. When we met, he offered me a cupcake, and then asked about my three-year-old son. He’d instructed me to bring the boy when I came to visit him at Dodger Stadium. I didn’t, because A) I am truly an idiot and B) the kid’s a bit wild, and I feared he would have run around and climbed both of the foul poles.
“We raised six, and have had 16 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren,” Scully said. “You tell me a three-year-old runs around, and I say, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ ”
Below us, on the field, the Dodgers were getting ready for another ballgame. The late afternoon air was still warm enough for just a T-shirt, and you could smell popcorn and sausage. A lot of folks think a scene like this is pretty close to heaven. Scully thought so when he was a child growing up in New York City, saving up 11 cans to buy a 55-cent ticket to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants. …
Like everyone who’s ever spoken to Vin Scully, I recognize quickly that everything Vin Scully says is a treat, because he is saying it in that famous, honeycomb voice, which migrated with the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and described Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela and Kirk Gibson, among countless others. Scully’s voice called Hank Aaron’s 715th home run…and it’s now talking about a cupcake? Dodgers president and co-owner Stan Kasten told me about a time he was talking to Scully, who was describing a friend’s surgery in great, gory detail “but it was Vin Scully describing it, so it was still kind of lyrical.”
“Whenever you talk to Vin on the phone, it really is kind of surreal,” Kasten said.
Scully occupies rare space. At a moment in our culture in which antagonism is the preferred currency, Scully is as universally beloved as it gets. There he was, a few weeks back, on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “VIN SCULLY IS READY TO DROP THE MIC,” the headline read. There’s his name on the Dodger Stadium entrance road from Sunset Boulevard. Though he’s worked a reduced schedule in recent years, his voice is the first thing you hear when you enter the park. Inside, his presence looms larger than any player’s. Even a screwy cable-TV controversy in L.A. that’s prevented a lot of Dodger fans from seeing games hasn’t diminished the goodwill.
There will be no one like Scully again—an ideal package of talent, paired with a historic franchise, and perfect timing as baseball expanded from the radio to TV era. And yet he isn’t a foghorn for the “good old days” but an exuberant voice for the current game offering just the right sprinkle of nostalgia. To listen to Scully is to be transported, said Bob Costas, who praised Scully’s “mastery of the craft.”
“A Vin Scully broadcast is simultaneously today’s game and whatever notion you have about any game you’ve ever listened to,” Costas said. “It’s a news bulletin and a flashback.”
He is a reservoir of moments. I ask Scully the loudest he ever heard the old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. He mentions Cookie Lavagetto’s pinch-hit double in the 1947 World Series that gave the Dodgers a win over the Yankees. And Dodger Stadium? That’s easy: Kirk Gibson’s walk-off homer in the 1988 World Series, which happened not long after Scully told the audience at home that the hobbling Gibson wouldn’t appear.
I’ll let Scully handle the rest, because nobody on Earth wants to hear me tell it:
I had no idea that Gibby was in the clubhouse, all by himself, looking at the television set with ice packs on his knees. And whatever I said struck a note in him, and he hollered, ‘Bull—-!’ and then hollered to the clubhouse kid, ‘Go down and tell Tommy [Lasorda] I’m coming down.’
And then, as the inning progressed, I remember [seeing Gibson] out of the corner of my eye, and I just responded—it wasn’t a broadcasting line, I was absolutely shocked—‘Well, look who’s here.’ And the rest is history.
If you go and watch the Gibson clip now, what’s striking is that as soon as Gibson’s homer clears the fence, Scully says nothing until Gibson gets to home plate. The drama breathes. The moment is enough. It’s the same with Aaron’s 715th home run. Scully says little. The game’s greatest voice also knew when to not use it.
He still cares, still loves it, and is still adored. So why leave now? Why is Scully retiring young?
“I’m not young, I’m young at heart, for sure,” he said. “Little by little, you start losing it, and I’m aware that I’m not nearly as sharp as I was 10 years ago.” He compared it to a ballplayer whose bat starts to become a little late on a good fastball.
“I think it’s just time,” he said. “I just know it’s time.”
Respectfully, I have to disagree. Vin Scully is forever.
The question was asked of Bob Lutz, former GM vice chairman and now the answer man of Road & Track’s “Go Lutz Yourself”:
Dear Bob, Does Chevy need a mid-engine Corvette and Cadillac a mid-engine sports car? You can’t have Ford selling a $450,000 GT while GM has only a Z06, right?
Well, neither Chevrolet nor Cadillac “needs” a mid-engine car. A mid-engine Corvette would likely coexist with the regular model but be priced at least $30,000 to $40,000 higher, my guess, about $130,000 to $150,000. A logical assumption would be 700 to 750 hp, massive torque, and decent fuel economy. GM won’t do it unless it’s a world-beater, so we should expect it to suck the doors off all the Europeans (Veyron excluded) and the Ford GT, which, while a nice car, would soon seem poor value. A possible Cadillac execution would have to exceed the Corvette and would be priced higher. I’m all for it, and I definitely “need” at least the Corvette.
Well, Lutz may get his wish, because, Motor Trend reports:
It’s time to clear those eyes and lean into the screen because these grainy spy photos reveal what is likely the mid-engine Chevrolet Corvette that’s coming sooner rather than later. These photos, along with recent rumors, further solidify that General Motors is serious about producing the most balanced Corvette we’ve seen yet.
This mule was caught at GM’s Milford Proving Grounds. It’s disguised in C7 Corvette body panels and heavy camouflage, but there are a few clues suggesting this isn’t a normal Stingray. The mule’s rear hatch appears to be missing its glass cover, likely to provide enough cool air to the engine sitting behind the seats. The prototype is lapping the track alongside a C7 Corvette and a few Caddies like the CT6, which the photographer says should provide some perspective on the test mule’s stance and size.
A number of recent events have given hope to ‘Vette fans clamoring for a mid-engine version. Early last year, GM was caught testing a strange prototype that was essentially a mashup of a C7 Corvette and a Holden Commodore SSV, which the rumor mill suggested was housing its engine behind the front seats. In 2014, GM trademarked the name “Zora,” which could hint at a future Corvette moniker. The name is a reference to Zora Arkus-Duntov, the father of the Corvette who made numerous attempts to produce a mid-engine version.
Many GM engineers and executives have also tried to make a mid-engine Corvette a reality and it appears it could happen by the end of the decade. The 650-hp Corvette Z06is already pushing the limits of the current front-engine, rear-drive platform, which means a mid-engine layout is perhaps the only option GM has to take the ‘Vette to the next level.
The supposed mid-engine Vette is following a Cadillac and the current Vette.
If your mind reels at the prospect of a $150,000 Chevrolet, well, assuming the spy photographers are correct, there it is. Readers know I have a number of questions, beginning with why there’s a need for this car when GM sells every Corvette it builds now, and at a profit. The nitpickers about the current Corvette, over its brand and the subpar interiors, seem to me unlikely to choose a Chevy over a Ferrari or a Porsche because it’s a Chevy.
Unless it isn’t a Chevy. Michael Austin is properly skeptical:
Call me crazy, but I’m not convinced the mid-engine Corvette is the next Corvette. The rumor is strong, yes. And, contrary to some of the comments on our site, Car and Driver – leader of the mid-engine Corvette speculation brigade – has a pretty good record predicting future models. But it’s another comment that got me thinking: or maybe it’s a Cadillac.
There is clearly something mid-engine going on at GM, and I think it makes sense for the car to be a Cadillac. First off, check out how sweet the 2002 Cadillac Cien concept car still looks in the photo …
Second, there are too many holes in the mid-engine Corvette theory.
The C7 is relatively young in Corvette years, starting production almost three years ago as a 2014 model. Showing a 2019 model at the 2018 North American International Auto Show would kill sales of a strong-selling car before its time. Not to mention it would only mean a short run for the Grand Sport, which was the best-selling version of the previous generation.
More stuff doesn’t add up. Mid-engine cars are, in general, more expensive. Moving the Vette upmarket leaves a void that the Camaro does not fill. There’s not much overlap between Camaro and Corvette customers. Corvette owners are older and enjoy features like a big trunk that holds golf clubs. Mid-engine means less trunk space and alienating a happy, loyal buyer. Also, more than 60 years of history. The Corvette is an icon along the likes of the Porsche 911 and Ford Mustang. I’m not sure the car-buying public wants a Corvette that abandons all previous conventions. And big changes bring uncertainty – I don’t think GM would make such a risky bet.
Chevrolet could build a mid-engine ZR1, you might say, and keep the other Corvettes front-engine. Yes they could, and it would cost a ton of money. And they still need to fund development of that front-engine car. I highly doubt the corporate accountants would go for that.
But a Cadillac? Totally. Cadillac is in the middle of a brand repositioning. GM is throwing money at this effort. A mid-engine halo car is the just the splash the brand needs to shake off the ghosts of Fleetwoods past. And it’s already in Cadillac President Johan De Nysschen’s playbook. He was in charge of Audi’s North America arm when the R8 came out. A Caddy sports car priced above $100,000 isn’t that unreasonable when you can already price a CTS-V in that range.
Switch the NAIAS debut rumor to Cadillac, maybe even make it for 2017. Remove the conflict of abandoning Corvette history or running two costly model developments for one car. Heck, a mid-engine Cadillac could even act as a Trojan horse if the rumored demise of the current small-block engine is true. Launch a high-powered overhead-cam V8 in the Caddy and after a few years Corvette fans will be begging for an engine swap instead of grabbing their pitchforks and demanding more pushrods.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Corvette engineers, or former Corvette engineers, are working on a mid-engine car. There’s a lot of talent working on GM’s performance vehicles, and people move between teams on a regular basis. And the Corvette’s Bowling Green, Kentucky plant is a great place to make a low-volume sports car with advanced materials. But it’s not clear that GM plus mid-engine equals Corvette. While we’re still making random guesses, my money is on Cadillac.
Whether this is the next Corvette or the next Cadillac XLR-V: I understand bulletproof reliability is not common with supercars, but I would be extremely hesitant to purchase a mid-engine vehicle from a company famous for sending new technology into the marketplace before it’s ready. (Remember the Vega and its melting engine? The Oldsmobile diesel? The Chevy Citation and the other X-body cars? Computer Command Control? The Cadillac V-8-6-4? The Pontiac Fiero?) And it seems strange to combine a mid-engine design and probably all-wheel drive (also commonplace in supercars) with the usual pushrod V-8. And yet the usual pushrod V-8 has powered every Corvette since 1955 except the C4 King of the Hill, powered by the Mercury Marine-built 32-valve double overhead cam V-8, which was eventually superseded by the pushrods, which obviously work quite well, old tech or not. (Which might confirm Austin’s suspicions about an engine GM currently doesn’t offer in this Caddivette. One hopes that Cadillac wouldn’t emulate Ford’s mistake of throwing the Ecoboost V6 into the Ford GT by using the ATS-V’s 3.6-liter twin-turbocharged V6.)
At least for those of us who have enough money to consider a Corvette (which once again doesn’t include me), the rear-drive Vette will remain available if Lutz is correct.
Jonah Goldberg has new respect, as I do, for newspaperman and caustic cynic H.L. Mencken:
Believing in my bones, as I do, that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unworthy and unqualified to be president of the United States has inspired me to do a lot of soul searching, and that has drawn me more and more to the writings of the legendary H.L. Mencken and less-than-legendary Albert J. Nock.
The two Tory anarchists, as some called them, were friends and intellectual comrades-in-arms who stood athwart the progressive and populist passions that defined American politics in the first half of the 20th century.
The domestic madness of World War I galvanized both men. Under Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the United States established the first modern ministry of propaganda, the Committee on Public Information. The Wilson administration jailed political dissenters by the thousands, encouraged the brown-shirt tactics of the American Protective League and censored newspapers and magazines with abandon.
Wilson demonized “hyphenated Americans” — i.e. Irish Americans or German Americans — as enemies of the state. “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American,” he proclaimed. “The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”
Nock wrote a scalding editorial for The Nation criticizing labor leader Samuel Gompers for supporting the government. The Wilson administration responded by temporarily banning the publication.
The government also banned booze — an effort led in Congress by Republican Andrew Volstead. Prohibition further demonstrated for Mencken and Nock that the zeal to muck about with peoples’ lives was a bipartisan affair.
“The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives,” Mencken wrote in 1926. “In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are.”
What united Nock and Mencken most was a sense of homelessness in the intellectual establishment. Franklin Roosevelt, who campaigned on the promise to use the war-fighting methods of the Wilson administration to fight the Great Depression, further cemented their alienation. “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism,” Nock wrote in his memoirs, “are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.” This was an exaggeration, but one can only exaggerate the truth.
Once again American politics is threatening to become a competition between rival factions of statists, eager to use the government to reward themselves and punish their enemies, with “enemy” defined as anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Today, America looks very different from the America of Mencken and Nock’s era, but the similarities are hard to ignore. Liberal elites have decided that if you have a problem with men using women’s bathrooms, you’re not just wrong, you’re a bigot. A registered Democrat murdered 49 Americans at a gay nightclub, in the name of the Islamic State, and the smart set insists conservative Christians are somehow to blame.
The zeal of Prohibition has multiplied like a cancer cell, with reformers wanting to ban everything they don’t like: vaping, free speech, coal, Uber, refusal to bake cakes for gay weddings, and, if they could, guns.
On the right, the presumptive GOP nominee promises not limited government but stronger, more protectionist government enlisted to remedy the grievances of his constituencies. His white working-class supporters represent “real” America, and their problems are always somebody else’s fault. I’ve lost count of how many times his most ardent fans have called me a “bigot” for opposing Trump.
True to their reputations as curmudgeons, no constituency was above reproach for Nock and Mencken. Business elites were Babbitts, eager to chart the course of least resistance. The people, in Mencken’s famous phrase, were the great “booboisie.” The decent and right-thinking were, according to Nock, a silent and tiny “remnant” hiding away from politics.Democracy itself, according Mencken was “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
My cynicism is not yet as great as theirs. I have some cause for optimism. But one only looks for signs of hope when there’s ample reason to despair.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 