No comments on Presty the DJ for July 13
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Sometimes in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. It is high time to declare our personal independence from any remnant of obligation to those who have spit upon the rule of law. We owe them nothing – not respect, not loyalty, not obedience.
Think about it. If you are out driving at 3 a.m., do you stop at a stop sign when there’s no one coming? Of course you do. You don’t need a cop to be there to make you stop. You do it voluntarily because this is America and America is a country where obeying the law is the right thing to do because the law was justly made and is justly applied. Or it used to be.
The law mattered. It applied equally to everyone. We demanded that it did, all of us – politicians, the media, and regular citizens. Oh, there were mistakes and miscarriages of justice but they weren’t common and they weren’t celebrated – they were universally reviled. And, more importantly, they weren’t part and parcel of the ideology of one particular party. There was once a time where you could imagine a Democrat scandal where the media actually called for the head of the Democrat instead of deploying to cover it up.
People assumed that the law mattered, that the same rules applied to everyone. That duly enacted laws would be enforced equally until repealed. That the Constitution set the foundation and that its guarantees would be honored even if we disliked the result in a particular case. But that’s not our country today.
The idea of the rule of law today is a lie. There is no law. There is no justice. There are only lies.
Hillary Clinton is manifestly guilty of multiple felonies. Her fans deny it half-heartedly, but mostly out of habit – in the end, it’s fine with them if she’s a felon. They don’t care. It’s just some law. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter that anyone else would be in jail right now for doing a fraction of what she did. But the law is not important. Justice is not important.
The attorney general secretly canoodles with the husband of the subject of criminal investigation by her own department and the president, the enforcer of our laws, shrugs. The media, the challenger of the powerful, smirks. They rub our noses in their contempt for the law. And by doing so, demonstrate their contempt for us.
Only power matters, and Hillary stands ready to accumulate more power on their behalf so their oaths, their alleged principles, their duty to the country – all of it goes out the window. But it’s much worse than just one scandal that seems not to scandalize anyone in the elite. Just read the Declaration of Independence – it’s almost like those dead white Christian male proto-NRA members foresaw and cataloged the myriad oppressions of liberalism’s current junior varsity tyranny.
There is one law for them, and another for us. Sanctuary cities? Obama’s immigration orders? If you conservatives can play by the rules and pass your laws, then we liberals will just not enforce them. You don’t get the benefit of the laws you like. We get the benefit of the ones we do, though. Not you. Too bad, rubes.
So if you are still obeying the law when you don’t absolutely have to, when there isn’t some government enforcer with a gun lurking right there to make you, aren’t you kind of a sucker?
Don’t you feel foolish, like you’re the only one who didn’t get the memo that it’s every man/woman/non-binary entity for his/her/its self?
Who is standing against this? Not the judges. The Constitution? Meh. Why should their personal agendas be constrained by some sort of foundational document? Judges find rights that don’t appear in the text and gut ones that do. Just ask a married gay guy in Los Angeles who can’t carry a concealed weapons to protect himself from [OMITTED] radicals.
The politicians won’t stand against this. The Democrats support allowing the government to jail people for criticizing politicians and clamor to take away citizens’ rights merely because some government flunky has put their name on a list. Their “minority report” on Benghazi is an attack on Trump, and to them the idea of congressional oversight of a Democrat official whose incompetence put four Americans in the ground is not merely illegitimate; it’s a joke.Is the media standing against this, those sainted watchdogs protecting us from the powerful? Don’t make me laugh. What do these moral abortions have in common? Short term political gain over principle. These people are so used to the good life that a society’s reflexive reliance on the principle of the rule of law brings that they think they can undermine it with impunity. Oh it’s no big deal if we do this, they reason. Everyone else will keep playing by the rules, right? Everything will be fine even as we score in the short term.
The Romans had principles for a while. Then they got tempted to abandon principle for – wait for it – short term political gain. Then they got Caesar. Then the emperors. Then the barbarians. And then the Dark Ages. But hey, we’re much smarter and more sophisticated than the Romans, who were so dumb they didn’t even know that gender is a matter of choice. Our civilization is permanent and indestructible – it’s not like we are threatened by barbarians who want to come massacre us.
Oh, wait. The last words of some of these people to their radical Muslim killers before they are beheaded will be, “Please remember me as not being Islamaphobic! And sorry about the Crusades!”
There used to be a social contract requiring that our government treat us all equally within the scope of the Constitution and defend us, and in return we would recognize the legitimacy of its laws and defend it when in need. But that contract has been breached. We are not all equal before the law. Our constitutional rights are not being upheld. We are not being defended – hell, we normals get blamed every time some Seventh Century savage goes on a kill spree. Yet we’re still supposed to keep going along as if everything is cool, obeying the law, subsidizing the elite with our taxes, taking their abuse. We’ve been evicted by the landlord but he still wants us to pay him rent.
Now it seems we actually have a new social contract – do what we say and don’t resist, and in return we’ll abuse you, lie about you, take your money, and look down upon you in contempt. What a bargain!
It’s not a social contract anymore – American society today is a suicide pact we never agreed to and yet we’re expected to go first.
I say “No.”
We owe them nothing – not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. Nothing.
We make it easy for them by going along. We make it simple by defaulting to the old rules. But there are no rules anymore, certainly none that morally bind us once we are outside the presence of some government worker with a gun to force our compliance. There is only will and power and we must rediscover our own. If there is no cop sitting right there, then there is nothing to make you stop at that stop sign tonight.
They don’t realize that by rejecting the rule of law, they have set us free. We are independent. We owe them nothing – not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. But with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we will still mutually pledge those who have earned our loyalty with their adherence to the rule of law, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
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Can American democracy survive this presidential election? We assume any framework that has endured through the Civil War, the Great Depression, the violent upheaval of the 1960s and more can survive anything. But no earthly institution is eternal, and it’s hard to think of a campaign that has done more damage to our system of government than this one.
Amid our misery, we take comfort in the belief that once the election is over, things will get better. More likely, they will get worse.
On the Republican side is a candidate who appears incapable of telling the truth, trying to gain a basic understanding of policy or speaking in anything but childishly simplistic sound bites. Donald Trump has made himself so radioactive that for the first time in memory, dozens of Republican politicians are shunning their nominee, repudiating many of his statements and boycotting their national convention.
Has any major-party nominee ever been tarred with the brush of racism by the party’s highest-ranking officeholder as Trump was by House Speaker Paul Ryan? Has any former president in the past century refused to endorse his own party’s nominee — much less two former presidents — as both Bushes have done?
On the other side, has any major-party candidate ever come so close to being indicted just before being nominated as Hillary Clinton did? Has one ever been criticized more thoroughly and damningly by the director of the FBI than she was on Tuesday, when James Comey presented a picture of her as dishonest, reckless and incompetent?
None of this comes as a shocking discovery. From their decades in the public eye, we knew Trump as a bombastic fraud with an ego as big as the Titanic and Clinton as a ruthless power seeker with a compulsion to deceive. Yet the political order has enabled them to reach the threshold of our highest office.
The latest Gallup Poll found that these two arouse more negative feelings than any presidential nominee in the past 60 years. Barry Goldwater was perceived in “highly unfavorable” terms by 26 percent of Americans on his way to one of the most crushing defeats in American history. Clinton is regarded that way by 33 percent of Americans, and Trump by 42 percent.
Those figures came in before the FBI director’s report and before the controversy over Trump’s use of anti-Semitic imagery. They also come before the candidates and their allied super PACs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars showcasing the flaws of the other. By election night, the loser may qualify as the most hated person in America — and the president-elect may be the runner-up.
The problem is not so much that voters will spend the next four months being disgusted by Trump and Clinton before having to suppress nausea long enough to cast a ballot for one of them. It’s that the citizenry will be forced to submit to one or the other of them for four years that may feel like 40. …
If Trump wins, though, Democrats will not be alone in seeing him as an intolerable usurper. After George W. Bush emerged victorious from the five-week legal battle over the 2000 election, his inauguration attracted thousands of demonstrators chanting, “Hail to the thief,” with a few throwing eggs and bottles. Imagine the protests that would engulf the capital for a Trump inauguration.Is America lurching toward collapse, disintegration or civil war? It may sound far-fetched. But delegates to this year’s Texas state Republican convention spent two hours debating whether to put a plank on secession in their platform.
The simple fact is that the next president will be detested by half the country, if not more, from day one. How long till impeachment hearings begin?
We don’t know who will be in charge of the next administration. But it already has a haunting theme song: “Eve of Destruction.”
And if not this …
… then certainly this:
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Today is the anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first public performance, at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They were known then as the “Rollin’ Stones,” and they had not recorded a song yet.
If you’re going to record just one song that gets on the charts, ending at number one would be preferable, whether in 1969, or in the year 2525:
Today in 1979 was one of the most bizarre moments in baseball history and/or radio station history:
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It was my luck to be on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday morning to discuss the latest American horror, the murder of five police officers in Dallas during an anti-police protest the previous night.
The irony, of course, is that the protesters, who were exercising their First Amendment right to protest the deaths at the hands of police of two black men in Baton Rouge, La., and the Twin Cities, were running the opposite direction while the people whose profession they were protesting were heading toward the gunfire to protect the protesters.
The additional irony is that whatever the protesters want changed is likely to be overlooked in the wave of outrage over the assassination of five police officers by someone who used the pretext of the protest as his opportunity. The shooter was interested in killing whites, including white police officers.
The danger of commenting upon police is that very few people know what being a police officer is like. My own experience is slightly more than most people, but far less than being an actual officer — from having covered crime (including the murder of a law enforcement officer) and courts, including police disciplinary matters, and from police ridealongs, which are always most educational even on slow nights. However, we taxpayers have the right to have opinions about what our elected officials allow the police to do and prohibit the police from doing.
Facts are necessary:
The U.S. violent crime rate, according to the FBI, is, you’ll notice, where it was around 1970.
The U.S. homicide rate, you’ll notice, is where it was in the 1950s.
And perhaps this is why. The next time someone complains about all the Americans in jail, ask that person if they would trade reducing the prison population for increasing the crime rate.
Or perhaps this is why. U.S. gun ownership is at a record high. None of those more than 300 million guns loaded themselves, aimed themselves and fired themselves, including Thursday night’s murderer.
All of those, of course, could be examples of correlation without causation. It also seems that while crime may be down, fear of crime is up. Part of that is because the media is able to report what might be considered infamous crime — child kidnappings, gruesome murderers, carjackings with children inside the carjacked car, etc. — from anywhere in the nation, whether or not it’s pertinent to you.
Government generally and some police specifically don’t help. Last week I posted about this Ohio police chief who claims children shouldn’t be allowed to leave home unaccompanied until they’re 16. Police handouts of identification kits and fingerprinting of kids, which have good intentions, carry with them an unspoken message that it’s a dangerous world out there. (As usual, if you’re a certain age you can see these things and wonder how we survived a world without, among other things, bicycle helmets.)
The other thing government does is pass laws that police have to enforce, whether or not the laws make sense. Recall Eric Garner, shot to death by New York police while he was out on bail for a charge of selling untaxed cigarettes. Libertarians question the resources governments use in enforcing drug laws. The Minnesota death the Dallas protesters were protesting was after a traffic stop for a broken taillight. The most outrageous finding to come from the investigation into the Ferguson, Mo., police was that city officials apparently expected the police to fund city operations by writing as many citations as possible, leading to comments that the city looked at its residents as ATMs.
Here’s an inconvenient fact reported by the Volokh Conspiracy:
USA Today reports that “The number of police officers shot and killed in the USA is 44% higher than at this time last year following the Dallas ambush Thursday night that left five officers dead, according to data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.” And indeed last year there were, according to the group, 41 fatal shootings; the 26 so far this year puts us on pace for about 50 fatal shootings in 2016, about 22 percent more than last year. (The 44 percent number is because only 18 of the 41 killings last year came by this time of the year.)
But if one looks at the fund’s data for 2005 to 2014, one sees that (a) 2015’s 41 fatal shootings was unusually low, and (b) there is a good deal of year-to-year variation. Indeed, the only three years from 2005 to 2015 that saw fewer than 49 fatal shootings of police officers were 2008 (41), 2013 (33), and 2015 (41), and most years saw at least as big a change in raw numbers as we’re expecting for 2015 to 2016. Most important, if you average the totals from 2005 to 2015, you get almost 53 fatal shootings per year — about the pace we’re seeing for this year.
I share the sorrow and the anger over the murders of the police officers in Dallas, and indeed over murders of police officers generally. But we shouldn’t let the accident that there were fewer fatal police shootings than normal in 2015 make us worry that there’s any broad upward trend. Many people’s views of police are based on their past experiences with police, which tend to be negative either as defendant (technically a traffic ticket is an arrest) or as victim of a crime. A county sheriff once told me that his department interacts with 80 percent of the public once, and of the remaining 20 percent interacts with 80 percent of them once more. Assuming his math is correct, about 4 percent of police business is with, shall we say, repeat customers.
One caller to WPR, a black woman, claimed that black men feel stalked by police, in her opinion. I wonder how much of that is racism, as she seemed to claim (and she was certainly more thoughtful on the subject than the caller who followed her), and how much of it was police training to note the unfamiliar. A police officer seems unlikely to stalk a black man the officer knows from non-unfriendly contacts. A police officer is trained to notice what does not fit, including who does not fit, which is why if you’re a young person out at night, you are more likely to see a police officer ask what you’re doing than if you’re, say, 50.
That also gets to a point about the divide between police and the people they’re sworn to protect, including at the cost of their own lives. One reason living in small towns is superior to urban areas is that you are much more likely to know your local police officers in contexts other than as I listed two paragraphs ago. Police officers I’ve known over the years include relatives, a former Boy Scoutmaster of mine, my daughter’s former softball coach, part of a local two-man guitar act, and, of course, parents of children our children’s ages. I probably know more police than the average person for professional reasons, but it never hurts, one way or another, to get to know police officers in a non-professional context.
Several columnists wrote about the Dallas police and its chief, including Radley Badko:
… one particularly unfortunate aspect of the murder of five Dallas police officers Thursday night is that the city’s police department is a national model for community policing. Chief David Brown, who took office in 2010, has implemented a host of policies to improve the department’s relationship with the people it serves, often sticking out his own neck and reputation in the process. At risk of stating the obvious, no sane person would argue that these murders would have been okay if they had occurred in a city with a less community-oriented police department. Nor am I suggesting that the killer or killers represent any legitimate faction of the police reform or racial justice movements. But because Dallas is grieving right now, and the rest of us with it, it’s worth pointing out that in its police department, the city has much for which to be proud.
There are always calls for unity after events like Thursday’s, the largest one-day death of police officers since 9/11. Unity over the horror ends up disappearing when it’s time to figure out what to do about it. (And that’s preferable to disagreements over what the problems are, such as what’s caused the shrinkage of this country’s middle class.) Most people have not had repeated negative encounters with police, so most people may not think it’s a problem. Those protesting police forget that blacks dying at the hands of police are a minute percentage compared to the deaths of blacks at the hands of other blacks.
We also discussed Hillary Clinton’s not being prosecuted over emails that, had a federal employee or soldier done a fraction of what she did, would have resulted in that person’s firing from federal service and prosecution. The Dallas protesters were protesting what they see as police officers’ not being held accountable for their actions, and Hillary Clinton is not being held accountable for her actions either. So both sides perhaps see laws as not applying to the “little people.”
No law enforcement agency is perfect, because the criminal justice system is not perfect, because all human creations are flawed. There are dangers to excessive crackdowns on police, as explained by Heather Mac Donald back in May:
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey has again drawn the wrath of the White House for calling attention to the rising violence in urban areas. Homicides increased 9% in the largest 63 cities in the first quarter of 2016; nonfatal shootings were up 21%, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association survey. Those increases come on top of last year’s 17% rise in homicides in the 56 biggest U.S. cities, with 10 heavily black cities showing murder spikes above 60%. …
Mr. Comey’s sin, according to the White House, was to posit that this climbing urban violence was the result of a falloff in proactive policing, a hypothesis I first put forward in these pages last year, dubbing it the “Ferguson effect.” The FBI director used the term “viral video effect,” but it is a distinction without a difference. “There’s a perception,” Mr. Comey said during his news conference, “that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime—the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” …
But the evidence is not looking good for those who dismiss the Ferguson effect, from the president on down. That group once included Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, who was an early and influential critic. Mr. Rosenfeld has changed his mind after taking a closer look at the worsening crime statistics. “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian recently. “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase.”
A study published this year in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that homicides in the 12 months after the Michael Brown shooting rose significantly in cities with large black populations and already high rates of violence, which is precisely what the Ferguson effect would predict.
A study of gun violence in Baltimore by crime analyst Jeff Asher showed an inverse correlation with proactive drug arrests: When Baltimore cops virtually stopped making drug arrests last year after the rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, shootings soared. In Chicago, where pedestrian stops have fallen nearly 90%, homicides this year are up 60% compared with the same period last year. Compared with the first four and half months of 2014, homicides in Chicago are up 95%, according to the police department. Even the liberal website Vox has grudgingly concluded that “the Ferguson effect theory is narrowly correct, at least in some cities.”
Despite this mounting evidence, the Ferguson effect continues to be distorted by its critics and even by its recent converts. The standard line is that it represents a peevish reaction from officers to “public scrutiny” and expectations of increased accountability. This ignores the virulent nature of the Black Lives Matter movement that was touched off by a spate of highly publicized deaths of young black men during encounters with police. As I know from interviewing police officers in urban areas across the country, they now encounter racially charged animus on the streets as never before.
Accountability is not the problem; officers in most departments are accustomed to multiple layers of review and public oversight. The problem is the activist-stoked hostility toward the police on the streets and ungrounded criticism of law enforcement that has flowed from the Obama administration and has been amplified by the media. …
Policing is political. If a powerful segment of society sends the message that proactive policing is bigoted, the cops will eventually do less of it. This is not unprofessional; police take their cues, as they should, from the messages society sends about expected behavior. The only puzzle is why many Black Lives Matter activists, and their allies in the media and in Washington, now criticize police for backing off of proactive policing. Isn’t that what they demanded? …
Officers must of course treat everyone they encounter with courtesy and respect within the confines of the law. But unless the ignorant caricaturing of cops ends, there will be good reason for FBI Director Comey and the rest of us to worry about what the rising tide of bloodshed holds in store for U.S. cities this summer.
Who is hurt the most? The “rich” can buy alarm systems and even hire private security. Middle-class people can buy guns and, if necessary, move. Poor people generally have none of those options, including leaving their high-crime neighborhood.
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In Merced or Dayton, if an insurance agent, eager to help his wife facing indictment, barged into a restaurant where the local DA is known to lunch, he would almost certainly be told to get the hell out.
But among the Washington elite, the scenario is apparently quite different. The two parties, in supposedly serendipitous fashion, just happen to touch down at the same time on the Phoenix corporate tarmac, with their private planes pulling up nose to nose. Then the attorney general of the United States and her husband, in secrecy enforced by federal security details, welcome the ex-president onto her government plane. Afterward, and only when caught, the prosecutor and the husband of the person under investigation assure the world that they talked about everything except Hillary Clinton’s possible indictment, Loretta Lynch’s past appointment by Bill Clinton and likely judicial future, or the general quandary of 2016.
There has been a lot of talk since Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump of the corrosive power and influence of the “elite” and the “establishment.” But to quote Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”
In the case of the ancient Romans or of the traditional British ruling classes, land, birth, education, money, government service, and cultural notoriety were among the ingredients that made one an establishmentarian. But our modern American elite is a bit different.
Residence, either in the Boston–Washington, D.C., or the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor, often is a requisite. Celebrity and public exposure count — e.g., access to traditional television outlets (as opposed to hoi polloi Internet blogging). So does education — again, most often a coastal-corridor thing: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.
Net worth, whether made or inherited, helps. But lots of billionaires, especially Midwestern sorts, are not part of the elite, in that their money does not necessarily translate into much political or cultural influence — or influence of the right sort. (Exceptions are Chicago traders who bundle millions for Hillary.)
Especially influential are the revolving-door multimillionaires, especially from big banks and Wall Street — the Tim Geithners, Jack Lews, Hank Paulsons, and Robert Rubins, but also the lesser flunkies of the Freddie/Fannie Clintonite crowd, a Franklin Raines (raking in $90 million) or a Jamie Gorelick ($26 million), all of whom came into the White House and its bureaucracies to get rich, but who always seem shocked when the public does not like their incestuous trails of bailouts, relief plans, favorable regulations, etc.
Creepy too are the satellite grifters like “investment banker” Rahm Emanuel — who somehow, between the White House and the House of Representatives, made off with $16 million for his financial “expertise” — or Chelsea Clinton, who made her fortune ($15 million?) largely by being a “consultant” for a Wall Street investment group (her fluff job at NBC News was small potatoes in comparison). The locus classicus, of course, is the Clinton power marriage itself, which invested nearly 40 years of public service in what proved to be a gargantuan pay-for-play payoff, when they parlayed Hillary’s political trajectories into a personal fortune of well over $100 million. Give them credit: From the early days, when they would write off as IRS deductions gifts of their used underwear, they ended up 30 years later getting paid $10,000 to $60,000 a minute for their Wall Street riffs.
The nexus between Big Government, Big Money, Big Influence, and Big Media is sometimes empowered by familial journalistic continuity (e.g., John Dickerson, son of Nancy Dickerson) or a second generation of fashion/glitz and media (Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper), but again is increasingly expressed in the corridor “power couple,” the sorts who receive sycophantic adulation in New York and Washington monthly magazines. The Andrea Mitchell/Alan Greenspan power marriage was hailed as a threefer of media, government, and money. What was so strange, however, was just how often wrong were Mitchell in her amateurishly politicized rants and Greenspan in his cryptic Delphic prophecies — and always in areas of their supposedly greatest expertise.
Take also the Obama Cabinet. When we wonder how Susan Rice could go on television on five occasions in a single day to deceive about Benghazi; or John Kerry — in the middle of a war whose results Obama would come to call a “stable” and “self-reliant” democratic Iraq — could warn American youth that the punishment for poor school performance was “to get stuck in Iraq”; or Jay Carney (now senior vice president of global corporate affairs at Amazon) and Josh Earnest could both repeatedly mislead the country on Benghazi, the reason may be not just that they felt their influence, status, and privilege meant they were rarely responsible for the real-world consequences of their own rhetoric, but that they had forgotten entirely the nature of middle-class America, or never really knew it at all.
I get the impression that members of the D.C. elite do not wait in line with a sick kid in the emergency room on a Saturday night, when the blood flows and the supporters of rival gangs have to be separated in the waiting room; or that they find dirty diapers, car seats, and dead dogs tossed on their lawns, or wait two hours at the DMV, or are told that their journalistic assignment was outsourced to India, or read public-school teachers’ comments on their kids’ papers that were ungrammatical and misspelled to the point of being incomprehensible. The elite seems to be ignorant that, about 1975, Bedford Falls flyover country started to become Pottersville.
In forming perceptions about Benghazi, the Iran deal, globalization, or illegal immigration, it is sometimes hard to know who is making policy and who is reporting and analyzing such formulations — or whether they are one and the same. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is married to former ABC television producer Ian Cameron. Ben Rhodes, who drew up the talking-points deceptions about Benghazi and seemed to boast of deceiving the public about the Iran deal, is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. Will 60 Minutes do one of its signature hit pieces on Ben Rhodes?
Secretary of State John Kerry — who famously docks his yacht in Rhode Island in order to avoid paying Massachusetts taxes on it — is married to Teresa Heinz, the billionaire widow of the late senator and catsup heir John Heinz. Former Obama press secretary Jay Carney married Claire Shipman, senior national correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America; his successor, Josh Earnest, married Natalie Wyeth, a veteran of the Treasury Department. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s “body woman,” is married to creepy sexter Anthony Weiner; perhaps she was mesmerized by his stellar political career, his feminist credentials, and his tolerant approach to deviancy? And on and on it goes.
These Christiane Amanpour/Jamie Rosen or Samantha Power/Cass Sunstein types of connections could be explored to the nth degree, especially their moth-to-the-flame progressive fixations with maximizing privilege, power, and class. But my purpose is not to suggest some conspiratorial cabal of D.C. and New York insiders, only to note that an increasing number of government and media elites are so entangled with each other, leveraging lucrative careers in politics, finance, and the media, and doubling their influence through marriage, that they have scant knowledge of and less concern for the clingers who live well beyond their coastal-corridor moats. And so when reality proves their preconceptions wrong — from Benghazi to Brexit — they have only outrage and disdain to fall back on.
Sometimes their smug isolation is the stuff of caricature. Mark Zuckerberg waxes poetically on about the illiberality of building border walls (e.g., “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others”), but he is now simultaneously involved in three controversies involving either hyper-private security patrols or walls or both as he seeks to use his fortune to create Maginot Lines around his Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Hawaii properties to keep the wrong sort of people quite distant.
I should end by returning to Hillary Clinton, whose insider arc from the cattle-futures con to quarter-million-dollar Wall Street chats to the e-mail scandal shares the common and persistent theme of influence peddling, greed, and lying, while she lectures Americans about the need for trust, fairness, and transparency. Or perhaps I should finish with Chelsea, a chip off the old blockess, who became instantly rich as she decried the culture’s overemphasis on wealth, and whose husband’s hedge fund is tottering, after disastrously investing in Greek bailout bonds — at a time when his mother-in-law and Sidney Blumenthal were exchanging classified speculations over whether German banks would guarantee Greek debt and hence investors’ money.
But I conclude on a much more sober, judicious, and appropriately unimpeachable D.C. figure, the rightly revered Thomas Pickering, career diplomat, bipartisan Council on Foreign Relation fixture, co-chairman of blue-ribbon investigative committees, and perhaps heir to the itinerant fixers of a bygone age, such as Sumner Welles, John McCloy, and Clark Clifford. Pickering — multilingual, veteran of hazardous diplomatic posts, confidant to presidents of both parties, and octogenarian “wise man” — was asked by the State Department to conduct its internal investigation of the Benghazi debacle, as chairman of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board.
Four of the five members of this board, including Pickering, were apparently recommended by Hillary Clinton’s own State Department team in good Quis custodiet custodes? style. No one would dare suggest that Pickering, appointed as an undersecretary of state and an ambassador by Bill Clinton, and a well-known Clinton friend, might have various conflicts of interest in investigating fully the allegations that Hillary Clinton refused to beef up security at the consulate in Benghazi, or falsely claimed in public that the loss of four Americans was the result of an inflammatory video, just hours after she confided in e-mail communications that it was a preplanned al-Qaeda attack.
Instead, Pickering decided that Clinton would never appear before his committee and declared that he was not interested in a gotcha finding; yet somehow Clinton aide Cheryl Mills found a way to review the board’s findings before publication. In the end, the State Department chastised and put on leave lowly subordinates for seemingly working within the security parameters established by the sacrosanct secretary of state.
Nor would anyone suggest that the temperate and esteemed Pickering, as a vice president of Boeing from 2001 to 2006, and then a consultant to Boeing from 2006 to 2015, had any special financial interest in promoting the Clinton, and then the Kerry, outreach to Iran. Indeed, Pickering testified before Congress and wrote elegant op-eds about why the Iran non-enrichment accord was a good deal — but without ever quite telling the country that a liberated Iran was also considering a $25 billion purchase of aircraft (with potential dual use as military transports) from Boeing — which just happened to be Pickering’s quite generous corporate client.
Is it all that strange that when Washington fixtures write outraged op-eds about the “fascistic” Donald Trump or the “self-harming” Brexit voters, no one seems to listen any more? Does a Hank Paulson — former assistant to John Erhlichman, former CEO of Goldman Sachs (which has given over $800,000 to Hillary’s campaigns as well as $675,000 in speaking fees), former Treasury secretary, and of some $700 million in net worth — ever sense that his assurances that Hillary is presidential and not corrupt are not believable? Or that the effect of his politicking is analogous to angrily waving a Mexican flag at a Trump rally?
In a sense, these revolving-door apparatchiks and incestuous couples are bullies, who use their megaphones to disparage others who are supposedly blinkered and ignorant to the point of not believing that a videomaker caused the attacks in Libya, not trusting the Iranians, being skeptical about the theory of sanctuary cities, missing the genius of the European Union, not seeing the brilliant logic in allowing in 12 million immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America under unlawful auspices, panicking about $20 trillion in debt, and incapable of appreciating the wonders of outsourcing.
In matters of deception, ostentatious vulgarity never proves as injurious as the hubris of the mannered establishment. So what I resent most about the Washington hollow men is not the sources and methods through which they parlay wealth, power, and influence, or the values they embrace to exercise and perpetuate their privilege and sense of exalted self, but the feigned outrage that they express when anyone dares suggest, by word or vote, that they are mediocrities and ethical adolescents — and really quite emotional, after all.
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The number one single today in 1960 was the first, but not only, example of the caveman music genre:
Today in 1962, Joe Meek wrote “Telstar,” the first song about a satellite:
Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared live on (British) ABC-TV’s “Thank Your Lucky Stars.” The appearance was supposed to be taped, but a strike by studio technicians made that impossible. The band had just appeared at the northern England premiere of their movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” requiring them to get to London via plane and boat.
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Two anniversaries today in 1965: The Beatles’ “Beatles VI” reached number I, where it stayed for VI weeks …
… while the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” was their first number one single:
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Today in 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was played around the clock because it hit number one:
One year later, Dick Clark made his first appearance on ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand”:
Today in 1972, Paul McCartney and Wings began their first tour of France:
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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.
Of “Night Beat,” it says:
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…”
Another WPR series is “Frontier Gentleman“:
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.)
What about my favorite superhero, the Green Hornet?
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“:
If you can’t see the film, listen to this radio version.
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.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 