Today in 1954, ABC Radio banned Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” for what it termed “offensive lyrics” (decide for yourself):
The number one album today in 1978 was Billy Joel’s “52nd Street”:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Nov. 18
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The number one single today in 1958:
The number one British single today in 1966:
The number one British single today in 1979:
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The number one single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1963:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland”:
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I’ve written before on this blog about my TV-viewing preferences — generally the genre of action/adventure, including crime dramas.
One of the key aspects of a TV series is its opening. Whether the teaser — the first couple minutes designed to hook in a viewer — comes before the titles or as the beginning of the first act, the teaser has to draw in a potential viewer to put down the remote or TiVo control and watch what’s ahead.
The titles create the setting for the entire series, from the combination of visuals and music. Or at least they used to; titles have been truncated to in some cases no music at all, which proves yet again that change may be inevitable, but positive change is not.
A sense of realism, or at least verisimilitude, is useful. Consider the openings of these early ’60s Warner Bros. detective dramas:
If a TV series last longer than a couple seasons, the titles often end up changing. The cast changes, or producers change, or someone gets an idea to do something different.
Generally, if the words “Theme by Lalo Schifrin” are in the credits, that is a plus. The first season of “Medical Center” was nothing more than medical jargon before Schifrin hit the scene to start season two:
Schifrin also wrote the theme music for two iconic ’60s series:
I watched fewer sitcoms than cop/detective shows, but I thought immediately that I preferred the much-less-familiar version of “I Dream of Jeannie” …
… to the opening everyone who watched the show knows:
In contrast, the NBC “Get Smart” open …
… wasn’t as good as the (last-season) CBS “Get Smart” open:
I like the early version of “Ironside” …
… instead of the more familiar jazzed-up version (which writer Quincy Jones released as a single “Smackwater JAck”):
Everyone has probably seen the famous opening of the original “Hawaii Five-O” …
… but the first-season close racing through downtown Honolulu …
… is more action-oriented than the canoeists:
I prefer the first-season theme, written by the great Lalo Schifrin, of “Starsky and Hutch” …
… to the more familiar second- and fourth-season themes …
… and this third-season dreck that ends up sounding like something out of bad Saturday morning TV:
While the first opening of Kojak isn’t bad …
… the second is better …
… certainly compared to what’s been called “Disco Kojak” in its last season:
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The headline comes from George Patrick, a deep-voiced eastern Iowa rock and roll DJ and TV station announcer.
What is big is this weekend in southwest Wisconsin football. Four teams play tonight and Saturday for the right to go to Camp Randall Stadium in Madison and play in the state championships Thursday. I get to announce one of those teams, Platteville, playing Manitowoc Roncalli at Watertown at 7 p.m. (Which you can hear online at http://www.theespndoubleteam.com.)
As if that’s not enough, UW-Platteville plays at UW-Oshkosh Saturday with a hoped-for NCAA Division III playoff berth in the balance. (Also heard, though not with me, at http://www.theespndoubleteam.com.)
More thoughts on both Platteville games can be read here.
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Today in 1925, RCA took over the 25-station AT&T network plus WEAF radio in New York, making today the birthday of the NBC radio network:
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones made their U.S. TV debut on ABC’s “Hullabaloo”:
Today in 1966, the Doors agreed to release “Break on Through” as their first single, removing the word “high” to get radio airplay:
The number one single today in 1980:
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Southern Wisconsin’s corner of Facebook was all atwitter (Atwitter? Get it?) about this from the Romenesko media news site:
Analyst: Lee Enterprises is doomed
Update: Lee Enterprises loses $77 million in fiscal 2013 (bizjournals.com)“We believe that Lee Enterprises has been burning its furniture to stay alive by aggressively cutting costs in order to service its crushing debt load,” writes a contributor to Seeking Alpha, a financial news/commentary site.
He points out:
* Lee has laid off 26 percent of its workforce since 2010.
* In that same time, the chain’s newsprint consumption has declined by 30 percent.
* The newsprint produced per subscriber has decline by 14 percent since 2010. (“Each of Lee’s subscribers is reading a smaller newspaper.”)The Seeking Alpha writer’s conclusion:
Lee Enterprises has embarked on an unsustainable business model of destroying its product while raising prices in an effort to sustain its financial performance. …
Lee’s short-minded strategy of gutting its workforce (and therefore its product) while simultaneously increasing prices is doomed to fail. We believe the stock is worth at most $2.85 per share and is likely ultimately worthless based on industry average multiples and the high likelihood that LEE’s financial performance will begin to deteriorate once consumers catch on to the much weaker product and the company runs out of cost cutting measures. We are short the stock and suggest shorting the stock.
While Lee may be burning the newsroom furniture, its top executives are probably buying high-end leather sofas for themselves with their six-figure bonuses.
This was reposted by Jack Craver, a reporter for The Capital Times, with this introduction:
Will this serve as a wake up call to Lee Enterprises, which owns the Wisconsin State Journal as well as half of Capital Newspapers?This is of personal interest to me as a literally lifelong (from age 2, according to my parents) reader of the State Journal, despite its resolute refusal to hire me for going on 30 years. I suppose it’s personal interest to Craver too as schadenfreude for a competitor of his. (Although the State Journal is not exactly competition for reasons that will soon reveal themselves. But here’s one: The Capital Times, formerly a six-day-a-week newspaper, downsized to two issues per week, stuffed inside the State Journal and available at newsstands for free, to switch its competition from the State Journal to Isthmus, the weekly tabloid that has been around as a tabloid since the late 1970s.)
I am glad Craver posted this, though, because one of the comments …
Jack, other than the fact I don’t want you or anyone on staff there to lose [their] job, I hope they fail—big time! They are nothing but a shill for the 1% and militarism.
… reminds me why I try to avoid Madison like the plague — it is full of stupid people who believe and say stupid things. Live in Madison long enough, and you will come to question the wisdom of the First Amendment.
For two newspapers that once upon a time couldn’t have been more different on their opinion pages, the State Journal and the Capital Times have a lot in common. See if you can follow this, which may read like one of those “I am my own grandfather” riddles:
- Lee Newspapers 0wns the State Journal. (Lee also owns the La Crosse Tribune and Kenosha News, along with the weekly Vernon County Broadcaster.)
- The Capital Times Co. owns the Capital Times.
- Lee and The Capital Times Co. each owns half of Capital Newspapers, which since 1948 (as Madison Newspapers, which apparently is Capital Newspapers’ corporate name) handles advertising for and printing of both newspapers. (Their newsrooms are separate, but their business operations are not.)
- Capital Newspapers owns the Portage Daily Register, Baraboo News Republic, Reedsburg Times Press and Beaver Dam Daily Citizen, along with several weekly newspapers. (The latter daily is a former employer of mine.)
A former writer at the aforementioned Isthmus claims that Madison Newspapers owns not just the advertising and printing arms of the State Journal and Capital Times, but actually owns both newspapers. That might come as news to Lee, but someone with more knowledge of their corporate structure should explain all that.
I have run into State Journal employees from time to time, including when I was an employee of Journal Communications, publisher of the late great Marketplace Magazine. In fact, I met some members of the State Journal’s business news staff at a business journalism conference held in the Journal Communications building in downtown Milwaukee. They seemed to be nervous, and I think at least one of them who was there is no longer employed there, though I don’t know whether that person left by choice or not. (This was about the time that I started to realize that Journal Communications as an Employee Stock Option Plan company and Journal Communications as a publicly traded company were not the same company.)
Lee as a company apparently is not doing very well. What does Lee itself have to say about this? Just ask Lee:
Lee Enterprises Inc. (NYSE: LEE), a major provider of local news, information and advertising in 50 markets, reported today that for its fourth fiscal quarter ended September 29, 2013, digital revenue continued to increase, operating expenses continued to decrease and debt has been reduced to a level two years ahead of its reorganization plan.
Because of period accounting, year-over-year comparisons are distorted. The 2012 quarter and fiscal year included an additional week of business activity, which added both revenue and cash costs in comparison with the 2013 periods. Tables below summarize key 2013 and 2012 results on a comparable 13- and 52-week basis(1), respectively.
Also, the 2013 quarter includes a non-cash impairment charge of $1.94 per diluted common share. As a result, Lee reported a preliminary loss of $1.71 per diluted common share, compared with a loss of 6 cents in 2012. Excluding unusual matters, adjusted earnings per diluted common share totaled 25 cents for the 2013 quarter, compared with 7 cents a year ago.
(What’s an impairment charge? Read this.)
Since it is the People’s Republic of Madison, an obligatory slam on management’s compensation is required. To that, two points: (1) Management pay is a small fraction of overall payroll, unconscionable bonuses or not, and (2) I’ve always suggested that employees of publicly traded companies, which includes Lee, buy stock in their company so they can reap the benefits of whatever management does to increase profitability and stock price, and to give the employee a voice, even if a small one, as a shareholder.
Oh wait, here’s a third point: I suspect the State Journal salaries are where they are less because of Lee management salaries than because of the employment market. Madison is about as great a news city as exists in the Midwest, and therefore reporters would … well, insert your favorite violent metaphorical verb here … to work in Madison. If someone leaves the State Journal, easily 100 applicants would seek to replace him or her. One rule of business is that a business that wants to stay in business does not overpay its employees. Because there are so many journalists, anyone who leaves the State Journal — or the Capital Times, or one of the radio station groups, or one of the TV stations — are very easy, financially speaking, to replace.
Based on Facebook comments (and you know how accurate those are), the State Journal is doing well financially, enough to subsidize other Lee newspapers. The State Journal is not the newspaper I grew up reading, although you could say that about any newspaper since about 1980. There is more national and world news than you might think should be in a daily today, though that could be attributed to Madison being a supposedly more worldly community. (It also could be attributed to wire-service subscriptions costing less than reporters’ salaries.)
The State Journal has always had a great sports department. The State Journal also seems to cover Madison and Dane County well, though that might be a better statement posed to a Dane County resident. (Those three words will never again describe me.) The State Journal used to be Madison’s conservative newspaper in terms of opinions. “Less liberal” would be a better description now (though any newspaper looks like a John Birch Society newsletter compared to the communists who write C(r)apital Times opinions).
One irony of the Capital Times is that the family that started it has a large charitable foundation, the Evjue Foundation, which gives a lot of money to a lot of Madison and Wisconsin causes. The irony is that the newspaper whose profits created the foundation has spent its entire existence castigating business and wealth, and editorially espousing taking others’ wealth for their own idiotic pet lefty cause.
(Another is that the Capital Times started WIBA radio in Madison, which carries the three-hour show of the non-liberal Rush Limbaugh. Still another is this: Madison Newspapers employees went on strike in the 1970s. My high school journalism teacher, who I conclude was quite active in Madison Teachers Inc., refused to take his classes to Madison Newspapers — which one would think would be a place high school journalism students would like to see — because he refused to cross the union’s picket line, several years after the strike. The target of his ire was not, interestingly, the State Journal; it was the Capital Times.)
One irony of the State Journal is that one of Lee’s owners is Warren Buffett, who didn’t make his billions of dollars making stupid investment decisions. In fact, Buffett is also not known for making short-term investment decisions, which suggests against the theory that Buffett bought into Lee expecting Lee to be sold in whole or in part.
So because speculation costs nothing, Craver’s Facebook posters speculated on whether the Capital Times Co. would want to buy the State Journal from Lee. If it’s true that the State Journal is one of the most profitable — maybe the most profitable — Lee newspaper, then Lee’s not going to sell except for a high price. The State Journal’s future seems better than Lee’s, particularly if Lee keeps reporting eight-digit fiscal-year losses. If Lee hasn’t figured out how to make newspapers work in a digital world, well, Lee has a lot of company.
My prediction for years has been that what we now know separately as newspapers, radio and TV are going to merge into one, to where an information provider will provide the news in whatever form a reader wants it — as video, audio, print (as a PDF or something like it that the subscriber can read online or print), online, and whatever the next medium of information is. The value of the State Journal is that it has covered Madison and surroundings since 1839. How information is delivered will change; the need for that information won’t.
To demonstrate why I like hanging around with the news media, someone who works on Fish Hatchery Road posted:
Romenesko’s post made me realize that I need to start keeping a flask of alcohol in my desk. Although, as a friendly competitor pointed out, I may need to keep the booze safely away from any burning furniture.
That last point is because, of course, you can’t see the flame of burning alcohol. But you knew that.
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The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:
This column has been following with amusement the various equivocations and rationalizations supporters of ObamaCare have offered to avoid acknowledging plainly that Barack Obama’s central premise–“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it”–was an out-and-out fraud. “Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that” is how a New York Times editorial put it last week. The Times’s news side seems to have settled on “incorrect promise.”
But if the Times editors are in the market for talent, they ought to find out who wrote Sunday’s editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This thing is a masterpiece:
First of all, this is a problem of the president’s own making. He did repeatedly say that if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it. He was three words short of the truth. All he had to add was “in most cases.”
It’s unlikely that this extra frankness would have hurt the political effort to sell the legislation. People understand that not everybody can be left unaffected by such a sweeping change, and Mr. Obama should have been careful not to embellish the assurance.
Was it a lie? He should have known the facts. By definition, a lie is a deliberate misstating of the truth; it is not simply something that was wrongly stated with good intentions, in this case perhaps, to make the complicated simple for public consumption. Those who believe the worst of this president will conclude that he lied; those who do not will be more charitable.
This is savory for multiple reasons. For one, adding a weaselly phrase like “in most cases” does not constitute “extra frankness.” Quite the opposite: It turns a shining promise into a foggy assurance with no clear meaning. …
The Post-Gazette’s claim that “it is unlikely” such equivocation “would have hurt the political effort to sell the legislation” is supportable only if one assumes the enactment of ObamaCare was not the close-run thing it seemed at the time–in other words, that Harry Reid would have been able to command 60 votes and Nancy Pelosi 218 even without whatever political cover the fraudulent promise provided the Democratic members of their respective chambers. If that is true, however, then the entire “political effort to sell the legislation” was a sham: The fix was in, and Congress was prepared to act with completedisregard for public opinion.
Now for the best part: “By definition, a lie is a deliberate misstating of the truth; it is not simply something that was wrongly stated with good intentions, in this case perhaps, to make the complicated simple for public consumption.”
This is a bit of a head-scratcher. The Wall Street Journal established a week earlier that the pledge was the result of careful deliberation between “White House policy advisers” concerned about accuracy and “political aides,” who prevailed because, as the Journal paraphrased a comment from an unnamed former official, “in the midst of a hard-fought political debate ‘if you like your plan, you can probably keep it’ isn’t a salable point.”
So this was a deliberate misstating of the truth. By raising the possibility of “good intentions,” the Post-Gazette editorialists seem to be suggesting that it was a sort of noble lie. “The furor of the supposed great lie is an embarrassment to Mr. Obama,” they concede in conclusion, “but it obscures the larger and more important truth that the Affordable Care Act remains good policy.”
That evaluation seems increasingly delusional with every passing hour, but let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that ObamaCare was a well-intended policy: that Obama pushed for it out of a sincere desire to help people. That would make its failure an example of what the scholar Barbara Oakley calls pathological altruism.
That seems to us, however, to give Obama too much credit. For one thing, it takes more than altruistic motives to justify lying. Suppose one could establish that Bernie Madoff sincerely wanted to make his clients wealthier. Would that mitigate his guilt for defrauding them?
Further, good intentions are not the same as pure intentions. People often have altruistic and selfish motives for the same action. Even if we assume Obama honestly wanted to help people and made his fraudulent promise in pursuit of that goal, it would be silly to deny he also made it in pursuit of his own aggrandizement–of the approbation that comes with a “legacy” of substantial “achievement.”
Of course, that’s not working out so well for him now. Whether or not this is a case of pathological altruism, it definitely is pathological narcissism.
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British single today in 1981:
The number one British album today in 1981 was “Queen Greatest Hits”:
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Dennis Prager gives advice on how to raise a politically conservative child:
In a nutshell, American parents who hold traditional American values — such as belief in small government as the basis of liberty, or a God-based moral code, or American military strength as the greatest contributor to world peace and stability, or American exceptionalism, not to mention the man-woman definition of marriage or the worth of a human fetus — are at war with almost every influence on their children’s lives. This includes, most important, the media and the schools. …
First, non-left-wing parents need to understand that if they do not articulate their values on a regular basis, there is a good chance that after one year, let alone four years, at college, their child will adopt left-wing views and values. Do not think for a moment that values are automatically transmitted. A hundred years ago they may have been — because the outside world overwhelmingly reaffirmed parents’ traditional values — but no longer.
You have to explain to your children — repeatedly — what America and you stand for. …
Second, they need to know what they will be taught at college — and now in many high schools — and how to respond. When they are told from Day One at college that America and its white citizens are inherently racist, they need to know how to counter this libel with these truths: America is the least racist society in the world; more black Africans have immigrated here of their own volition than were brought here forcibly to be slaves; and “racist” is merely one of many epithets, such as “sexist,” “intolerant,” “xenophobic,” “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” and “bigoted,” that the Left uses instead of arguments.
Third, when possible, it is best that your child not go to college immediately after high school. One reason colleges are able to indoctrinate students is that students enter college young and unworldly. It is very rare that adult students are convinced to abandon their values and become left-wing. Why? Because they have lived life and are much less naïve. For example, someone with life experience is far more likely than a kid just out of high school to understand that the best formula for avoiding poverty is personal responsibility — get a job, get married, and then have children — not government help.
Teenagers who spend a year before going to college working — in a restaurant, for a moving company, at an office — will mature far more than they would after a year at college. And maturity is an inoculation against leftism.
If your home is Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon, another option for the year after high school is to have your child devote a year to studying religion in some formal setting. The more your child knows, lives, and adheres to the principles of any of these religions, the less likely he or she will convert to leftism, which has been the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years. For example, it is a fundamental belief of each of these Judeo-Christian religions that the root of evil is within the evildoer. But it is a fundamental belief of leftism that people murder, steal, and rape overwhelmingly because of outside influences such as poverty and racism. The moment your child understands that people who commit evil — not poverty or racism — are responsible for it, he or she cannot be a leftist.
Fourth, don’t be preoccupied with instilling high self-esteem in your child. It is the Left that believes that self-esteem is a child’s right, something that parents and society owe children. Conservatives believe that everyone, including children, must earn self-esteem. Indeed, the belief in earning — rather than in being given — is conservative.
Fifth, teach character. The Left has essentially defined a good person as one who holds progressive social positions — on race, the environment, taxes, health care, etc. That is why the Left, including the feminist Left, could so adore Bill Clinton, who regularly used his positions of power to take advantage of women: He held progressive positions.
If your child recycles, or walks five or ten kilometers on behalf of breast cancer, that is lovely. But if your child refuses to cheat on tests or befriends an unpopular kid at school, that is character. And teaching that definition of character is more often done in a conservative (usually a religiously conservative) context.
I guess I agree with most of Prager’s five points more than Prager’s overall aim. Parents need to teach character, though as with classroom teaching it’s more about showing than telling. Similarly, parents should teach their values, including religious values. (Parents are, after all, their children’s first teachers, and they teach their children far longer than they’re in school.) Prager is absolutely correct about the bogus nature of the self-esteem movement. I’ve heard more than one opinion about whether taking time off between levels of education is a good thing. (Those in adult education will tell you that older students are more focused on the educational aspects of college than the social aspects.)
I’m guessing, however, that most readers know of siblings who grew up in the same house with the same parents and yet have different political beliefs. If you believe Prager, that’s not possible, and yet it happens. (Some people may adopt the opposite political beliefs of their parents merely to oppose their parents.) Parents have difficulty getting their children to do their homework, clean their rooms, take out the garbage and go to bed; convincing them of the correct position on the political fight du jour seems uncertain at best to succeed. (For one thing, if you elevate politics, you inevitably elevate politicians, and you should not elevate politicians.) I think Prager also underestimates the ability of people to change their political beliefs when their beliefs collide with facts or experience. (As the saying goes, if you’re not a liberal when you’re 20 you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 30 you have no brain.)
I should not be giving parenting advice, but I don’t believe it should be the goal, or is the job, of parents to teach their children a particular political worldview. (For one thing, it places excessive importance on politics, which should be less important than it is.) I can think of many more things — the need to work hard and well and not be lazy or settle for less than your best, for instance, and the need to think for yourself, not merely parrot the official line — that are more important for our children to learn than, say, whom to vote for in the next election. My political beliefs were obviously shaped by my parents (in part because they taught me to think for myself), but I believe what I believe because I thought it out. That should be the goal of conservative parents — to get their kids to think for themselves. (And that should be the goal of liberal parents, moderate parents and politically uninterested parents too.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 