Category: Television & Radio

John Fleck makes an excellent point about the professionalism of firefighters contrasted with that of TV journalists:

I have a great frustration with traditional television news coverage of wildfires, because it generally leaves the impression of a chaotic, uncontrolled and unpredictable situation. Sometimes it is that way. But more often, the fire crews have a pretty clear idea of terrain, fuel load and weather. They know where the fire is now, and where it’s likely to go in the next 24 hours. They have a strategy for fighting the fire, which generally involves cutting a line behind it, flanking it with lines, and picking a safe distance in front of it to cut a line. It’s hard work, but most of the time it’s a fairly orderly process. The importance is to distinguish that orderly process from the times that the fire gets unruly rather than just treating the whole event as unruly chaos.

NewMexiKen lived through The Sopranos without cable, but Deadwood, which returned last night on HBO, pushed me to the brink. I need HBO and I need it now.

So I called my dealer, Comcast. They had sent me an advertisment for cable at “$25 off per month for 16 months!” Sounded good.

“But sir, you have to be an existing dish customer. This is a ‘Dump the Dish’ marketing campaign.”

“But it doesn’t specifically say that,” I reply.

“But that’s what we intended,” I hear back. “It’s a “Dump the Dish” campaign.”

The supervisor who eventually came on the line (not unlike Ernestine for those who remember Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator) pointed out that the mailer does say “Some restrictions may apply.” And so they do.

I’m going to buy a dish.

“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,” a new series for preschool children that begins tonight on the Disney Channel, seeks to restore the primacy of the network’s most famous character. In a sense, Mickey has been demoted: the cartoon creature, who in his heyday chatted with Leopold Stokowski in “Fantasia” and was a hero of World War II (the password for Allied troops on D-Day was “Mickey Mouse”), is now teaching toddlers to count and identify shapes in a Sesame Streetish half-hour program that the network describes as “learning-focused.”

For much of his television career, the mouse was more a master of ceremonies than a comic lead. Now he has been whittled down to a Mister Rogers role — kindly and didactic.

For Today’s Preschooler, a Slick New Mickey Mouse

What a way to treat a senior rodent (Mickey’s 77).

Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born on this date in 1908. He died in 1965.

A Murrow radio report from a bombing raid over Berlin (he made 25 bombing runs).

The clouds were gone and the sticks of incendiaries from the preceding waves made the place look like a badly laid out city with the streetlights on. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. As Jock hauled the Dog up again, I was thrown to the other side of the cockpit, and there below were more incendiaries, glowing white and then turning red. The cookies—the four-thousand-pound high explosives—were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad. And then, as we started down again, still held in the lights, I remembered the Dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in its belly, and the lights still held us. And I was very frightened.

The above from a fine article earlier this year by Nicholas Lehmann in The New Yorker. This article is excellent background for those who have seen Good Night, And Good Luck. (Quotation actually taken from Bob Edwards’ Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism.)

NPR has some good stuff including clips from World War II and commentary on McCarthy.

And here is the complete text of Murrow’s 1958 speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association featured in the film, Good Night, And Good Luck.

AP is reporting that Mike Wallace says he has been in talks with NBC about a job.

Holy cannoli, Mike Wallace (1918) is older than NBC (1926).

The Writer’s Almanac, often cited here at NewMexiKen, is now available as a daily podcast hosted by Garrison Keillor. Click for details.

So, one of the rumors going around the internets is that Tony Soprano really did get whacked by Uncle Junior in the sixth season opening show of The Sopranos (last Sunday). The remaining 17-or-so episodes will consist of flashbacks to events before the shooting while we — the audience — all wait to learn Tony’s fate.

Dan Neil has 800 Words on American Idol. Go read them all, but here’s some of them:

In this newspaper’s op-ed section, author Thomas de Zengotita theorized that the popularity of “Idol” reflected the onset of the “virtual revolution,” a pervasive self-publicizing impulse (blogs, chat rooms, MySpace.com) that has ordinary people “demanding a share of the last scarce resource in the overdeveloped world—attention.”

This is a grand bit of pop culture hermeneutics, and it’s just bull. “Idol” is a talent show, an amateur singing contest, no better and no worse—and no more driven by digital culture—than the “Original Amateur Hour,” which ran on radio and then on television almost uninterrupted from 1934 until 1970. Were “The Gong Show” and “Star Search” also manifestations of the virtual revolution?

In fact, it’s the celebration of amateurism that makes “Idol” so compelling; conversely, it was the Olympics’ semi-pro vibe that made the Winter Games so farcical and forgettable.
…

Far from polishing the almighty pedestal of celebrity, “Idol” takes a wrecking ball to it. Here is proof that pop stars are not so unapproachably special and rare that they deserve to be worshipped. People just as talented and just as worthy may be shelving your library books or cold-calling you for newspaper subscriptions or cleaning your pool. It turns out we’re a pretty gifted species, Homo sapiens cinderellus.

The Oscars were watched by less than 40 million Americans.

That means about 250 million Americans were doing something else.

… might be interested in knowing that the iTunes Music Store has the complete 90 minutes of his recent appearance on Inside the Actors Studio for $1.99.

Oh my goodness.

Catch Natalie Portman’s gangsta rap while you can (from Saturday Night Live).

Update: NBC has it here.