When it was relevant - Meet The Press 1974
By Gordonskene Saturday Mar 28, 2009 5:00pm(Meet The Press interviews Governor Ronald Reagan - January21, 1974)
There was a time, not so long ago, when Sunday morning "Public Affairs" programs consisted of useful discussion, pertinent discourse and the occasional almost-brawl. Meet The Press was only one of several shows on every major network Sunday mornings which covered some aspect of local, national and world politics. They all adapted the Panel method of mini-press conferences. Sometimes it was a good cop/bad cop situation. Sometimes it just got contentious from the get-go. But you always walked away better informed than you were before you turned on the TV (or radio . . .let's not forget). Somewhere, back in the dark ages, it was deemed important for an audience to be informed about the world around them. There was, above all, an FCC edict that said all broadcasting over public airwaves had to have some portion of "Public Interest" programming included in its schedule. And all (or most) News Departments were respected entities within the network structure. Somewhere along the line though, the Peoples Right To Know took a giant step backward and wound up reduced to streams of pander, infantilism and spin. In short, Mainstream Media can take big credit for the Dumbing Down of America it so often talks about. And you can almost put a date on it. From the best I can suss out, the formats of all the Sunday Morning talk shows started changing in 1982. Going from panels to one-on-ones or Hardball to Softball.
Getting off the soap box - here is Meet The Press from its earlier incarnation, as a panel of questioners moderated by Lawrence Spivak, the co-creator of the panel format (along with Martha Rountree). It started as a Radio program in 1946 and quickly made the transition to television. As you may notice, listening to this broadcast, the panel features a young and rather cantankerous Robert Novak.
My, how times have changed.
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Sunday Morning talk shows started changing in 1982
So much seems to have started going to shit around that time.
It's a crying shame to see what the once noble profession of journalism has degenerated to. Now it's infested with nothing but charlatans, partisans, harlots, liars, robots and entertainers. I will disown any child of mine who dares to pursue this gutter "profession" as a career choice.
On the other hand, we need new talent more than ever to push back and reclaim investigative integrity and independence. The models are changing. Maybe we can't rely on the most expensive form of media to accomplish this, as only the enormously wealthy can afford to deliver "news" on TV and in print. Thank the regenerative forces of good that the internet and blogs like this are opening new venues.
If your child did choose to enter this field, one hopes it would be with a spirit of determination to cut through the tangle of crap to present unvarnished truth.
Idiocracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc
It's all Crap-Media now and has been for some time.
They force-feed American audiences with self-serving Conservative Swill just as geese are force-fed for the liver pate.
We stopped watching ALL television over 15 years ago - no exceptions. We gave up newspapers about 10 years ago now.
Watching newspapers like the ultra-Conservative Chicago Tribune slowly die is a pleasure.
*
Watch MSNBC. Read any other newspaper and you'll see "ultra-liberal" writing.
Is this the place you get your news?
is ultra liberal?
Just asking.
Like the United Press International (UPI) which Helen Thomas quit, the day after Sun Myung Moon's organisation, News World Communications, bought it
I know. I was just trying to ask dracovelli why he/she thinks "any other newspaper" has ultra-liberal writing. Maybe I am not getting the snark intended?
you were too subtle for me :D
I didn't read above...
Can we go back to that kind of public discourse? The old would be so refreshing and new.
Reagan was an evasive, ill informed buffoon back then and he died one. He single-handedly destroyed the California school and mental health systems then went on the "trickle" us down to where we are today.
To hell with him.
by a bunch of powerful people to sell us something. For the most part, they got their money's worth.
In my opinion, it was the same with Bush. He was a salesman - and a good one.
I also have the strong feeling that Obama is in the same mold. He was picked to sell us something.
wasn't a salesman, he was a usable tool.
He's too fucking stupid to do about anything other than consume oxygen and resources that would be better used by far smarter and more deserving people.
Yeah, the way they trashed Obama in the beginning and pretty much through the whole election tells me that he was "picked" to sell us something. "They" would have loved to have lynched him if they thought they could get away with it. The bowel movements that Obama makes are legions smarter than Bush and Reagan combined. Give him some time, our country's drive-through, fix-it-now mentality thinks that things happen in sound bites and bumper sticker slogan time. He's just been the unfortunate person who wanted to get elected to clean up the mess that Reagan started and Bush perfected.
But we still may be able to force him to honor his promises,But we're going to have to get madder and louder
read http://www.truthout.org/032809A
thank you for putting it directly.
bet your buns on it , corporation picked, corporation owned!
of shit, moving the wingnut religious crap into the mainstreem that was started by Nixon. Bought and paid for by the corporate raiders which owned the country.
Also, just listening to this pile of dog crap comming out of his mouth made me want to puke all over again. My first vote was in 1972, and it was not for Nixon the crook.
You mean to tell me that "Meet the Press" actually was a program where a public met the press?
You mean there used to be a panel of reporters instead of one sleaze-bag hack with an agenda?
Why do we stand for it?
The conservatives did a three pronged attack on America. First they ended the Fairness Doctrine, then they consolidated the media into 5 corporations that decide what most people are "informed" by every day. Lastly they played a trick of making people think the media was "liberal" so they could get away with monopolizing it all in the background while dumbed down sheeple were hit over the head with the liberal media meme.
Roland Raygun looks so young in this photo.
Somehow too in the 80s, it came to be believed that all the public wanted was entertainment of the lowest-common-denominator variety, even in their news programs. I'm not sure that that is what the public wanted or wants; I'm more inclined to believe that media owners and reactionary types wanted the public to be less informed, so they made it so, in part by encouraging people to think that all they wanted was to be entertained.
But the strategy did work to dumb us all down, and today the public believes that whatever they see on TV is a reflection of their desires, that any changes that have occurred are because the public wanted those changes. Thus, they believe nothing can be done about it, that it's always been this way. But just knowing that it wasn't always this way means that something can be done about it, especially since the changes haven't been for the better.
Ronald Reagan was one of our nation's worst presidents.
He basically told the nation, "forget about Vietnam, forget about Watergate, you are great, all the problems are somebody else's fault, like Iran, like Russia, like Nicaragua."
The Reagan approach to government was an administration that sells dreams to the American people, placates them, and then does whatever it pleases. It cuts the populace out of the government. The Reagan method was disingenuous.
America is a great nation. But success only comes from making good decisions and good decisions only come from basing those decisions on reality.
Reagan has become one of the most overblown presidents in our history. He was well marketed, like George Bush, on the cowboy theme, but it was all hat and no cattle. America eats that shit up. Why? I don’t know.
Personally, I prefer the truth than smoke blown up my ass. But that’s just me.
I call Reagan the amiable dunce. An avuncular figure who basically spoke in stupid platitudes. A disastrous president who laid the groundwork for the Two Bushes.
David gregory is a tool.
That's why we're here. Instead of _us_ wasting our time watching them, _you_ will tell us the propaganda points they are pushing this week.
watershed hiring of multi-Emmy-award winning "ABC's Wild World of Sports" founder & Executive Producer Roone Arledge as the head of the ABC News Division, with the mandate that he makeover the Division with a fresh approach that would finally pull ABC out of perpetual 3rd place behind CBS and NBC... An incredibly visionary TV pioneer, Arledge unfortunately polluted the hard news model by migrating over to the News Division all of the truly groundbreaking tools he'd invented at Wide Wold of Sports, including, among many many things, the graphically packaged soft-story backgrounder on a noteworthy sports team player (read: newsmaker within a competitive 2-party political system in USA)... This, at te intersection of the advent of ENG video news cameras replacing film cameras as the primary method of news photography -- ushering in much faster turnarounds of clips (and the eventual lack of vetting & shaping that was helped by that extra time needed to develop and film-edit film stories) -- with the advent of live TV remotes, which for the first time lead to local news dropping network feeds and starting to cover events themselves -- all at the intersection of a very weak Dan Rather inheriting Walter Cronkite's role at CBS, combined with the emerging major new success of the news magazine format pioneered by 60 Minutes, all combined to create a result where for the first time, it could be possible to make a News Division profitable.
There'd always been a firewall between News and Entertainment Divisions, and News had never ever been subject to being a revenue center for the networks... Their economic role was to be the strong lead-in that held audiences to "stay tuned" to the primetime lineup of dramas and comedies that followed -- where the ad revenue machine was stationed.
Once it was seen that American audiences actually enjoyed "newsy" type shows occasionally in prime time, the networks saw how vastly cheaper it was to produce an hour of soft-news programming than a one-hour drama like Mannix or Mission:Impossible... yet draw a decent chunk of ratings, and ad revenues that flowed from them.... and thus began 20/20, the forerunner to all reality based theatrical news shows... Slowly but surely the news got further and further squuezed out of nighttime news programming, as it became clear that people didn't want to think that hard past the evening news hour, yet were engaged by newsy-type subjects.
Add the Iran Hostage Crisis and the emergence of The Two Teds -- (1) the REAL maverick Ted Turner, who bet a fortune on his new concept for 24 hour news -- and got "lucky" with this hostage crisis, supplying him an endless appetite from Ame3ricans for the latest news from Iran... which became the playmaker for CNN that put them on the map and disproved, big time, the flood of laughter & criticism of Ted Turner that "nobody would be interested in 24 hour news!"... and Ted #2, Ted Koppel, whose late night news updates on the Iran Hostage Crisis built the formula that lead to Nightline -- further proving that America would watch news programmming in slots other than primetime and Sunday mornings....
This is just a sketch off the top of my head, but also something I've tracked and analyzed for decades.. and when you put it all together, you can now see that there is nothing at all mysterious about how this splintering and then dumbing down of News came to be in the USA.
I'm often amazed that this Big Picture is not seen for what it is... the tipping point that demanded more and more news programming, to fill 24 hours of the new successful formula Ted Turner created, giving way to the "he said/she said"** food-fight formats that have now littered our culture beyond the emptiness of that Vast Wasteland of TV Broadcasting -- as though that was ever believed possible by the likes of Newton Minow and the Fred Friendly's of the world....
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newt... (MP3)
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_Minow
** 60 Minutes debuted this "Point/ Counterpoint" feature in 1971, which begat Dan Ackroyd's infamous line "Shana, you ignorant slut", which itself foreshadowed the entire Fox News Network format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#.22Po...
So, there is a very clear track that leads from all pf those events directly to the hiring of MC Rove-hack David Gregory as head od NBC's once venerable Meet The Press.
There are various other bullet points along the way, including CBS and Dan Rather's pathetic attempts at lightening their own news -- once the benchmark for excellence -- beginning with Connie Chung, to the Sweaters, to everything else that was to come down the pipe, leading to the Jeff Wigand story told so observantly by Michael mann's "The Insider" with Al Pacino and Russel Crowe.
The incredible "This News Division has been villified ...." scene from that film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJfyFoZcetY
from my own "news clip" compilation collection -- which derives from John Amato's lead with C&L -- the first move that has jumpstarted the first viable alternative to video network news.
Good job John... You'll be cited by history of journalism, for sure.
And this post cites you within my own deconstruction of this entire industry.
and made some dumb errors above... oh well... it was all off the cuff to get it out of my head and onto a page.
Their act was identical- they both shout, and rant, and never engage in intelligent dialogue...
... it was Wally George that started it all, then came Morton Downey Jr. When Downey was given the opportunity to videotape his show and syndicate it just like Wally George had done, he jumped at it and left his radio job. His successor at the same radio station was Rush Limbaugh. In other words, they're all repackaged versions of the same old and tired Father Coughlin/Cotton Mather spiel, generation after generation. Same talking points, slogans, and buzz phrases.
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