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Correspondences - News By the People For People (RDF)
Correspondences - News By the People for People. (English (US))
Added to The Feed Directory on Sun, 6 Jun 2004 12:49:11 PDT
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Last Feed Sample: In his preface to General S. L. A. Marshall’s fine book about the American Airborne Invasion of Normany (Night Drop, Little, Brown; Boston, 1962) Carl Sandburg related a story that circulated in Illinois country towns when he was a boy:...
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
The country mourns the death and destruction wrought by the powerful Katrina. Would that tears could solve problems, but not so. Pestilence, plague, floods and other natural disasters have intermittently tormented humans throughout their history. Man has fought back, occasionally losing but more often winning in recent times as engineering backed by science and technology has proved to be effective in developing the means to resist nature’s onslaughts. But that was during the Age of Enlightenment. Now, however, we are in the Age of Entitlement and Indifference where them that has, gets, and them that hasn’t, gets trickled down to. Unless there’s a powerful Katrina, of course. Then, them that has, gets out safely, and them that hasn’t, gets isolated and virtually wiped out....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
Paddy Chayefsky's movie "Network" (1976) prompted audiences to demand better, more substantial television newscasts. Cynical & critical as it was, popular though it remains, frequently echoed and here cited once again, sadly, audiences never really demanded, and certainly, television executives never delivered 'better'. One could argue that news as we experience it has never been softer. Network newscasts that proffer segments called "In Depth" but feature stories as short as 1:30 or 2:00 can hardly claim to live up to their billing. The pervasive soft question that now masquerades as a hard-hitting, probative interview, the staple of most newscasts, is simply offensive to any discerning viewer....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
It was time. When it came time to leave, we left - though more quietly than might have been expected. For those in the media who covered the Jackson trial, when the end came, the trial ended without the bang that was so anxiously anticipated. Not guilty on all counts meant quite simply, "Game Over." Like that. There would be no remand, or probation and sentencing, or appellate filings, c'est finis. More than a year of work from indictment to pretrial, from jury selection to trial to deliberations had simply concluded. Like that. Period. Not so much a boom or a bang as it seemed to me to be the sound of air escaping from a rapidly deflating tire....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
My friend Andrew Cohen, legal analyst for CBS News and a regular contributor to CBS4 in Denver posted this story about the coverage of the People vs. Michael Jackson. We covered the trial as colleagues - Andrew for CBS News and I, as the pool producer. His criticism is valid, and I wanted to share what he wrote as well as a note I sent in response. Here's his essay: Candor to the Glass * by Andrew Cohen Jun 17, 2005 11:14 am US/Mountain I hope someone is writing a book, a serious book, about media coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. I hope that someone has decided to use the swirl of reportage about the King of Pop to illustrate much of what is wrong about journalism in this age of the 24-hour news cycle, the blog, and the advocate television analyst. From the moment Santa Barbara County law enforcement officials raided Jackson's "Neverland" home until the moment a jury acquitted the star of molestation, conspiracy and alcohol charges, the story generated an obscene (pun intended) amount of uninformed speculation, rumor, and just plain bad journalism. Print reporting, not surprisingly, was better than radio and television work -- but not necessarily by much....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
If You Elect an Anus, What You Get is Offal Everyone’s so polite these days. The “ordinary” people, those who do hard work , provide their children as cannon fodder for their government and are the backbone of the country, are getting dumped on from all directions and only a relatively few seem to be able to speak up about it. What does it take to get them moving?...
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
As Mr. Bush slides closer and closer to becoming the AFLAC duck (translation: lame), let's recap the last few months of Am ar i ca (translation America, without the fake drawl) under his watch....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
The following is from a novel in progress, “Dib Krohmer and Friends” Essay on War by David Krohmer The media feed the public with images of war. Actual battle scenes are shown on television. Virtual battle scenes are created for the cinema. Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola excel at shocking viewers with graphic depictions of other people’s blood and guts. Lifeless bodies with wounds exposed are shown draped in the positions they assumed in the moments before they died. A heroic sergeant barks out orders to his squad while mortally wounded. A cowering soldier cringes in his foxhole shaking with fear. Grenades and shells explode; machine guns and mortars fire. Your neighbor’s brains are splattered all over you. The kid without fear dies crying. Drawn, oh so weary faces silently watch him die. A lad who can stand it no longer rises up out of his foxhole and yells “you bastards,” as he runs toward an enemy machine gun nest, grenade in hand. Brave voices. Brave men. Heroes, Cowards. Macho meets wimp. A new national prayer is born: “Our fodder who art in heaven, hollow be thy names.”...
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
Perhaps the most difficult thing about being an editor is finding new things to write about, no matter how prestigious or obscure or how large or small your publication. My own perception is that one tends to get too involved in the present and, based on one’s own sense of values, tends to continuously harp on the rightness or wrongness of the predominant issues of the day; the various wars, the economy, social security, right to life and/or abuse of individual rights. Thus, the editorial “countryside,” has become littered with the carcasses of literary “horses” flogged to death by desperate editors in search of writing material....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
Many of us in this country seem to require a simplistic view of events or ideas in order to be able to make decisions regarding those events or ideas. We must be presented with black vs. white choices in order to make up our minds. Nuanced choices are too confusing for our non-abstract minds to handle. We can only think “one thing at a time” and have great difficulty making generalizations from one event or idea to another or in seeing similarities or differences between various events or ideas. To make things easier for ourselves, we assign labels to events and ideas. Those labels soon become substitutes for the events and ideas themselves and any shades of grey are transformed thereby into black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, wise or stupid....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
County Cork is the southwestern corner of Ireland, which is itself on the outer edge of the European Union, a distant counter-balance to sunny Greece far off to the southeast. As you reach the end of the mainland in Cork you come to the small harbor at Baltimore and from there you take a doughty little ferryboat to the islands further west. The boat that connects Clear Island to the mainland is the Naomh Ciarabn II. We went his way one spring morning, with a cool breeze off the still-cold ocean. And we reached Clear Island, the most southwestern inhabited spot in Ireland. Barely inhabited, with fewer people than cows....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
Beating Around the Bush: the Failure of the American Press For those of us who monitor news from all over the world, it has long been apparent that the American people are not privy to much news or even to history that conveys a negative image about this country. The American press for the most part has failed. The major purpose of Fiatlux and the hundreds of similar websites and blogs is to try to bring that news and history to you. On a personal level, I find it offensive when a major newspaper such as the Boston Globe (04-13-05) displays on its front page a photo of George Bush at a cafeteria counter at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas with the caption, “Bush thanks soldiers for their service in Iraq.”...
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
This day we recognize all of those who have so greatly contributed to misery in the world by waging illegal wars, slaughtering, maiming and starving hundreds of thousands of human beings, pandering to the masses with false promises, lying, cheating, taking the Lord’s name in vain, failing to provide food, shelter, health care, medical support, decent education, environmental protection, fair wages, job security, freedom and justice . . . to all. This day honors the self-indulgent leaders, the exploiters of others, the torturers, those who bear false witness, the braggarts, the cheaters, the bullies, the know-it-alls who are perpetually wrong, those who speak before they think, the intolerant, the unfeeling, the cruel, the condescending, the money grubbers, the economic barbarians, the racists and all of those with distorted values who foist those values on others. You are either with them or against them. Single issues no longer matter. If people of good will cannot work together to make democracy work, you may possibly see the fall of democracy within your lifetime....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
On December 26, 2004 a massive tsunami struck. For days the world watched horrifying scenes of the devastation, the search for survivors, the identification of the dead. The world poured out donations to speed the needed disaster response to the region. One would think that the natural disaster would be bad enough, but an older man made horror swept in with the towering tsunami - toxic and radioactive waste - which is sickening hundreds (if not thousands) of Somalian's. An ongoing utilization of Somalia (and other poor nations) as a dumping ground for toxic and radioactive waste dumping is a devastating aftermath of the tsunami....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
March 1, 2005 A recent article by Bill Moyers entitled There Is No Tomorrow weighs continually on my mind. I just can’t let it go. [see Commentary Section of Issue 3 of Fiatlux Redux for Moyers' article.] That there are millions of American religious ideologues so wrapped up in a literal interpretation of the bible that they would be willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of their compatriots for their own salvation is mind boggling....
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:15 PDT
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