Trump, Demogoguery, Indecency and Us

This frightening political season has been rife with demagoguery and indecency.

The prime demagogue has been Donald Trump but there have been examples of other much more subtle demagoguery. Much of it has been in a biased establishment press that reports a favored half of the story — the half that pleases its corporate owners and feeds their greed.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that Bernie Sanders’ supporters had threatened to the chair of the Nevada Democratic party with violence, but we never find out what might drive them to such extreme measures.

Nor are we even certain that the threats originated with them. Dirty tricks of just this sort are not unusual in American politics. They are the by-products of big money, desperation and power.

Question: Could the threats be from agents provocateurs?

Once, the press sought to get to the root of events. Not today. The mainstream media are now controlled by the powerful and the greedy.  The news, in its search for profit, is drawn to entertainment and spectacle.

The the quest for truth goes begging. The maw of NOW must be fed.

The words “demagoguery” and “indecency,” take me back to this nation’s hither-to most public and dangerous bully and demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy. The time, the early ’50’s, is known to this day as “The McCarthy Era.” McCarthy’s lies and innuendos ruined the lives of thousands. The senator’s message was of fear. It was fueled with scapegoats.

Unlike the passive, self-serving role of the press today, back then the press was instrumental in bringing McCarthy down. The unblinking eye of television broadcast live the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Army’s attorney Joseph N. Welch exposure of McCarthy.

Consider his scolding of McCarthy. “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” intoned Welch to an arrogant, dismissive McCarthy.

Consider Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly’s famous, meticulously crafted McCarthy exposé on CBS Reports. You can find the transcript here: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/murrowmccarthy.html

In the broadcast’s coda, Murrow noted that McCarthy had once cited Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in warning of the dangers of Communism.

Murrow, eyes fixed on the camera and his audience, read: “Earlier, the senator asked, ‘Upon what meat does this, our Caesar, feed?’ Had he looked three lines earlier in Shakespeare's ‘Caesar,’ he would have found this line, which is not altogether inappropriate: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

And so it is today as we stand on the threshold of “The Trump Era.”

There’s plenty of “fault” to go ‘round, but the prevalence, acceptance and even celebration of indecency in this culture explains much of it.

If we were to ask Trump, as we should, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” he might well answer with his branded arrogance, “What does decency have to do with it? What does decency have to do with ANYTHING. I don’t DO ‘decency!”

Indeed his millions of followers love him for his indecency. Once decent Republican politicians, caving to power, have now embraced indecency in their support of the presumptive nominee.

In an earlier time this political season would be considered a spectacle of the obscene. Utterly repulsive.

Today, the media thrives on it. We laugh at rude put-downs. We fawn over hate-mongering talk radio hosts, who make millions off their venom. The most popular films today are bloody displays of brutal violence and foul language.

This is called entertainment. Over the years it has grown and melded with politics and, yes, produced unchallenged war and riches for the arms industry.

We are literally amusing ourselves to death, as author and critic Neil Postman warned years ago in a book of that name.

Murrow and Friendly were right: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

RIP: The Baron of TV News Banter

You may not have noted the death of Frank Magid earlier this month. He’s responsible for what passes for news on local TV ­— and hence your distorted perception (and that of your neighbors) of what’s going on around us.

I’ve known of Magid for years, ever since I became fascinated by the potential of broadcast news in graduate school. Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow’s producer (see “Good Night and Good Luck”), was my professor and inspired my belief in the high calling of broadcast journalism.

Murrow and Friendly, of course, famously lived up to that calling.

Not long after I graduated, Magid came along and took a wrecking ball to journalism on local TV news. As a high-paid, itinerant TV consultant, Magid was the nemesis of responsible journalism. He advised profit-fixated station owners that the news should be entertainment pandering to the lowest common denominator and the largest possible audiences ratings, ad revenues and profits.

His Dickensonian name seemed made to order for his contribution to our collective awareness.

Magid came up with the ubiquitous “Action News” format with its “happy talk” between “news teams” of affable, young “personalities.” Local broadcast news, which has always been highly competitive, became know for show not substance.

The Magid formula was, and is, heavy on fear and frivolity. The news is defined by noir accident scenes, baby giraffes and orangutans, muggers and molesters, ominous weather fronts on animated maps, goofy home videos, whiz-bang gadget reports and mindless banter between carefully-coiffed Ken-and-Barbie anchors.

Civic news about schools, government, political campaigns, taxes and the environment gets short shrift.

Audiences have been subjected to and shaped by Magid’s innovations for 35 years. In fairness, they worked. Media executives credit Magid’s recommended dramatics and phony chatter with “saving” local news — and generating massive profits.

“Action News” also made Magid, a former sociology professor, into a rich man. The New York Times obituary noted that when he died at age 78, he owned homes in Santa Barbara, Cedar Rapids and Montana.

The unhappy talk is that in departing this world, he left his largess behind.

What he left us was TV tabloid twaddle without end. Just flick through the local TV news to witness his legacy.

For the majority of the public, which, alas, still relies on television to learn about the world outside the front door, the Magid-esque perception is as pervasive as it is perverse.

Life gives us one shot at making this world a better place. Frank, you blew it.

Tim, I hardly knew ye

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times on Tuesday, Dene Lusby of Scottsdale, Arizona, wrote: “There was Tim Russert, and there was everyone else. Now there’s only everyone else.”

Since the outpouring of tributes to Russert, the NBC News fixture who died Friday at age 58, I have felt like a stranger in a strange land. I remember Murrow, vaguely, but know his courage. I studied under his alter-ego, Fred Friendly, a man of driving intensity. Cronkite had his moments of bravery, when he at last spoke out against the Vietnamese War.

And Bill Moyer’s, still very much alive, remains a voice of integrity and conscience.

But Russert?

Another Times letter writer, Kim Zeitlin of Potomac, Maryland, praised Russert for his “penetrating objectivity.” I’m not even sure what that means. I think it is related to the journalist’s stock-in-trade, the ability to ask “penetrating” questions of each and every comer without fear or favor.

That should be a given. Unfortunately in these days of schmooze and glitz, it isn’t.

I can’t think of when I watched Russert. Certainly not on “Meet the Press.” I’m wrapped in silence at our Quaker meetinghouse worship in during the televised political chatting. If something worth knowing is on the Sunday morning news interview programs, it usually shows up in Monday’s paper.

I must have caught Russert moderating a presidential debate, but again, that’s not exactly spadework. His election night commentary was informative, but that is what it is supposed to be.

No, I think that Russert became for many a guy they liked. A favorite uncle. A helpful neighbor. Affable, modest, articulate, fair-minded. If his death has left television journalism bereft of those qualities, that would be a loss. But it hasn’t. The screen abounds with such newscasters. At times I think of them as cultivators of popularity, who, of course, reap large audiences, which, in turn, net massive advertising revenue.

To be watchable, broadcast journalists, video guests in your living room, need these qualities to meet all the standards of ratings success.

But the times require more. We need truth seekers and truth-tellers. Think Moyers, Murrow, Friendly and Cronkite.

Fred, Milo and me

When Milo Radulovich died last month at age 81, it brought back memories of Fred Friendly.

Friendly was my mentor and teacher 40 years ago. He also was instrumental in bringing fame and redemption to Milo Radulovich.

Fred was, as many know, Edward R. Murrow’s producer and alter-ego. Together they made the riveting “See It Now” documentaries of the “Golden Age” of television.

Among the most notable was “The Case Against Lieut. Milo Radulovich A0589839.” As the many obituaries for Radulovich pointed out, the documentary, which aired on CBS Oct 20, 1953, marked the beginning of the end for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the “Red Scare” that ruined the careers of hundreds, if not thousands.

I won’t go into Radulovich case, which you can read about elsewhere. It was the story of a man terribly wronged by McCarthy, a power-mad, fear-mongering junior Republican senator from Wisconsin.

Murrow and Friendly set out, against considerable obstacles, to expose McCarthy and to undo the damage to Radulovich.

I was one of Fred Friendly’s students in 1968-1969 at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Wildly expansive in gesture, hulking, intense, Fred filled his classroom with an earnest, urgent ebullience. His loose-skinned face was huge and mobile. You could get lost in its gyrations as his broadcaster’s baritone voice ladled out war stories from his years with Murrow.

To make a McLuhan-esque observation: Fred was a “hot” persona working behind the scenes in a notoriously “cool” medium. The industry is full of people like Fred. Think of the Holly Hunter character in “Broadcast News.”

By contrast, print, a “hot,” “high definition” medium, is often managed by calmer, cooler types. Why this is the case, is a future topic.

In the film “Good Night and Good Luck” about Murrow and, to a lesser extent, Friendly, Fred is played by the strikingly handsome, made-for-the-screen George Clooney. Clooney may have been good for the film, but he was about as un-Fred Friendly-like as could be. I wanted to stand up in the theater and shout, “That’s not the Fred Friendly I knew!”

Early on in our time with Fred, he would screen the Radulovich documentary. He liked to tell us that the story offered up the perfect “little picture” to illuminate a larger problem. “Look for the little picture!” he would intone.

My field of emphasis at the school was broadcast journalism and so I spent considerable time in the aura of Friendly — and Murrow, as Friendly was the keeper of Murrow’s flame.

I was part of a four-student team that wrestled with a ungainly documentary project about two “normal families” who, of course, weren’t normal, largely because there is no such thing as a “normal family.” Our subject families were, of course, our “little pictures” exposing the larger reality of familial complexity.

In this pre-video-tape age, Karen, Mark, Bill and I worked in film. Cascades of rushes hung from ceiling clips. We lugged around what Fred called the “50-pound pencil.” It also required lights and sound equipment. Unobtrusiveness was out of the question.

Our project's inspiration was the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a master of cinema verité, who had made a series of acclaimed films starting with “Titicut Follies” and moving on through “Police,” “Welfare” and “High School.”

We discovered in the dimness of the cutting room, in the middle of long nights that Wiseman’s genius was beyond our dreams. But we were set on giving Fred his “little picture.”

The screening was to be before all of our classmates and the entire faculty in the school’s stately “World Room.” We had been up the night before struggling to match the sound track to the picture track. Because, like Wiseman, we had abandoned a narrator, we had no easy way to cover up the “lip flap” caused by the frame lag separating sound and picture. To make it work meant intricate, and as our deadline loomed, intense splicing.

We spliced to within minutes of the screening. The big room was filled with anticipation. The word was out that ours was a particularly ambitious undertaking.

The lights were darkened, the shades were pulled and the projector cast its flickering light on the screen. For a minute or two all went well. Establishing shots of comfortable Westchester County streets. A “wild” track of suburban sounds, the whoosh of sedans, distant birdsong, the slap of a delivered newspaper on a drive.

And then a frame froze on the hot projector lamp. Up on the big screen, the jammed image blistered to brown as the heat consumed it. Our “See It Now” moment incinerated before our eyes.

Fred, like an oracle, announced to the audience that “these things happen.” He liked the little he had seen, he said, and then he dispatched us to the editing bench to repair our little opus.

Two or three days later, in a private screening for Fred, we ran the film flawlessly. It was ragged from reconstruction, but it displayed promise even in its over-reaching ambition.

Within a year or two of graduation, I decided that the 50-pound pencil wasn’t for me. I took up the two-ounce graphite version. No more late nights in the cutting room. Print allowed me to work on my own, free of lip-flap, intrusive lights and eye-glazing all-nighters bent over the splicer.

Bill and Mark went into television. Mark became a producer of the CBS evening news and later launched MSNBC. He died at age 51 of melanoma. Bill became a producer at ABC. When I saw him last, some 12 years ago, he was embittered by the state of television news and seemed to be looking for a way out.

A young teaching assistant who held our hands through repeated crises was Tom Bettag, who went on to play Fred Friendly to Ted Koppel’s Murrow on “Nightline.”

Karen and I went into print. Karen rose to the position of managing editor of “The Nation.” When I last heard from her this past summer was on a stint teaching journalism at the University of Nairobi.

I gravitated to the Northwest, where in one way or another I’ve tried to make a difference through writing, reporting and publishing. I am still looking for little pictures — and my own Milo Raduloviches.