Portrait of the Evening "News"

   I am of the generation of print journalists who harbored some respect for certain of our competitors on the broadcast side -- especially if they worked for CBS.

  The likes of Fred W. Friendly, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and their colleagues provided us with a great deal of good journalism -- and would have provided exponentially more if they had ever managed to persuade CBS to make the nightly news an hour long.

   Another of the truly fine journalists of my generation, Mort Persky, closely monitors the performers, actors and entertainers who pose as journalists on TV these days.

   This is one of his reports:

   Alas, I don't think Walter Cronkite met his maker before seeing what happened to the TV news business since his, Murrow's and Bill Paley's day. Even without Fox, we actually have non-cable TV news telling us what it wants to tell us, the facts be damned. And the network "newscasts," by being a bit stealthier, do a better job of fooling their public than Fox, which because it is believed in like God, doesn't need to fool anyone. I've watched this on the 6:30 newscasts for years, though the only way I can stomach even two minutes of Fox is when it shows up as a clip on Olbermann or Maddow.

 Here's CBS last week, following up its report on Obama's healthcare speech (or is it the "You lie" speech?) with what they call their "USERS GUIDE To Healthcare"  (official looking visual right here emphasizes how factual this is gonna be. NOTE: Beware when ABC or CBS does something official looking like a "Users Guide" or a "Fact Check"; that's when the distortions flow thickest). Anyway, this "USERS GUIDE" purports to explain what a Public Option really means. But its target is bigger -- "government-run healthcare." For balance, they start with a white couple in Florida who run a small accounting firm and have to pay $2,000 a month -- one-fourth of their income -- for health insurance to cover themselves and their two sons, one of whom has a chronic illness. They're in their 50s, and can't afford to hire the employee they need and pay for health care too, They're rooting hard for the public option.


   For Point B, CBS moves to its man in Tennessee, which has, or had, a public system called TennCare. First, they show poor black woman benefiting from TennCare, unable to do without it. 2. Now they "report," then repeat and repeat that it damn near broke state of Tennessee and had to be cut back. Two persons are quoted on camera: Rep. Phil Roe, a Repub from the state's NE corner who was an obstetrician and pisses all over Tenncare. Also quoted is,Mary Bufwack, CEO of United Neighborhood Health Services of Nashville. She says, "Tenncare's lesson is a cautionary tale for us all. Tenncare's lesson is "Control costs, control costs, control costs." Hmmm. Why quote her? I smell a rat, and think her organization is some kind of anti-healthcare outfit with a cover-up name (a common subterfuge on CBS and ABC; the few-seconds quote and who's saying it is quicker than the eye). So I look up Ms. Bufwack's group, and it appears to pass the smell test. I drop her an email asking how she feels about the way she was quoted on CBS News.

   She answers a day later: "Mort, let's put it this way....One of my comments that did not get into the story was that the issue of TennCare's runaway costs wasn't that the state was too involved, the issue was that the state wasn't involved enough in controlling costs.  I also noted that one cannot leave cost controls to the private sector. How perceptive of you. Mary."

   CBS segment continues: Mark Strassmann, their man in Tennessee, closes out with a glimpse of Rep. Roe and a few dark words about how TennCare didn't work, cost way too much. His last words are, "Another reason many here will never trust government-run health care again."

   Portrait of the unbiased evening news on Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow's old network. Congratulations, Katie!
   --M.P.

The Nuts and the ACORN

     When I witness the hilarious mouth-frothing of the Foxes over the great ACORN scandal, my memory takes me back to a musical theater stage in post-riot Detroit.  In John and Dorothy Ashby's splendid jazz play, "Three Six," the approach of the white police would be signaled by the distant sound of sirens, whereupon the black cast would break out into song: "Ring around the ghetto, keep the Niggers in.  Let them knife each other, fighting' over gin."

   As the police arrived onstage they heard a torrent of misinformation that sent them scurrying off on wild goose chases.  Then their real prey, the king of the numbers books and his runners, emerged from hiding and resumed the day's business.

   "Three Six" was a whimsical depiction of real life in the black ghetto as it existed on the evening when a white police raid on a black after-hours drinking and gambling dive set off the rampage that killed what was then America's fifth-largest city.

   Against a similar  backdrop, the Foxes are shocked, SHOCKED!, that some ACORN employees were receptive to and willing to help establish a house of ill repute suggested by the Fox scammers who set them up.

   Fox conveniently did not mention the ACORN employees who saw through the ruse.  One threw them out of the office.  Another gave them some hum -- "Ah done kilt bof' ma husbins" -- which the big fools bit into and didn't even retract when the local sheriff reported that both men were alive and well and laughing like hell at Beck, O'Reilly and the other whiteys who were so easy to fool.

   ACORN is a grassroots outfit that has tasked itself with showing ghetto residents how to lift themselves up by the bootstraps.  One of its operations is a vast, nationwide effort to register poor blacks, hispanics and others as legal voters.  To give them a voice in a government that otherwise is hostile to them.  It recruits most of its employees and most of its fee-for-servicer voter registration workers off the streets of the ghetto.

   Is it really shocking, SHOCKING !  that some of these people, approached by slick-talking dudes in fine threads and flashing very long green, might think that a nice, clean, well-run whorehouse could be good for the neighborhood?  Bring in some tax-free white money, fix up a rundown place and make it look real nice, provide a few jobs.  What's surprising is that so many of these rung-in "Niggers" were smart enough not to fall for the Foxes' hoax.

   Virtually all of the legitimate voters enrolled by the ACORN workers vote Democrat, which is what really worms the Foxes.

   The registration teams, recruited right off the ghetto streets and paid serious Johnny Walker Red money for each voter they signed up, of course gamed the system and registered thousands of non-existent voters, or ineligible ones.  Grow up on the streets and that's what you know: game the system.

   Who's guiltier, the ACORN dudes with sixth-grade educations in ghetto schools who enrolled fictitious voters, or the Yale and Liberty Law School educated lawyers and shills who disenfranchised thousands of legal voters in  Florida, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere to steal elections for the GOP?

   American racism comes in subtle tones, not always in black and white.  The hypocritical flap over ACORN is just one more racist bleat from the white far right.

   They cannot get over the fact that there's a black man -- A BLACK MAN! -- in "their" White House.