69 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
With Appreciation - and How!, March 11, 2005
Thank you, Tom Fenton, for giving our generation a public voice. All the MBA's, CPA's and LLB's have brought boardroom boredom to the small screen by confusing reporting with entertainment and bottom line statistics and you get criticized for being critical of the blunder bosses, with the publication of Bad News. They were born too late.
They will never understand the intellectual and social advantage of entering this world during the Great Depression when heroic men and women inspired great hope in what should have been the worst of times; and then, moving into the adolescent years, a part of the total commitment of the Greatest Generation of World War II. Meatless meals and ration coupons were no sacrifice while GI's we knew were dying for a proud country and twenty-one dollars a month. We had stable, supportive neighborhoods; extended families, and dependable, imaginative, friends. Additional encouragement was surely provided by the poorly paid nobility of superbly dedicated teachers. All of it grew us. There was no bottom line, no money issue beyond survival. The issue was posterity.
Tom, do you know of a front office exec that has used - or even understood - that word? It was the selfless platform that our founding fathers built a nation on. Too, the early newsmen at CBS knew they were builders for the future, not grasping bottom-liners. What a world of giants you followed, Tom, with those paragons of intellect and elocution, Edward R. Murrow's "boys" at CBS News: Eric Severeid, Charles Collingwood, William L. Shirer, Robert Trout, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Richard C. Hottelet, Howard K. Smith, Larry LeSueur, Winston Burdett, and Murrow's producer, Fred W. Friendly? All of patrician mien if not patrician birth, they were mesmerizers and rarely, if ever, spoke a word in error.
That you aspired to follow them does you credit, Tom, a courageous recognition of personal worth....and you certainly fit that CBS mold, now discarded in some musty attic of fading memory, an artifact that wouldn't find a buyer on eBay or a price on the Antiques Road Show.
The inspirations are long gone now, Tom, remembered and commemorated only in the minds of the elderly among us mourning the lost legacy of the great issues your words speak of in Bad News. Today's power elite believe in narrowing down the salable, simplistic, "big story" and rehashing it over and over to the exclusion of all else, even as tens of thousands dying in the darker, obscured-to-the public regions of the world are ignored. And that is as much the fault of an increasingly crass Fourth Estate, the erstwhile custodians of public conscience, as it is uncaring governments not urged into action. "It's the competition stupid!" So what if more than half the public can't find Sweden on a map. Who ever heard of Scandinavia anyway, huh!
Compare those legends of the past to today's anchors and correspondents, particularly on the cable news networks that are now threatening the very existence of network newscasts. It's a world of pretenders, despite their degrees from Harvard and Stanford. They would have been an embarrassment to `enry `iggins and my 8B3 class back in 1944! When the Elbe River and Wilkesbarre , PA, are as foreign to them as quarks and mesons are to the average major league shortstop, they commit errors that should send them to their minor leagues to report on automobile accidents and two-headed turtles. No such luck. Too many of them are paid to be personable gigglers and chatter-boxers, too good looking and too sexy (in somebody's opinion) to be given the boot. They blend perfectly with the made over, tucked and enhanced generation. Alas, these jolly anchor people are now used as occasional correspondents in more distant venues. They are save-a-buck assignees, doing in-shallow reporting in fractured English. What ever happened to incisive follow-up questions? Soft ball players!
Dare we expect something better from our news centers while the United States is listed near or at the bottom of the world's industrial nations in educational quality, in knowledge of our native language, in math skills, and even in our pitifully low contribution of foreign aid as a percentage of GNP? Small wonder that our once most-admired-nation is now out-sourcing our foreign correspondents along with everything else of value, to enrich the grand poobahs of commerce, while impoverishing the rest of us.
For every concerned Lou Dobbs or sensitive Aaron Brown on the domestic front, or a Tom Fenton (before he retired) on the foreign scene, there are a dozen silver-spoon generation entertainers. Whether in the news rooms or temporarily on the road, they are readers, essentially, who read poorly scripted news poorly, and who are indistinguishable one from the other, society's Peter Pans, that will "never grow up" as long as they are suspended like marionettes. As a lifetime news junkie, I resent it.
Thanks again for telling it the way it is, Tom; but the Dutch boy at the dike is folk fiction. I fear that you, and a few less expressive others, can't hold back the spreading wasteland. It is no longer fashionable to be smart, and compassionately concerned. And we are becoming increasingly aware of how dangerous it is to be critical. Once on "the list," you lose access.
What the hell! You're right, it's still worth the fight, Tom, or else I wouldn't have bought your book in the first place.
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scary, but Join the Club, March 15, 2005
I think that the problem with the news as being broadcast by television, both national and local is that we consider it to be the news. If we think of it as just another form of entertainment show featuring a small team of bubble heads with puffed up hair and the ability to giggle at each other then it all makes sense.
Last night a featured local story was that diesel fuel prices were higher here than a few hundred miles away so truckers were just buying enough fuel to get to where it was cheaper. So what.
Every day or so we hear another American has been killed in Iraq. Every week or so a thousand Americans are killed in car crashes. Not a mention. Every month 10,000 or so people die from AIDS -- old news, no one cares.
Tom Fenton's book is quite interesting from an international news point of view. It joins with a bunch of other books lamenting the dumbing down, spin controlled, if it bleeds, it leads attitude of the media. I wish I could say that I felt it would do some good.
Have a good retirement Tom.
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