Blogroll

Goldarn and fudge you SNL

This week governmentattic.org (“Rummaging in the government’s attic”) released a response from the Federal Communications Commission to a Freedom of Information Act request for complaints filed about Saturday Night Live. With a cover letter dated “December 21, 2021,” the FCC provided more than 350 pages of documents, which also covered a request for complaints regarding […]

Book Review: The Trouble with Reality by Brooke Gladstone

It will be easy for Trumpists and conservatives to ignore Brooke Gladstone’s new book. Not only is she a member of the mainstream media, she’s spent the last 30 years working for two bastions of biased liberal media, WNYC and NPR. They’ll justify their dismissal of the book with fleeting perusals, its reviews or perhaps […]

Get off my dead trees!

Last week, a college friend and I got together for coffee. During the course of about two hours, we noticed several times we had reached the “you kids get off my lawn!” age. As he, too, is a former newspaper reporter, one of those times was our discussion of the newspaper business and the number […]

Look who’s caving

I shook my head when I saw the lede in a USA Today article in this morning’s local daily: “The Western world stood up against Islamic terrorism Wednesday after 12 people, including four cartoonists, were assassinated in the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo outside Paris.” Fact is, akin to Sony and the movie […]

The death of newspaper reporters and editors

For a number of years, I was a newspaper reporter. I started as a sportswriter and moved through the “cops and courts” beat and eventually became a political reporter, covering the legislature, local government and elections. I enjoyed the job because every day was different and you got to experience and learn about a lot […]