Ann Curry was weak on cooking segments!
That’s the horsehit explanation Steve Capus, the idiot president of NBC News gave for why they had to unceremoniously dump Ann Curry as co-host of THE TODAY SHOW.
Yeah. That was the problem. America tuned out in droves because Ann wasn't enthusiastic enough about whipped potatoes. It wasn't the guests. It wasn't that NBC's primetime lineup had become a national afterthought? No, sir. It was those damn potatoes! Turn in your apron, Ann. We can't allow you to bring down the National Broadcasting Company any longer.
Attention journalism schools: Forget international relations. Ditch Political Science. Teach cooking!
You tell me what’s worse -- A top executive of a major television network publicly humiliating a lifelong loyal employee by saying something hurtful and unconscionable or not being excited enough when corn muffins come out of the oven?
Ann Curry didn’t deserve that. Jeff Zucker didn’t deserve that. Well… maybe Jeff Zucker. But not Ann Curry.
So why was she fired… excuse me – “re-assigned to exciting new challenges?”
THE TODAY SHOW ratings have declined. GOOD MORNING AMERICA is nipping at their heels. Robin Roberts apparently can baste.
Ann Curry is 55. Savannah Guthrie (her replacement) is 40.
This was NBC’s plan all along. Ann was just a placeholder while Savannah got more seasoning. Her goose was already cooked, to use metaphors that obviously have great priority at NBC News.
Everything NBC does this year revolves around its Olympic coverage. The Olympics will bring back millions of viewers who fled because of WHITNEY, THE PLAYBOY CLUB, etc. NBC is trying to maximize that coverage to promote its shows. So they want the new TODAY SHOW line-up already in place. Pity because Ann is really a whiz on the mesquite grill and would absolute kill it on the 4th of July party segment, but alas, she’ll never get the chance. 
Look, if they wanted to replace her it's their prerogative. But they could have handled this matter sooo much better. And there’s a good chance it will backfire on them. Remember Deborah Norville, Mr. Capus? For years, the co-host of THE TODAY SHOW was Jane Pauley (pictured: right). The audience took to her. She asked knothead questions at times but made a mean strudel. After 13 years it was announced that she was being “re-assigned to exciting new challenges” and replaced by Deborah Norville, who was a rising star at NBC (and younger than Pauley). The audience perceived Norville to be a backstabber who squeezed Pauley out and they just hated her. Ratings plummeted and Norville was gone in five months. Savannah beware!
Ann Curry may not be flashy, may no longer be 40, and might not give a fuck how you make blintzes, but she’s the consummate professional, intelligent, sincere to a fault, and even in what has been described a “public execution” she has handled herself with dignity and grace.
Just compare these statements:
Ann Curry to the viewers of TODAY: “I have loved you and I have wanted to give you the world. And I still do.”
And:
The President of NBC News: “We gave her a year to prove herself, and ultimately we came to the conclusion that she had played at the highest level she could. When you’re in the major leagues of our profession, you’ve got to continue to be at peak performance in order to stay there.”
Here is Ann's final sign-off from THE TODAY SHOW. I offer her nothing but gratitude and wish her nothing but enormous success and happiness. For Steve Capus, I hope in three years he's covering a neighbor dispute over sprinkler heads for some Public Access channel.
5 Temmuz 2012 Perşembe
Ann Curry was weak on cooking segments. KILL HER!
Bill Cosby: mentor?
This post is along the lines of Sunday's.I’ve always been a big fan of Bill Cosby. Loved his comedy albums as a kid, took my wife to Las Vegas to see his stand-up act (more like a sit-down act. He just sat in a chair, smoked a cigar, and held a giant audience in the palm of his hand), and admired THE COSBY SHOW (at least when it started). He was a true original and his comedy came out of reality. You laughed because you related. He was also a damn good spokesman for Jello. So I respect his work. We’re clear on that, right?
Recently, WRITTEN BY, the WGA’s monthly magazine did an article where they referred to Bill Cosby as a writer’s mentor. I think they were being a little overly generous. I wouldn’t call him a mentor.
I’d call him an egotist who worked his writers as if they were pack mules.
I know. You say potato and I say potato.
There’s no question that there was much to be learned from Bill Cosby, and those writers who survived did take lessons that helped them in their future work. But what a cost.
The article explains how the process worked on THE COSBY SHOW. The staff worked out a very rough story area on Wednesday, then wrote an entire script over the weekend. Cosby would shit on it at the table reading on Monday. If there were lines he didn’t like he would read them in funny voices. Rather rude to the writers who killed themselves all weekend to service you. Then would come the hours of notes, Cosby would tear the whole script apart. Often, with his big cigar, he would literally blow smoke into the writers' faces. And then the staff went back to now write a completely new script and cough. Those rewrites, even in the article, were termed grueling.
And this went on week after week. Hundred hour weeks were common. Month after month. At least he didn't smoke $2 Tiparillos.
Oh, and did I mention, at the end, Cosby ad libbed stuff? I’m sure it was funny but why put everybody through that just to ultimately do it yourself?
Talented showrunners would understandably bolt after a season or even a few weeks of this. One writer was so fried after she quit that she spent six months working at the Coney Island Aquarium.
Are there shows with long hours? Absolutely. Is it difficult to write for a comedian who has a very strong voice? You betcha. But you know that going in.
However, to have a star just arbitrarily toss out draft after draft and force his staff to write around the clock for seven months is unfair and highly disrespectful.
I don’t know why the staff bothered to do anything for the table draft. Why work hard crafting jokes and scenes and moments when everything's just going to be dismissed? Just write down the first thing that comes to your mind and head for the train. The fact that the staff didn’t do that (and never did that) says something about how admirable and professional they were.
Fact: Writers burn out. Fact: Writers do not do their best work at 4:00 AM after being in the room for fifteen hours. How would an actor like it if he were asked to strenuously rehearse every day from 7:00 AM until 11:00 PM and then an audience would be brought in and he'd be asked to perform NOISES OFF for two hours?
The fact that Cosby established this grueling schedule and maintained it shows, to me, a lack of consideration and compassion. Yes, the show was a smash hit, and he was the 800 pound gorilla, but I will never be convinced it would have been any worse had the writers not spent 70% of their time writing material that everyone knew was gong to get thrown out. I could however, make an argument that the shows would have been even better had the staff not been walking zombies. And if some of the better writers had not quit.
But that’s the way they did it. A number of people made fortunes of money (including sweater manufacturers). And the show is a classic.
Call Cosby brilliant, call him the man who saved sitcoms, call him a game-changer, a visionary, a titan in the world of comedy. But mentor? I was fortunate that I had mentors who didn’t send me screaming to an aquarium.
Andy Griffith 1926-2012
So sorry to hear of the passing of Andy Griffith. I never worked with him, only met him once. It was at a memorial service for one of his writers. Just the fact that would attend says a lot. 
Andy was an amazing performer. He could be scary evil as in FACE IN THE CROWD, or your cuddly uncle. His likability quotient was off the charts. And as Sheriff Andy Taylor he represented the best of what America once was -- trustworthy, kind, homespun, humble, and (here's a blast from the past) used common sense.
Oh, and his show was funny.
I find it interesting that in this day and age of edgy comedy, THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW still airs like 18 times a day and gets good ratings. There still is a place for warm gentle humor set in small town America with characters who had a genuine affection for each other -- a place free of cynicism and vagina jokes.
Ironic that this comes a day after my Cosby post. Like Bill Cosby, Andy Griffith involved himself in all the show's scripts. But unlike Cosby, he treated his writers with great respect and they stayed with him for years. 
Younger readers might just know Andy as the old country lawyer, MATLOCK. The hair was white but the humanity, and savvy was still there. I hear all those über smart Aaron Sorkin characters talk and think, I bet Matlock could outsmart 'em.
Much older readers remember Andy from his bumpkin Air Force private in NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS. If you haven't seen it, rent it. Imagine Woody Boyd from CHEERS only ten times funnier. (And the film features a cameo by a young struggling actor named Don Knotts.) 
I wonder if anyone remembers his stand-up act. That's right, Andy Griffith was originally a comedian (and also a musician). His routine of describing a football game although he had no idea what was going on remains as hilarious today as it did fifty years ago. I was a weird kid and wanted to see top flight comedians. Andy was one I made a point of seeing. And it wasn't because I was just a sucker for North Carolina humor. I just marveled at his timing.
And if none of this sounds familiar, they mimicked his voice for Huckleberry Hound.
For years Andy lived in Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley in a nondescript house on a corner. Just one of the neighbors. A friend who lives in Toluca Lake said one Christmas Eve he heard carolers and wandered outside to see. There they were on a flatbed truck going through the neighborhood.. Led by Andy Griffith. Would you expect any less?
If there was a Mayberry they would surely have a 4th of July parade today. Even as everyone fought back tears. Because a celebration of America is a celebration of Andy, and that's worth a parade, a picnic, and fireworks... as long as Barney isn't lighting them.
What to do in Hawaii
If you’re in Hawaii on July 29th here’s something really cool to do!
Ron Jacobs, local personality known as Whodaguy and the architect of the KHJ Boss Radio format along with co-creating AMERICAN TOP 40 and hatching the San Diego Chicken – is staging a one-man show one-day only. He’ll be reflecting on his life growing up in Hawaii and God-knows-what. Ron is the one of the most colorful interesting people I’ve ever met. Trust me, you’ll get more fascinating stories, laughs, insight, and culture out of this concert than from four museums, three books, six luaus, four pineapple factory tours, and five Elvis movies.
Speaking of the King, he and Jacobs became friends. Ron emceed his first Hawaiian concert. And this was after Jacobs pulled a stunt on the radio parading around a fake Elvis that caused a statewide frenzy. Or, in the case of Ron Jacobs -- just par for the course.
It’ll all the be there – from the war to the surf craze, from the hula to Ho, natives and haoles, statehood, tourism, mysticism, Judaism, the dawn of rock n’ roll, the birth of Obama, radio, cool cars, and lots of words with k,a,e,u,h,o,n,and i's in them. Plus, a never-before attempted feature -- a talk radio segment, where you can call him on your cellphone and ask questions. Talk radio live. I'm curious to see if he hangs up on someone.
Imagine Garrison Keillor on Maui Wowie with a little Hunter S. Thompson, Mark Twain, and Dr. Emmet Brown thrown in.
Here are the details. Wish I could be there. 
This is a once in a larger-than-lifetime opportunity. And all you need to know to summarize just who this gentleman is and what he does:
"It is fitting that Jacobs is performing at the site of the former Insane Asylum in Kaneohe."
Before I blogged I drew
In my book, THE ME GENERATION... BY ME (GROWING UP IN THE '60s), which you should buy already, I talk a lot of cartooning and doing caricatures during my teen years. I went through a real Al Hirschfeld period. He was the caricaturist of the NEW YORK TIMES for sixty years.
Once I got to the UCLA campus radio station KLA (all of this great stuff is in the book) I did the posters for them. I was so terrible on the air I probably would have been fired had I not been able to draw.
Anyway, one of my KLA colleagues, Sharon, recently unearthed a couple of the posters. So I thought I'd share them today.
This was for a concert we presented. Since everyone knows exactly what each member of the Grassroots looks like, you can see how expertly I captured them all.
Likewise, you know all of these people of course. By the way, Bill Pearl became Billy Pearl (a very successful disc jockey in the '70s who wound up on KHJ), Steve St. John became Steve Weed (a long time successful program director and jock with stints that included WXLO New York and KIIS Los Angeles), Don Enright became a well-known TV and movie producer, and Vincent G. Thomas is Tom Greenleigh who went on to own radio stations.
I haven't drawn in a few years. Maybe I'll pick it up again. Let me know if you have a concert you want promoted.
25 Haziran 2012 Pazartesi
Media Rants: Happy Anniversary to (Me)dia Rants
Happy Anniversary to (Me)dia Rants
Media Rants
By Tony Palmeri
The first Media Rants column appeared in the August 2002 issue of The Scene. By my calculation, that makes this November column the 100th (!) rant. When the column debuted, I wasn’t sure I’d have the discipline demanded by 10 rants, let alone 100. But here we are, 8 years later, still trying to shed light on the ways in which corporate establishment media can, in the words of the late and great Madison Capital Times editor Bill Evjue, be “used to reduce the people to conformity and dumb acquiescence.”
Given that the New York Times, Washington Post, regional Gannett tabloids, radio and television outlets, or even alternative web sources aren’t exactly lining up to talk to me about this most momentous anniversary, I guess I’ll have to interview myself. So here’s a retrospective of sorts on the last 99 columns.
Question: How did the Media Rants column get started?
Answer: In the summer of 2002 then SCENE editor Tom Breuer called and asked if I’d be interested in writing for the paper. Back then I wrote a weekly electronic newsletter to accompany a television program called “Commentary” I hosted and produced with my heroes Doug Freshner and Jim Mather. Somehow Tom got on the newsletter email list, and he liked it enough that he thought I might be able to contribute something worthwhile to the Scene. The name “Media Rants” was Tom’s idea. The first column was a critique of the local press’ annual and shameful subservience to the Experimental Aircraft Association.
Question: What writers have influenced your thinking and style?
Answer: All conscientious media critics owe a debt to the late George Seldes. Probably the greatest investigative journalist in American history, Seldes in the 1940s published a newsletter called “In Fact” which is now widely regarded as the prototype for how to expose the shortcomings of the establishment press.
Given that Media Rants is a monthly essay, stylistically I’ve been guided by my favorite essayists. I respect and admire the rebel passion of Thomas Paine, the moral clarity of George Orwell, the principled prose of I.F. Stone, the sheer eloquence of Christopher Hitchens, the wisdom of James Baldwin ("I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."), the unpredictability of Alexander Cockburn, the stinging humor of Molly Ivins and Maureen Dowd, and the in-your-face rhetorical flourishes of James Howard Kunstler. I’ve disagreed with each of these wordsmiths at various times yet stand in awe at their contributions to the craft of writing.
Question: Do you have any favorite Media Rants columns?
Answer: My favorites are the ones that make at least some minor contribution to our understanding of local history (“Press Coverage of McCarthy” from April of 2006; “Earth Day at 40” from April of 2010; “King Karma: Yesterday and Today” from March of 2003), challenge local and state establishment media to do better (“The Magruder Media’s Ethical Compass” from November of 2002; “Northeast Wisconsin’s Iron Triangle” from August of 2003; “It’s Not a Witch hunt if There’s a Witch” from June of 2004), counter the insane pro-war journalism of the last 8 years (“Will We Hear the Winter Soldiers?” from March of 2008; “Media AWOL on National Guard Coverage” from March of 2009), and take a stand for rational public discourse (“Fighting Reactionary Politics: Real Conservatives, Real Liberals, and Real Radicals Must Work Together” from April of 2005). I also look fondly on the tributes to Robert L. “Doc” Snyder and Doug Boone, and interviews with my friends Curt Andersen, Stephen Richards, Jo Egelhoff, and Ron Hardy.
Question: Most memorable Media Rants moment?
Answer: UW Oshkosh Professor of Political Science James Simmons found the essay “Deconstructing Don Kettl” (July 2004) interesting and asked me to publish a revised version of it in the Wisconsin Political Scientist Newsletter. The essay situated Professor Kettl, formerly of UW Madison and widely recognized as governor Tommy Thompson’s most revered academic, as a symbol of the extent to which UW profs had become tools of power rather than challengers to it. Some of Professor Kettl’s colleagues at UW Madison lambasted Dr. Simmons for publishing the piece, reducing it to nothing more than a cheap-shot personal attack. The irony was that the tone and vacuity of their complaint validated the thrust of the essay better than anything I could have said or written.
Question: What kind of response has Media Rants received over the years?
Answer: Though it’s now conventional wisdom to say “no one reads anything longer than a Facebook wall post anymore,” the fact that Media Rants does have an audience keeps me writing it. When the Appleton Public Library invited me to participate in a debate about the movie “Good Night and Good Luck” in 2006, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people in attendance who recognized and appreciated the column. Media Rants columns also led to several invitations to lead discussions at the Harmony Café in Appleton, as well as numerous appearances on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Question: Any final thoughts?
Answer: I just want to thank everyone who has supported Media Rants over the years, especially those readers who take the time to offer constructive feedback. Many thanks also to Scene publisher Jim Moran and current editor Jim Lundstrom for making space every month.
Rant On!
The 2010 TONY Awards
There's only one TONY Award this year, and it's kind of an "award of distinction." Colin Crowley's done much admirable work around the globe. Read:The 2010 TONY Awards
Media Rants
By Tony Palmeri
If ‘tis noble to think globally and act locally, then how much nobler still to travel the globe and act in some of the world’s most troubled localities?
If ‘tis true that if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, then how extremely valuable is he who opens our eyes to problems we never knew existed?
Those questions come to mind when I think of Colin Crowley, the recipient of the 2010 TONY Award for excellence in local journalism. In prior TONY Award columns, “local” literally meant working in Wisconsin. Colin Crowley hails from Oshkosh, though he’s not lived here since taking off for Afghanistan in 2005 to work as a video documentarian for Shelter For Life, International (then headquartered in Oshkosh).
So why should someone who calls Nairobi, Kenya home receive the 2010 TONY Award?
To answer that question requires a candid assessment of the state of news media today. Largely irrelevant in the lives of too many people, news media frustrate the hell out of the shrinking numbers of folks that rely on it to meet civic and personal needs. Becoming “relevant” invariably means catering to the lowest common denominator while cutting the budgets necessary to cover seriously domestic and foreign policy stories that matter. The result is devastating for “small-d” democracy. This critique isn’t new, but argued most cogently in Bob McChesney’s classic Rich Media, Poor Democracy (University of Illinois Press, 1999).
Colin Crowley holds a set of humane, “big picture” values that role model what journalism, corporate and independent, national and local, could be like if it could find a way to escape from the clutches of profit motive and the resulting pandering and pettiness. Though he no longer calls northeast Wisconsin home, Colin’s got a thing or two to teach us locals about what 21st century journalism could be.
In 2005 Colin kept the “Colin’s Story” blog to keep followers up to date on his Afghanistan work. I lost touch with him until May of this year, when we exchanged emails. I learned that since April of 2008 he’s been employed with the British NGO Save the Children UK (STC) as a multimedia officer. In that role he creates photo essays, makes videos, writes case studies, serves as a chaperone for international journalists when they visit STC programs, and contributes international media pieces on humanitarian crises.
Since 2008 Colin's covered China’s earthquake, Myannmar’s cyclone, a war in the Congo, cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, food crises in Ethiopia and Northeast Kenya, the catastrophe in South Sudan, and Haiti right after the earthquake. I last heard from him in July as he documented a food crisis in Niger that received scant coverage in the US.
Because it conflicted with the Olympics in South Africa occurring simultaneously, Niger’s food crisis almost disappeared from the global media radar. For Britain’s Sky News, Colin worked on some of the only interviews and video footage of the crisis. STC UK reported a large spike in donations from the British public in the 24 hours following the broadcast. Colin says that “it’s a good feeling to think that this kind of reporting can make a bit of a difference.”
Colin has become quite knowledgeable and articulate about the nature of the global food crisis. His analysis is hard to find in the mainstream press:
“I don't think Americans realize how inefficiently their taxes are used when it comes to food aid. I can't tell you how ridiculous it feels to be standing in a World Food Program warehouse in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Northeastern Kenya, and other places and see tons and tons of bags of grain that was grown in Nebraska, Iowa, etc., and costs billions of dollars to transport while people all around are starving and local farmers are sitting on empty stores for a lack of fertilizer, modern farming tools, seeds, or irrigation systems. It invariably brings to my mind a seemingly simple question: ‘Rather than paying farm subsidies and shipping companies billions of dollars to grow this grain in the US and then transport it to Africa, couldn't we take a fraction of that money and just invest it into local agriculture?’”
Colin advocates replacing the current food aid system with one that many NGOs now endorse: simply provide cash to people to support local market. This would inject needed dollars into local economies and be much less expensive than traditional food aid programs. The problem, according to Colin, “is that it would threaten farm subsidies and profits of shipping companies.”
The human catastrophes covered by Colin Crowley exist largely because of lack of awareness. Awareness leads to outrage. Outrage leads to collective action. Collective action leads to social justice. The great tragedy of modern media is in its failure, in some cases purposeful failure, to use its remarkable powers of creating awareness for the common good.
Lewis Hine was an Oshkosh son whose photojournalism helped end the scourge of child labor in the early 20th century United States. For bringing the humanitarian spirit of Lewis Hine to a global level, Colin Crowley is the recipient of the 2010 TONY Award. You can congratulate him by making a contribution to Save the Children. (http://www.savethechildren.org/).
Note: Past TONY Award recipients can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
