Flashback: when TV news wasn’t total war.

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I’ve been mulling the collapse of the CNN brand, only partly in the wake of the ratings fact that more people turned to Fox for the Zimmerman verdict than turned to CNN. There’s also the departure of CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, that drab man-hating crab who suddenly signed with Al Jazeera, which is, you know, the station that had Muslim resignations this week over the pro-Islamist tilt of the network in the latest Egyptian shenanigans. But not Soledad. (She ducked her meeting with former network news colleague Lara Logan, because she has people to see and things to do in her new global career.) How much disgust are we supposed to swallow without dying of stomach cancer? What legitimate news organization would ever have hired her in the first place?

You see, there was a time when people of all stripes did turn to CNN. Especially Headline News. Which just told you, ta da, the headlines.

It made me think of Lynne Russell, the first solo female anchor of a prime time news show. She was on for 18 years and I have no idea what her politics were. She knew, astoundingly, that she was a newsreader, not a guiding political philosopher of the age.

Loved her. She was in a groove. Her outfits and hairdos changed from night to night, she got so practiced she seemed to be gliding into the anchor a chair a moment before the TelePrompTer began running, and often, quite often in fact, her readings had the arch, humorous quality of a woman with a real life who was as amused by the copy she was reading as she expected us to be hearing it.

She wasn’t trying to be above us. She was mirroring us. Only much better dressed and better looking.

Jersey girl, of course. Like many things that have gone away, I miss her. When life was not as grim as a Stalinist reeducation program.

If you youngsters don’t know what you’ve already lost, you have absolutely no chance to get it back. Be thankful for same-sex marriage. Because you’re yoked to Rachel Maddow regardless of your tilt.

I’m just wondering how anybody is going to reach old age without a sense of humor and the knowing smile of a wise woman. Things that are gone, gone, gone.

5 thoughts on “Flashback: when TV news wasn’t total war.”

  1. I have a lot of respect for Soledad O’Brien. In 2009, she became the first recipient of the “Soledad O’Brien Freedom’s Voice Award” from the Morehouse School of Medicine. Man, did I not see that one coming!

    The “fake but accurate” (thanks Dan Rather!) narrative of this recent Trayvon saga was only disrupted because of what went on with the blogosphere. I usually think the “Global Village” perception of the internet as this decentralized trove of power to the people is way overblown, but in this case, the Narrative(TM) was only disrupted by the diligence of those working completely outside the system, especially Chuck Rudd (http://glpiggy.net/2013/07/02/most-of-my-zimmerman-trial-stuff/).

    Not to go all pervy or misogynist, but Russell strikes me as both hot and humorous. My favorite news personality now is Matina Stevis. Look her up.

  3. News? Journalists? Anchors?

    Sorry I am without a youtube link at the moment, but I’ll trust interested parties to find it.

    A local San Fran station got “tricked” into reading, on air, bogus names of the Asiana Airlines crew from the recent crash. Those names?

    Some Ting Wong
    Wi Tu Lo
    Ho Lee Fuk
    Bang Ding Ow

    Listening to the completely oblivious drone of the female anchor read these names out was at once one of the funniest and most depressing things I’ve ever experienced. I say “tricked” because allegedly some NTSB official confirmed all of these names, but for Ho Lee Fuk’s sake. Not one person at the network is sharp enough to figure that out? But these are the people competent enough to give us the straight dope on everything else. Right.

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