19 February, 2004

Good Luck, Bill

AP - NEW YORK - Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine "Now" on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.

This saddens me. I've watched Bill Moyers on PBS since I was a kid. It seems like all the old-time journalists who just didn't wave the flag and call people names are leaving television and, worst of all, not being replaced. People who took the time to explore an issue, people who delved into complicated areas which require more than 30 seconds to be explained. Buckley left TV several years ago. Does anyone remember those roundtable debates that PBS used to show that were hosted by Edward R. Murrow's partner in crime, Fred Friendly? They took place at a university, in a lecture hall that looked like an old operating theater. The panelists sat in a circle and Friendly would moderate from the middle. Each discussion had maybe a dozen panelists. I remember the one about abortion. You had a lawyer, a theologian, a judge, a doctor - people from all sorts of fields to being their knowledge and opinions to bear upon the topic.

I remember watching it with such great anticipation. Those were my kind of people, even if we disagreed. They trafficked in ideas. No flashy artifice. Concepts were slowly and deliberately elaborated upon with skill and precision. The payoff of prehension was not immediate and required some thinking on my part. Somehow, as a boy I had the patience to listen and do my best to absorb what the speakers had said and to connect the dots. I even had to consult the dictionary occasionally too. But, if I hadn't, I would have missed something, wouldn't have understood someone's view and their argument.

It's so hard to find such discussion on TV today. When I was a boy, I was taught patience, to take my time and explain things thoroughly. Then I grew up and found that concision and simplicity were the order of the day. And, honestly, I've never really adjusted to this mentality. No idea or news event is worth anything if it's left to stand alone. Without context, without showing its relation to other things, its useless. Economic/business news is great this way.

A stray comment by Alan Greenspan or a statistic is thrown at you and is supposed to mean something. But, for us non-economists, they're devoid of significance. If manufacturing goes up 0.3% in a given quarter or the dollar is trading weaker against the Euro, what does that mean to me? I'm just seeing random numbers and not being given any way to sort out what they mean. Here's something that has meaning to me in business news that gets left out generally: labor news. I'm not a corporate CEO nor a stocker trader nor in the futures market. What affects me? The fate of those striking workers at the Tyson plant in nearby Jefferson. Greenspan's cryptic quotes have virtuality no utility for me. But hearing about those workers does. I bowl with them. The local economy is affected by that plant. Ray-o-Vac moved most of their company out of Madison recently. My friend of mine lost his job along with hundreds of others. The distribution plant was moved to Dixon, Illinois where there's no union and the starting salary of a warehouse guy was cut down to $7.00/hour. How people like me are faring - that's what the media ought to be covering. WalMart, Target, and such stores didn't have a great Xmas season but high-end retailers did. Could this have anything to do with Bushy's tax cuts that benefitted the wealthy? Whenever the government cuts taxes, every news show should have at least 2 economists come on for at least 2 commercial-free hours to disect and discuss it. Instead we get a sound bite barrage of he said-she said bullshit.

That's just my opinion - I could be wrong.

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