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script-doctor · 4 years ago

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“Let us breathe again”

The events of these days are choking everyone – without social media and cameras everywhere we would not be witnessing such a widespread response to police racism, economic inequality and lack of leadership. Something good must come from all the pain we’ve been experiencing. We must acknowledge our flaws and act to correct them. We must have a functioning government, not a government that operates by tweet, innuendo and publicity. We must return to our original task of forming a more perfect union. We must require by law that any future candidate for president have prior governmental or military experience. We must honor our past and remember that we once had some simple ideas that insured fairness – as we did with a top individual income tax rate of 91% during the Eisenhower Administration.

How do we get to a fairer and more just society? One hopes that our current battle with inherent systemic racism will banish it forever. Symbolic change – e.g., tearing down Confederate statues is only valuable if we also put in place real systemic change. We can’t keep celebrating business above all. Our society can’t primarily be about making money. We must prioritize what we deem most valuable rather than privatize it. We must stop pre-judging and labeling valuable ideas such as Medicare for All as socialism. We must be aware that several self-described socialist countries are quite different from Soviet Communism which often is what is meant by those who cry “socialism”.

We’ve always done best as a nation when we’ve had a balanced mix of business ingenuity and governmental regulation – when we sought fairness and standards – not ways to take unfair advantage. We must believe in public options for essential services – not only for health care, but for our technology, especially electronic and digital communications. Are we better off with a multitude of channels than we were with a handful in the early days of television?

We have to make sure that technology enhances our lives and not threatens to destroy them in the name of profit. We need a digital communications capability like Facebook, but we must regulate speech in the interest of truth and fairness, not foster an “freedom to express hate and lies” policy. At least once daily, the robot call instructs me “Do Not Hang Up the Phone” – an appeal to update my Google business listing. I hang up. I’m sick of these daily disturbances that seem to be selling me something – what it is, I’m never sure – but not really offering a service. We do need an electronic equivalent of the telephone directory’s white pages and yellow pages, but we shouldn’t need to pay to spy on our friends and neighbors in order to get what ought to be essential information. Once we valued the post office and looked to see how it could help us reach and help the ordinary citizen through postal savings accounts. Now we have a president who is critical of the post office and online campaigns to “save it”. We can do better.

Why are we spreading fear? Because it sells. We shouldn’t have to listen to or watch endless pharmaceutical commercials that almost always end with the message: “ask your doctor”. Too much of the nightly news is based on “fear” – and now when it’s most noticeable we need to come up with better ideas and practices. Television news interviewers need to stop asking for predictions of what will happen next and stop trying to get people to emote on demand. We need to provide context and history for what’s happening, but not milk every interview for a quote to keep selling the program.

Taking online ZOOM exercise classes, I realize how simple the new technology isn’t. The instructor asks one of the participants, “Do you know where your volume is?” After a moment of considerable uncertainty, the sound of my ringing cellphone rings comes through my computer. Did I want this feature? No. Then I notice that the full screen video of our exercise instructor has vanished. I fiddle around and get multiple videos of classmates in “gallery view” and then find our instructor in “speaker view”. Though she’s back, she’s now wondering where I went. “Keep your cellphone on airplane mode or leave it in another room during our Zoom exercise class,” she later suggests after she’s sure that I downloaded the latest update to Zoom software. I did, after the last kerfuffle when I had no warning that I had to update the software. We’ve focused so much on choice that we have overcomplicated computers – and we don’t insist that everyone have the equivalent of a technological driver’s license because it would actually require something closer to a pilot’s license. It would be great if there were a simple on/off switch for most computer tasks, and it would be great if a useful functional feature didn’t disappear with the next “upgrade.”

When I recently tried to send out a group email, I noticed that the bounce back was extraordinary. I sent a separate message to one person with whom I’d worked and for whom I had a separate personal email. He replied, “I didn’t receive the below email. The IT Dept at [our college] recently switched to a new “spam blocker” and it seems to block a lot of emails that it shouldn’t. Not sure of a good work-around for it yet.” He reminded me of the World War II slogan “SNAFU” – and I thought it’s time we stop describing our current desire for “a return to normal” and begin to deal with our inherent confusions and contradictions. What good is a “pause” if we don’t use it to re-examine outmoded assumptions? Leadership is required. Intelligence is essential and creative expression should be encouraged. But who’s looking at the big picture with an eye to improving it? That’s the challenge. But it won’t be easy for us to reclaim our position as the head of the free world. Basic infrastructure tasks await us. While we talk of renaming bridges, we must strengthen them so that they last for another generation. While we talk of equality before the law, we must insure equal opportunity and treatment in all sectors of the economy. Let everyone breathe again and live their lives to the fullest.

#fairness #fear #new technology #SNAFU #equality #leadership in government

Howard Weinberg is working on a memoir of his career in television journalism and currently fundraising to complete a feature documentary about the 1970’s digital revolution that changed the face of television. http://fiscal.ifp.org/project.cfm/289/Nam-June-Paik–TV-Lab-License-to-Create. Weinberg is a script-doctor and an award-winning documentary filmmaker (Sports for Sale, First Things First, One Plus One, net.LEARNING), television journalist (Founding Producer, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Executive Producer, Listening to America with Bill Moyers; Producer, CBS News Sunday Morning & Sixty Minutes) and President of Priority Productions, Inc. He mentors documentary students privately and has taught documentary history and production at NYU, Dartmouth and Columbia Journalism School, where he also developed courses in video profiles and newsmagazine production, organized documentary screenings and moderated panels of filmmakers. The Daily News called the subject of his film Sid at 90 the “undisputed star” of the 2003 New York Jewish Film Festival.

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script-doctor · 7 years ago

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Passover and Presidents

The homemade Haggadahs for a Passover Seder were on two dining tables in a large East Side Manhattan apartment decorated in gold and white. The text referred to “The President” instead of “The Leader” as the one who guides the traditional explanation of the commemoration of “our forefathers flight from Egypt to freedom”. Was that mention of “the President” why I had a sudden realization that the ancient Egyptians’ fear of burgeoning numbers of Jewish immigrants paralleled today’s right-wing nationalists’ fear of refugees around the world? The Pharaoh wanted to preserve the domination of his Egyptian people — and did so with decrees designed to punish immigrants. This was not my traditional view of the event that insired the song, “Let My People Go.”

I hadn’t heard mention of the current President attending a Passover Seder though his son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter converted to Judaism. It’s commonplace to invite a stranger — or a non-Jew — to a family Seder. But the ceremony ought to have some meaning for the participants. In families sundered by divorce, attendance at family Seders is at best an alternate year occurrence. Attending the Seder with us this year was a woman in conflict with her daughter over a desire to support her grandson’s college dreams. She had planned to give $100,000 in tuition money directly to her grandson, but her daughter, his mother, objected, and told her, “This is not how it’s done in Westchester.” Taken aback, she repeated her daughter’s distancing comment and wondered, “Is there a tribal custom in Westchester that I didn’t know about? Really?”

The Seder had special meaning for President Barack Obama who held an annual White House Seder as a private dinner from 2009 to 2016. Obama said in 2013, “To African Americans, the story of the Exodus was perhaps the central story, the most powerful image about emerging from the grip of bondage to reach for liberty and human dignity – a tale that was carried from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement into today. For me, personally, growing up in far-flung parts of the world and without firm roots, the story spoke to a yearning within every human being for a home.”

On our way home I noticed a signed framed 8 x 10 photograph of President Richard Nixon on the bookcase by the apartment front door. What? I didn’t have time to ask for an explanation. In 1960 when I was a student at Dartmouth College, I went to Manchester, NH to attend a Nixon rally. I had already met John F. Kennedy, heard him speak with extraordinary wit and intelligence and photographed him outside Dartmouth Hall. I was appalled by Nixon’s speech and satirized or mocked what I felt was Nixon’s insincere appeal to “the good and the true”. I wrote a poem about Nixon’s political appeal that we published in THE DARTMOUTH, the college newspaper of which I later would become the Editor in my junior year.

When we got home from the Passover Seder I saw 93-year-old former President Jimmy Carter on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert asked Carter him if had been too nice to be president. “Does America want kind of a jerk as president?” Colbert asked. Carter replied, “Apparently, from this recent election year. I never knew it before.” Colbert then asked about the one quality a president must have. “I used to think it was to tell the truth,” Carter said, “but I’ve changed my mind lately.” Carter, promoting his new book, Faith, told Colbert that he prays for Trump. “I pray that he’ll be a good president and that he’ll keep our country at peace and that he’ll refrain from using nuclear weapons and that he will promote human rights,” Carter said. “So, yeah, I pray for him.”

My scariest image of President Richard Nixon came in 1972 at a CREEP rally — CREEP stood for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, you’ll recall. At Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, pro-Nixon enforcers physically surrounded protesters and pushed them out of the arena. The turmoil in the seats surpassed the usual uproar on the ice during Islanders’ hockey games. Yet my favorite image of Nixon is of his outstretched arms and two handed V-salute as he enters a helicopter to depart from the White House after he’d resigned the presidency.

I knew that President Gerald Ford, under his birth name, Leslie Lynch King Jr, had been born in Omaha, so on a visit home I went to see the memorial site that marks his connection to the city where I grew up. When later I had the opportunity, I visited the Gerald R. Ford museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I saw a copy of the famous NY Daily News cover, “FORD TO NYC: DROP DEAD”.

When Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1976, I decided to visit an old Omaha friend who’d moved to Columbia, South Carolina. Together we drove to Plains, Georgia to see the hometown of America’s most famous peanut farmer. I remember seeing a frustrated Judy Woodruff, reporting for NBC News at the time, repeatedly muff her TV standup on the main street of Plains across from brother Billy Carter’s gas station. My friend and I decided our presidential tour should also include Warm Springs, Georgia where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was treated for his paralytic disease beginning in 1924 and where he died in 1945. As a teenager I had collected stamps and had visited FDR’s home overlooking the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York and saw some of his stamp collections. I was especially delighted to include footage of Roosevelt in his car in Warm Springs that was filmed by actor/comedian Sid Raymond in my 2003 documentary SID AT 90. FDR wanted to know if Sid’s camera was on, and when assured that it was, he said emphatically for the silent camera, “Nice Work! Nice Work!”

When Ronald Reagan ran for President, I went to Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California, where as a radio announcer in March 1937 Reagan had covered Spring Training with the Chicago Cubs and made a screen test for Warner Bros. Pictures; a month later he signed a movie contract. In 1980 for Bill Moyers’ Journal I produced a half-hour film titled “The Essential Reagan” that was paired with “The Essential Carter.” But my real up close and personal experience with Reagan came after he was elected President. At a neighborhood party, a photographer told me that Reagan’s White House Photographer Michael Evans was a good friend of Gerald Ford’s White House Photographer David Kennerly but that he had to take a different approach to do his job. Intrigued, I found out more and pitched a story to CBS Sunday Morning where I was on staff at the time. Both men had been Time Magazine photographers, but as Evans famously said, “If David Kennerly was like Gerald Ford’s son, I was like Ronald Reagan’s nephew.” Kennerly had free access to the Oval Office and to the President. He photographed history as it happened. Evans had to wait to be called for a formal portrait after critical meetings had taken place. Evans had arranged for the Armenian-Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa to pose President Reagan. Karsh had taken a cigar out of Winston Churchill’s mouth before memorably capturing his image. How would he pose Reagan? The President’s image-conscious aide Michael Deaver said we could film Evans photographing Karsh photographing Reagan in the Oval Office for three minutes. Reagan was about to sit for a second pose next to a bronze Frederick Remington sculpture of a bucking horse. But after only about 30 seconds elapsed, Deaver indicated our time was up. “Are we done?” Reagan asked. Deaver replied, “No, Mr. President, that’s just the CBS crew leaving.”

I first heard Bill Clinton speak at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House at a literacy event arranged by First Lady Barbara Bush when I was producing a PBS Project Literacy U.S. special for WQED-TV Pittsburgh. I was quite impressed by this Oxford scholar and Yale Law graduate – the most articulate politician I had heard since Kennedy. I later arranged for Bill Moyers to interview Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas when I was Executive Producer of Listening to America with Bill Moyers — a 27-week series of hour programs during the 1992 election year that The New York Times praised for “having elevated the dialogue of democracy”. Clinton’s staff wanted us to interview him in the basement of the unimpressive split-level house that served as the Governor’s residence in Little Rock. I knew he wouldn’t look well in this low ceilinged room with his back close to the wall. In order to get some depth of field, I suggested that we go upstairs to the higher ceilinged living room. We opened the double doors leading to the central hallway and beyond to the dining room; we moved the furniture and our production manager bought flowers that my wife arranged on tables in both rooms. After the interview, we filmed Moyers and Clinton walking outside under a veranda as a way of introducing their conversation. Then Clinton invited us into the basement family room to meet his wife, Hillary, who came downstairs from the family quarters to chat.

At some point during the Clinton presidency, I traveled to Kennebunkport, Maine to interview his predecessor George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife Barbara Bush at their summer home. A former reporter from The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and a friend of hers enlisted my help in producing a biographical documentary of the 41st President for his library on the campus of Texas A & M University in College Station that would open in 1997. I don’t recall much about the film though I found them an editor and an editing facility, but I do remember that Bush Republicans were impatient that too much time in the rough cut of the film was spent on Bush’s role as Reagan’s Vice President and on Reagan himself. “He had his turn,” they said about Reagan. Factionalism isn’t limited to the parties themselves.

I had previously made the documentary “What’s a Party For?” for Bill Moyers’ Journal. I went all over Maine to cover Democrats and Republicans at party primary events, got to meet Senator George Mitchell, and arranged for Moyers to interview Senator Edmund Muskie in the Governor’s Mansion. Soon after our program aired, Muskie became President Carter’s Secretary of State in 1980. In 2004 for New York Times Television and the Discovery Channel, I co-produced “Unraveling of a Candidate” – a look at campaign disasters inspired by what became known as “The Dean Scream”. We included Muskie’s alleged crying as the snow fell in the 1972 New Hampshire primary, Michael Dukakis wearing a helmet and driving a tank, and of course Gary Hart photographed with model Donna Rice on his lap on the yacht appropriately named “Monkey Business”.

Suddenly I’m reminded of the words of Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed who railed at the political cartoons of Thomas Nast: “Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures!” I included Boss Tweed’s story in a 10-part mini-documentary series that I produced with Eyewitness News Correspondent and writer Milton Lewis: Scoundrels! Scalawags! & Saviors! — The Good Old Days at New York’s City Hall. Nast created the political party symbols of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. In 1980 I invited the widely syndicated political cartoonist Patrick Oliphant to update Nast’s party symbols for a poster to promote What’s A Party For? – Moyers kept the framed poster in his offices until it had faded years later. Our WABC-TV series won a 1971 New York area Emmy Award and I re-edited it into an hour documentary that we screened at Gracie Mansion at the invitation of Mayor John Lindsay. When I learned that Boss Tweed was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, I had to gain access for us to film. I decided to hire a limo, buy flowers and drive into the site of William M. Tweed’s grave as if we were paying our respects to a loved one. There we filmed Milton Lewis telling part of the Tweed story of political corruption and we also filmed a standup in the Tweed Courthouse directly behind City Hall — an elegant monument to extraordinary economic extravagance.

I suppose it’s inevitable that a television journalist covering national stories would have some interaction with major American politicians. I met George W. Bush in his Governor’s office in Austin, Texas, before he ran for President. I met Al Gore at Columbia Journalism School after he’d lost to Bush. l met Jesse Jackson on an airplane going to Chicago. I shared an airport limo with Senator Ted Kennedy and CBS White House correspondent Bob Pierpoint. Earlier I had ridden in a press bus that followed Ted Kennedy when he campaigned for President. I remember Pierpoint saying that the youngest Kennedy brother was “a great guy to have a beer with” but not sure he’d be the best choice as President. Oddly, that was the phrase many used to endorse George W. Bush. I covered Tricia Nixon’s wedding at the White House with Eyewitness News correspondent Melba Tolliver. A Life magazine correspondent who briefly grumbled about her assignment said, “At least, today, this is the place to be”.

Without a news crew, I went to Monticello to see the home of Thomas Jefferson and one Presidents’ Day my wife and I went to Mount Vernon to tour the home of George Washington, our First President. There I learned about Washington’s “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” By age sixteen, Washington had copied these rules by hand that seemed to have originated with French Jesuits in 1595. This may have been a penmanship exercise. But it is evidence of the power of the young to influence behavior. They proclaim our respect for others and how we must behave in order to live together for the good of all. The first rule is “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.” The fiftieth rule is “Be not hasty to believe flying Reports to the Disparagement of any.” The 110th rule is “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Remember that Washington was the man who would not be King. The Founding Fathers would be appalled at our lack of a belief in some form of civic religion or rules of behavior that would bind us together. Maybe the students at Parkland, Florida will galvanize us to do what our constitution proclaims — promote the general welfare. For too long the rewards have gone to those who have gamed the system, who’ve put individual profit above the common good. Let’s hope that we have the resilience to face the onslaught of offenses that seem like a modern version of the Ten Plagues.

Our Seder service this year was spare. But for many years I have participated in updating Haggadahs to reflect contemporary “plagues” such as war, hatred, and disease. The Jewish Council on Urban Affairs’ Immigrant Justice Haggadah, for example, counts as plagues “the detention of immigrants, unwarranted deportations, hate crimes, the denial of drivers’ licenses and other services to undocumented immigrants, hopelessness, apathy, and fear of speaking out.” Feminist Haggadahs add plagues such as sexism and violence against women; environmental Haggadahs mention the destruction of natural resources. Every modern application of the story of slavery and liberation necessitates the creation of a new list of “plagues” to be eradicated. In designing the Haggadah our family has used for the last several years, I included two passages from books by Rabbi Eli Louis Cooper, who was my wife’s father and also a lawyer. His words seem especially relevant this year. Rabbi Cooper wrote: “Never has there been as much information poured into our homes and schools, offices and legislative halls as we have today. We are lulled by the euphemism of calling it public relations. One must be alert against eloquent falsifiers on the rostrum, the air and television, in newspapers and magazines, on the floors of Congress and in the halls of government. It is a defense and a duty to be intelligent. There is also the duty to practice equality. It is no accident that the Haggadah begins the Seder service and ritual with a call to ‘all who are hungry to come and eat, and all who are needy to come and join in celebrating the Passover.‘ Freedom cannot be complete without equality.” #

Howard Weinberg is working on a memoir of his career in television journalism and currently fundraising to complete a feature documentary about the 1970’s digital revolution that changed the face of television. http://fiscal.ifp.org/project.cfm/289/Nam-June-Paik--TV-Lab-License-to-Create. Weinberg is a script-doctor and an award-winning documentary filmmaker (Sports for Sale, First Things First, One Plus One, net.LEARNING), television journalist (Founding Producer, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Executive Producer, Listening to America with Bill Moyers; Producer, CBS News Sunday Morning & Sixty Minutes) and President of Priority Productions, Inc. He mentors documentary students privately and has taught documentary history and production at NYU, Dartmouth and Columbia Journalism School, where he also developed courses in video profiles and newsmagazine production, organized documentary screenings and moderated panels of filmmakers. The Daily News called the subject of his film Sid at 90 the “undisputed star” of the 2003 New York Jewish Film Festival.

#Presidents #nam june paik #documentary #television journalism #passover #haggadah

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script-doctor · 8 years ago

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A few questions for beginning filmmakers -- by Howard Weinberg

What is your story? — Don’t worry about it being too long or too short, just be concerned with showing and telling your story? Think motion pictures. Does your story move — visually? Does your story develop — unfold and deepen?

Who is your main character? How do you introduce him or her? Can you find family photos and/or archival footage to expand your film story?

What crucial events are part of your character’s timeline? How will you show them? What important interactions with others inform us about him?

What future events can you capture to tell your story? Anticipate key events, don’t just follow your character. Show him doing something more important than being filmed by you.

Are you a character in this film? Why? Why not? Why are you the best person to tell this story. You’ll need to share why in a proposal, if not in the completed film.

Do you have a transcript of your interviews? Do you have a transcript of your rough cut? You’ll save time in editing if you have both.

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script-doctor · 8 years ago

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Enough Already!

By Howard Weinberg

For more than a year we’ve experienced the extreme acrimony and the bizarre absurdity of American presidential politics. Enough already! The countdown clock shows 63 days — 9 weeks — until the November election, but we’ve forgotten both the needs of the future and the lessons of the past. Obsessed with or sickened by name calling and charges of dishonesty, we’ve been unable to consider seriously how to improve our electoral politics.

We are victims of a damaged political system — even wealthy political donors believe that, as you can see in Alexandra Pelosi’s incisive, humorous and important new HBO documentary MEET THE DONORS: DOES MONEY TALK? What Pelosi hasn’t covered in her film, she freely admits, are the more sinister and less transparent aspects of how wealth influences politics. She couldn’t get Charles and David Koch to sit for an interview. But New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book DARK MONEY describes the efforts of the Koch Brothers and other like-minded extreme conservatives to push their agendas by filtering donations to politicians through non-profit associations and foundations.

Many find the role of money in our political campaigns abhorrent and believe that the Supreme Court should reverse its 2010 Citizens United 5-4 decision that legitimizes the distorted notion that freedom of speech prohibits restricting a non-profit corporation’s independent political campaign contributions. As Mae West famously said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!” Not in politics, however, where too much money for attack ads and too much repetitive media covering the “horse race” make one wonder, “What’s so wonderful?” To enlighten voters is not the mission of most of our media. Rather they aim to garner attention, to entertain and, first and foremost, to make money. Most politicians, whether or not they admit it as Richard Nixon did, believe pro-football coach Vince Lombardi’s classic aphorism: “Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.”

To fix the structural problems in American democracy is a formidable challenge, but we might start with what the two parties agree on: controlling presidential debates and gerrymandering. Democrats and Republicans alike are unable to resist gaming the system. When they collaborate to gerrymander congressional districts, the two parties are agreeing to avoid real competition. They clear a pathway for extreme candidates because a local candidate in a political monoculture doesn’t have to appeal to a wide spectrum of voters. In the process our democracy is deprived of the ability to test future leaders in the crucible of real local elections. A prestigious non-partisan commission could develop rules to reign in the excesses of the two major political parties. No candidate or party should hold itself above playing by fair, equally-applied rules. Nonetheless, Democrats and Republicans connived together to remove the non-partisan League of Women Voters from its role in organizing and running presidential debates as it did from 1976 to 1984. A proposed Commission To Reform Electoral Politics should restore the League of Women Voters or find another independent organization to run presidential debates.

Since many courts have rejected efforts across the nation to restrict voting rights, it’s time to examine and adopt nationally the strongest possible state laws that will improve and facilitate voting: 1) Make Election Day a National Holiday or Create an Election Weekend, 2) Use Preferential Voting or Instant Run-off Voting, 3) Extend Early Voting and Make Absentee Voting Easier, 4) Provide Instant Registration.

A non-partisan commission could reduce the entire presidential selection process to less than 18 months, focus public attention and increase voting by grouping states in successive regional primaries that would cover the Northeast, Midwest, West and South. Would the revenue-hungry media countenance such obstruction of their profits? Those changes would expand the current narrow emphasis on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and California during primary elections.

It’s no solace if the state of our democracy was worse in 1860 or 1968. What’s different now is that we are living in a media-saturated world. In essence Ronald Reagan offered a preview. He’d managed to get elected Governor of California before running for President, but his claim to fame was as a movie actor and a television presenter — not as a politician or statesman. The people surrounding Reagan sold his persona in an era when media was less fragmented than today. Seeing him close-up in the Oval Office as his Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver controlled my CBS News crew’s access, I felt Reagan was very much an actor preparing to hit his mark and waiting to read his lines.

Trump, by contrast, seems to run his own show and sells his celebrity in a YouTube world where “stars” are even more readily “known for being known” than for any actual accomplishments. Trump is a pre-eminent self-promoter and entrepreneur at a time when boasting and self-promotion are highly valued in our society. Hillary Clinton has the disadvantage of being “too well known” — often the peril of a Vice President who would succeed a President (see Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore). The media, given the opportunity, enjoy saying to Democrats and Republicans “a plague on both your houses”. After all, it’s easier than committing to reporting in depth on each candidate and party.

Our democracy clearly can do better: According to the Pew Research Center, U.S. voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election was 53.6%. Yet according to the Census Bureau, 65% of the U.S. voting-age population were registered in 2012, compared with 91% in Canada and the UK, 96% in Sweden and nearly 99% in Japan.

At bottom, however, what’s most missing today is cultural more than organizational: we seem to have lost our sense of the commonweal. We have forgotten the virtues of compromise, the belief in fair play, and the ability of argument to win adherents. We are missing a culture-wide understanding of the benefits of government AND business — neither trying to dominate or to destroy the other. While we deeply need self-restraint, we only get excess. We define freedom as the right to do whatever we damn want. And that includes the right to exploit our fellow citizens — a return to the 19th Century shibboleth: Caveat Emptor, “Let the buyer beware.” We haven’t really adjusted to the new technological world that we’re living in. We haven’t agreed upon rules of behavior in the global economy — nor even in our own society. In Texas this has led to the tolerance of guns in the classroom. We celebrate disruption, and we get chaos. We haven’t moved toward software and hardware compatibility lest we deprive some of a profit opportunity. We want courage, and we get cowardice.

Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, warns of closing borders, of protectionism. In a recent GE newsletter, he says, “The relationship between business and government is the worst I have ever seen. Technology, productivity and globalization have been the driving forces during my business career. In business, if you don’t lead these changes, you get fired; in politics, if you don’t fight them, you can’t get elected…” In the U.S., we want exports but seem to hate trade and exporters.”

Underlying American politics is a pervasive sense of income inequality, a reality of stagnant incomes, fewer union jobs paying decent wages, a decline in manufacturing, and an increase in competition from new places and new methods, an increased fear of the other — the immigrant, the hacker, and the terrorist.

Chris Matthews said on MSNBC that Republicans ignore the fact that most Americans are employees — 90% of Americans are employees, not entrepreneurs. The media, too, prefer to focus on the latest technology and on start-ups rather than on efforts to organize unions and to raise the minimum wage. Trump, who hangs around with entrepreneurs, may enjoy fast food, but that’s about all he has in common with his admirers who feel ignored by the 1%, the wealthy and powerful with whom Trump has proudly and loudly consorted.

Today’s fractured media fails to provide the historical and logical analysis that the public needs to make decisions. Social media have shown us that the smaller the audience, the louder the shouting. “Click-bait” trumps significant reporting. Politicians mainly look to what will play well rather than to what makes the most sense. It’s so easy to call for reducing taxes, and hard to seek funds for rebuilding roads and bridges, for expanding mass transit and high speed internet.

Are we better off today than in 1970 when Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska urged the Senate to confirm the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court? Responding to criticism that Carswell had been a mediocre judge, Senator Hruska claimed: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.” Senator Hruska faced considerable criticism for his comments, and Carswell was eventually defeated. Today’s U. S. Senate has refused to hold a hearing or vote on President Obama’s March 16th nomination of the unambiguously excellent Judge Merrick Garland to serve on the Supreme Court. Are we really better off?

In President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union speech he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy: The first two are guaranteed by the U. S. constitution: Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship. We are still fighting to secure the other two: Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.

By some measurements, poverty has decreased worldwide — 35 years ago more than 50% of the world’s population lived in dire poverty. Now it’s about 14%. Yet in the United States the official national poverty rate was 14.8 percent in 2014, that’s 46.7 million people living in poverty. In June 2016 the International Monetary Fund urged the U. S. to address its poverty by raising the minimum wage and offering paid maternity leave to women to encourage them to enter the labor force.

As to fear President Roosevelt said: “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.” He spoke 11 months before the United States declared war on Japan, December 8, 1941.

There are plenty of reasons for fear today — especially acts of terrorism. We would benefit from a leader who could articulate and assuage our feelings of fear. Instead, the media focus on the name calling and bickering in our presidential politics, and our leaders fail to realize the goal set forth in our Constitution — “to form a more perfect union.” #

Howard Weinberg is a television documentary and public affairs journalist who has covered politics extensively. See www.howardweinberg.net. A script-doctor, teacher and mentor, he was Executive Producer of LISTENING TO AMERICA WITH BILL MOYERS — a 27-program PBS series that The New York Times called the “best political journalism” of the 1992 election campaign that “elevated the dialogue of democracy.” A Founding Producer of THE ROBERT MACNEIL REPORT and THE MACNEIL/LEHRER REPORT, he covered political stories during the 1976 election; he produced political documentaries for BILL MOYERS’ JOURNAL during the 1980 election, and produced political stories for CBS 60 MINUTES in the 1984 election.

#election 2016 #money in politics #voting reform

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script-doctor · 8 years ago

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Alexandra Pelosi’s MEET THE DONORS: DOES MONEY TALK? gets phenomenal access to some who grease the wheels of our political system. This must-see HBO documentary reminded me of an interview I did with the late maverick political funder Stewart Mott for CBS NEWS 60 MINUTES in 1984, ten years after Watergate when restrictions on campaign finance were tightened (before being loosened even more by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision). Mott said, “I’m still a fat cat. I just have to go about funding in a different way.” He suggested that campaign finance laws be changed every three years to give lawyers a harder time gaming the system! I’d produced what might have taken two 60 Minutes segments or have been a PBS half-hour documentary, but CBS only allowed Harry Reasoner and me 12 minutes for our campaign finance story: after all, I was told, we weren’t getting someone unjustly imprisoned out of jail! The Mott interview wound up on the cutting room floor, or -- I hope -- the CBS Archives. Read more about Stewart Mott: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/us/14mott.html?_r=0

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script-doctor · 8 years ago

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Together with Technology

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. — Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster

By Howard Weinberg

Technology, we were led to believe, would bring us together and save us time. Yet most of us are more distracted than ever. Isolated, working at home or wearing headphones in a “shared workspace”, we expend considerable effort to make our devices work smoothly. Our current entrepreneurial culture celebrates disruption as if it were an ultimate good while we pay a high price for the lack of compatibility of our electronic tools. Businesses profit by keeping us apart and out of sync, and government is slow to lead us toward a new synthesis. At minimum, we need the digital equivalent of a pilot’s check list to navigate today’s complex communication systems that are advertised as simple.

With email and apps like Facebook I connect with friends, colleagues and former students living around the world. Yet I also get lost in the endless self-promotion and obscure happenings of people whom I barely know as I miss connections with those whom I greatly value. One former international student who lives half-way around the world, came to New York, took a selfie and posted it on Facebook, but she never called. After she’d returned home, she emailed that my reply to her announcement of a New York visit had wound up in junk email! How often must we remember to check our junk email folder?   Some people, I’ve learned, don’t and won’t use email. If I remember, I’ll send these outliers a text or leave them a voice message. Some who have business and personal email accounts will chide me if I fail to distinguish between them. But it is my computer that makes the wrong choice automatically.

Even people whom I’ve met, whose homes I’ve visited, or whose parties I have attended can become unreachable. After an email bounces, it is not easy to get a new email address. To reconnect I must find a common acquaintance. As Chicago’s legendary boss Mayor Daley famously said, “We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent”. Few people seemed to be “unlisted” in the bygone era of printed telephone books. What is our closest electronic equivalent? “Whitepages”? Maybe, but its website is less thorough than its mobile app. And on both, phone numbers and exact street addresses are optional. No email addresses are included. How much privacy is necessary or desirable?

I became acquainted with Facebook Messenger because a former colleague prefers to communicate that way. She was coming to New York for a classical music concert and encouraged me to attend. She told me where she and her husband would be sitting, but I couldn’t see them in the hall. I sent her messages via Facebook and text, but got no response. After the weekend, she wrote that she had left her cell phone in New England. Oops! That’s why pilots have check lists!

My wife said she’d copied me on an email, but I hadn’t received it. She showed it to me on her iPhone. Some four hours later it arrived on my cell. I checked my computer the next day, and I had only a few more messages. But I could no longer send or receive email because my Gmail account was full. I deleted some — a cumbersome process that still left my account 97% percent full. But spending hours or even minutes deleting emails seems a terrible use of time. Help, Marie Kondo! These accumulations do not spark joy. I know I could learn to manage email better; and I must, for buying more storage means another toll on my life.

The opportunity for intergenerational learning, for serendipity, for curiosity and chance to determine our choices has become diminished in American society because digital technology makes possible a data-driven segmentation that marketing gurus insist upon. Businesses strive to learn as much as possible about our tastes and habits in order to micro-market to us. In the process they encourage the demographic fracture of our already politically splintered society. A recent New York Times article advised people in their 50s that they wouldn’t be able to continue to have the rich, casual associations that they enjoyed in their 40s! They would have to work harder for job references that once came to them en passant. I overheard a young woman in her early 30s tell a friend that she could no longer go into a particular bar because it was “only for millennials in their 20s.” In contrast, on a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland several years ago, we saw — and enjoyed — considerable intergenerational mingling at bars and restaurants that attracted patrons from 18 to 80. As we adjust to our larger culture, gladly or reluctantly, we nonetheless hope we can and will find ways to create “a more perfect union.” But does anyone feel we are headed in that direction?

Years before most manufacturing departed for China, Mexico or countries without unionized workforces, a public relations executive I knew got a job with a Fortune 500 company and invited me to a meeting where management discussed how to engage customers who had expected the company’s consumer products to last forever. How could the company lower expectations for their products that would last as long as 30 years or more? Nowadays, companies have figured it out. They lower expectations by selling extended warranties. When our 3-year-old wide screen television suddenly died without warning less than a year ago, we bought a new so-called Smart TV — and the manufacturer recently sent us a notice to purchase an extended warranty. We did, but it felt like paying “protection money”: Pay now or pay later! We seem to have returned to the time when the relationship between business and customer was CAVEAT EMPTOR: Let the Buyer Beware! Can we ever agree on reasonable expectations for how long a consumer product should last, work, or perform? No forum for dialogue with corporate behemoths suggests such accommodation is possible.

Most technology companies make it difficult or impossible for a customer to speak to a real person. Recently I wanted to confirm that a web hosting account I had transferred months ago wouldn’t renew automatically. Though I had received an email that said, “Do Not Reply”, I could call my former hosting company. Communicating via computers is rarely gratifying: “I’m sorry, the email address you’ve provided does not match the log in email for this account.” Yet when we call a company, we almost always must wait on the phone — for 20 minutes or more in my experience. Then we are put through the maze of a phone tree: customer service, sales or technical support? Afterward the company gives you a survey! How did they do?  

Most companies want to sell the next “improvement”, however minor it may be. It’s hardly a new discovery that planned obsolescence is profitable. It’s been more than two decades since the Internet changed our lives — or promised to. How much longer must we wait for standardization and compatibility to become the norm for most new technology? Think of the time that “fix” would save!

Howard Weinberg is a television documentary and public affairs journalist who has covered politics, arts and social issues. A script-doctor, teacher and mentor —www.howardweinberg.net, his forthcoming feature documentary Nam June Paik & TV Lab: License to Create shows how innovation and technology made possible television’s “first digital revolution.”

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script-doctor · 8 years ago

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The Script Doctor turned 6 today! To celebrate, I am offering a free two-hour consultation to the first two documentary filmmakers who have intriguing projects.

Here’s what recent clients have said:

1) “We finally finished the film. I feel really good about it. I am so glad you told the producer/director about me.”

2) “Your notes regarding our film were stunning in their clarity and insight -- a most helpful coaching at this point in the process.”

3) “Thank you for these very precise notes! I have been mulling over them and the footage. Many thanks for this very useful work!!!”

#tumblr birthday #tumblr milestone

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script-doctor · 8 years ago

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If you want to see the news media and politicians behaving badly, you might enjoy this film though not learn much from it. Like many a documentary these days, it is MISSING CONTEXT. At one point, Weiner says to his campaign manager/filmmaker: “You’re supposed to be a fly on the wall.” Unfortunately, such misunderstanding of “observational filmmaking” is commonplace. A decade or so ago, I said to Albert Maysles after a screening of GREY GARDENS, “You were never a fly on the wall.” He smiled broadly and said, “You’re right.”

When Weiner is taken with reciting a series of Rodney Dangerfield jokes, one realizes the desire to perform is too much on the mind of many politicians these days. Is everything entertainment? As a prelude to the 2016 Presidential election, the film has some value. But Stephen Holden’s review tells you most of what you need to know.

#weiner (movie)

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script-doctor · 9 years ago

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Arts v. Politics

By Howard Weinberg

I first encountered the extraordinary young cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing under the baton of Conductor Andre Previn 35 years ago. CBS News Sunday Morning had assigned me to produce a story about Previn and his Pittsburgh Symphony’s festival of British music. After hearing Yo-Yo Ma play Elgar, I called Executive Producer Robert “Shad” Northshield to pitch a separate profile of Yo-Yo Ma. Shad, the founding producer of Sunday Morning and the former Executive Producer of NBC News’ Huntley-Brinkley Report, often listened to classical music in his office at CBS and loved the idea.

I invited Yo-Yo to breakfast the next day and asked when he had the most fun concertizing. “When I’m on tour playing chamber music with Manny Ax,” he said. A few months later on a cold winter day Yo-Yo and “Mr. Cello”, who had a separate seat on each airplane, would depart Boston’s Logan Airport for Omaha, NE. Pianist Emanuel Ax was on time for the flight, but Yo-Yo had to run to catch the plane. Later as we edited the story, our new cultural correspondent, flutist Eugenia Zukerman, wrote an introductory narration that said, “This man is going to make it. In fact, he already has.”

Fast forward to April 15, 2016: Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax enthrall an overflow Carnegie Hall audience as they play Beethoven’s five cello sonatas, written from 1796 to 1815. The repertoire for cellists is quite small compared to that for violinists and pianists, and in recent years Yo-Yo has been doing his best to enlarge it and our conception of classical music. In 1998 he founded the Silk Road Project to bring musicians from around the world to Tanglewood in Lenox, MA each summer to learn from one another and make music together.

A new documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble, directed by Morgan Neville (who won a 2014 Oscar for 20 Feet from Stardom), debuted at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. HBO will broadcast it and The Orchard will distribute it theatrically later this year. The Ford Foundation, a sponsor of the Silk Road Project, screened it a week before Yo-Yo’s Carnegie Hall concert. Yo-Yo told Ford’s preview audience that he’d been married for 35 years but had been away from home making music for a total of 22 years. His humor and spirit, intelligence and compassion shone through in the film and in person.

Yo-Yo got me to listen more carefully to music. Omaha was the first stop on Yo-Yo’s and Manny’s Midwestern U. S. tour those many years ago. Yo-Yo asked me to stand at the back of the Joselyn Museum auditorium and to tell him where he sounded better as he moved between two positions. He assured me I could do this. In this hall where he was performing for the first time, I said the sound seemed clearer when he played his cello at center stage forward of the piano, instead of slightly to the right of the pianist as he did at Carnegie Hall — the usual arrangement. In Omaha, my home town, I had an unexpected advantage: the organizers of Joselyn’s venerable Tuesday Musicale series let us put our camera front and center in the second row of the orchestra.

On our next stop in Madison, WI we had to be content with shooting from one wing of the stage. But as Manny checked into his hotel, he turned to the camera, held his green American Express card alongside his face and said, “I’m Manny AX — my name is on every American Express card!” Oh, they had a good time — as do most who become part of Yo-Yo’s informal gaggle.

My Sunday Morning profile of Yo-Yo Ma was just over 12-minutes, not unusual then at CBS where I produced several stories as long as 15-minutes. Some were “cover stories” — topical news stories I produced in 7 to 10 days. Others were social issue and cultural stories budgeted for 4 to 5 days of filming, but shot often over several weeks or even months in order to capture salient events. Scripting and editing averaged two weeks for each piece. For me it was the perfect mix. Shad’s curiosity drove the show: “Find out what Leontyne Price is doing since she retired from the Metropolitan Opera.” (She was conducting master classes at the San Francisco Opera among other things.)

When I suggested a profile of pioneering electronic artist Nam June Paik, Shad agreed but confessed that he’d assigned the story of Paik’s receiving the Whitney Museum’s first retrospective for an video artist to another staff producer who’d said it “wasn’t right for Sunday Morning.” It was perfect! And that’s how I came to know another very different cellist, the avant-garde performer Charlotte Moorman who collaborated with Paik. Sunday Morning stories featured natural sound and minimal narration. Viewers would experience great artists and want more. When people found out that I worked at Sunday Morning, they often would say, “I went to a concert,” or “I read a book,” or “I saw an exhibition” because of a particular Sunday Morning story. It was a great feeling when I could say, “I produced that story.”

 In 1987 when then CBS Chairman Lawrence Tisch saw that Ted Turner was spending less than CBS to create television news programming, Tisch ordered the firing of more than 200 staffers from CBS News. I was one of them. As I searched for work elsewhere, I learned how much of an anomaly CBS Sunday Morning was. No other news magazine program did more than one arts-related story per episode. Sunday did two or three cultural stories on each program.

When Charles Osgood took over hosting from Charles Kuralt, I was invited back to produce a story about the opening of the Rockefeller Estate at Kykuit to public tours. In the CBS archive I found footage of Osgood interviewing former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who spoke about the “civilizing effect of the arts.” For three years in the mid-1990s when I freelanced as a summer replacement producer, Sunday Morning reduced the typical length of its pieces from 9 minutes to 7 1/2 minutes to 6 minutes as more commercials filled the 90-minute broadcast.

With the election of Ronald Reagan and conservative efforts to dismantle government programs, the U. S. not only failed to spend for essential physical infrastructure but also for the cultural underpinnings of public life. In The Music of Strangers violinist Isaac Stern, who saved Carnegie Hall, is shown educating young Chinese musicians in an excerpt from the documentary From Mao to Mozart. Yo-Yo continues this tradition. His Silk Road Ensemble musicians are teaching the next generation as did Leonard Bernstein, the composer and conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who presented an 8-year-old Yo-Yo Ma on one of his famous televised Young People’s Concerts. But what about American television? As our society has become less aspirational and more about the bottom line, the arts are in jeopardy in the media and in the schools.

Former FCC Chairman Newton Minow became famous in 1961 for calling American television a “vast wasteland”. When I interviewed him in Chicago in the 1980s for a story on the “V-Chip” that could help parents block undesirable programs, he told me that he had tried to broker a partnership between CBS and PBS so that public television could rebroadcast Sunday Morning later the same day. But he couldn't make it happen. Now with video on demand and “Start Over”, more options are possible. Yet today programming for the lowest common denominator or for quirky niche audiences crowds out excellence and quality arts coverage. We don’t have anthology drama or variety television during prime time either. Such are the business decisions that determine what is broadcast.

On the day of Yo-Yo and Manny’s Carnegie Hall concert, The New York Times reported on the yearly income of CBS executives. Though the headline and story focused on former Chairman Sumner Redstone’s pay having been reduced from more than $10 million to just under $2 million, the article also reported about his successor, “In 2015, Mr. [Leslie] Moonves received a total of $56.8 million, down slightly from $57.2 million in 2014.”

Seeing Yo-Yo and Manny at Carnegie Hall and watching Yo-Yo in his new documentary made for two nights without television and obsessing over presidential candidates’ behavior. Excellent artistic performance became an antidote to the excessive animosity of political speech. Seeing these friends perform together again, I became aware of Yo-Yo and Manny’s obvious respect for and appreciation of each other; they enhanced our feeling of humanity and hinted at hope for our common future. Would that our political candidates could convey such a vision.

Howard Weinberg is a television documentary and public affairs journalist who has covered arts and culture extensively. A script-doctor, teacher and mentor —www.howardweinberg.net, his current almost-finished documentary Nam June Paik & TV Lab: License to Create shows the innovation made possible in the 1970s and early 80s by funding for public television.

#documentary #arts #poliics #television #cbs #yo-yo ma #music

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script-doctor · 9 years ago

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It’s Not a Playground, Or Is it?   Covering Politics Today By Howard Weinberg

This electoral season we hear commentators, right and left, say “It’s not a playground,” but it sure seems like one. I first became aware of political passions that erupted into “fighting words” on my grade school’s playground when I was 8 years old. A bully ran up beside me, yelled insults and attempted to jump me. It was 1948. The disrupter denigrated Democratic President Harry S. Truman who was running for re-election. Truman was from Independence, Missouri, where he had once sold men’s clothing as my dad had during the Depression. Republican Thomas Dewey was Governor of New York, where my dad had lived as a child. We lived in Omaha, a Democratic city in a mostly Republican state. The obnoxious kid struck my arm as he screamed, “Win with Dewey.” That election year The Chicago Tribune famously got it wrong with its headline: “Dewey Beats Truman.”

1948 was the year my parents got our first television set, a Zenith with a 12-inch round screen in a blond wood cabinet. Though the political conventions were first televised that year from Philadelphia, my earliest TV memories are not of politics but of The Howdy Doody Show, Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre, and the frequent Test Patterns described in newspaper listings as TBA.

Not until 1960 did televised Presidential debates gain national attention. Most post-debate discussion then focused on whether you watched the debates on radio or TV. The Democrat John F. Kennedy appeared “cool” on the new medium — as Marshall McLuhan said one should. TV viewers thought he won. The Republican Richard M. Nixon, who refused makeup, won according to radio listeners who couldn’t see him perspire under hot TV lights. Earlier that year during the New Hampshire primaries, I heard JFK speak and photographed him at Dartmouth College. He electrified me with his intelligence and imagination. Determined to see Nixon campaign, I went to a G.O.P. event in Manchester, N. H. but came away disappointed with the flag-waving empty rhetoric of his speech.

1960 became an important year for me and for television documentary coverage of politics. Filmmakers Robert Drew, Ricky Leacock, Albert Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker produced PRIMARY about the contest between Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin that year. It was the first American example of “cinema-verite” or direct cinema filmmaking. Three years later Drew Associates produced CRISIS: BEHIND A PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT about President Kennedy’s integration of the University of Alabama over the objections of Governor George Wallace. In 1965 I interviewed and wrote about these pioneer documentary filmmakers for my thesis at Columbia Journalism School. Their work continued to influence me throughout my career in television journalism.

Each election cycle I had opportunities to innovate in covering politics. As a founding producer ofThe Robert MacNeil Report, I led a team that covered Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory in the Democratic caucuses which put Iowa on the political primary map for the first time. By the general election that year our nightly news analysis program had gone national on public television as The MacNeil Lehrer Report. We covered candidates’ stump speeches and even included Vice Presidential candidates which is how I videotaped Senator Walter Mondale’s arrival in Oil City, PA (“I love Oil City,” he said as he stepped off his plane).

In 1980 I produced WHAT’S A PARTY FOR?, a one hour public television documentary for Bill Moyers’ Journal, that aired on Valentine’s Day. It focused on the two parties in Maine a year after an independent had concluded a four-year term as Governor. Senator Edmund Muskie described Democrats and Republicans as the traditional parties of the elite and the common man, the owner and the worker, the corporation and the individual.

Muskie had been the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1968 and had run for President during the primaries four years later. After he’d left the Presidential race in 1972, Muskie told journalist and historian Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President 1972: "I doubt whether I'm a candidate who could ever have won in this country this year. I'm a man for a country looking for a healer, not a country in protest."

Once again we are a country in protest. During the Vietnam War era, we got Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. He resigned on August 9, 1974 after Watergate. In 1980 independent candidate John Anderson and Citizens Party candidate Barry Commoner ran for President. I profiled both in half-hour documentaries for Bill Moyers Journal. Thus far this political season we’ve had only the threat of independent candidates: the most talked about, Michael Bloomberg, has said he won’t run. Our parties were in turmoil then; today they seem almost unrecognizable as they continue to fragment.

In 1980, there were only two televised presidential debates, the first between Ronald Reagan and John Anderson, and the second between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Now we have many more televised debates and ongoing reality TV-style coverage. The 2016 Republican primary debates began with 17 candidates and a dozen scheduled debates. As the undercard was eliminated, the GOP debates descended into mudslinging and ad hominem attacks. One suspects that a March Madness NCAA style elimination tournament would have been a better way to choose a nominee.

Today television provides plenty of coverage of the “horse race”; but its correspondents are too often asked to be “prognosticators” instead of reporters. Producers who are kept busy with day-to-day coverage don’t get enough time to dig into candidates’ backgrounds, voting records, financial supporters, staff and policy positions. It’s cheaper that way, and attracts more viewers so the media can claim it is giving the public what it wants.

When broadcast television was subject to the Fairness Doctrine as it was from 1949 to 1987, it had to devote air time to covering issues of public importance and include opposing positions. But the imperative of making money overwhelmed any desire to serve the public and broadcasters were able to persuade the FCC to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.

In a burst of American freedom, we’ve also removed whatever neutral constraints gave purpose to the processes of politics. The League of Women Voters began organizing Presidential debates in 1976, but both major parties soon decided they wanted to play without a referee. On October 3,1988, in a press release, the League announced it would no longer sponsor the debates: “…because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.” The President of the League said the two campaigns’ demands were “outrageous” and included control over who would question the candidates, who would be in the audience and which reporters would be admitted to the hall for the event.

The two parties also have contributed to the polarization of politics by gerrymandering congressional districts so that there are few real local contests between political viewpoints. How are promising politicians going to get noticed beyond their home districts if television doesn’t find legitimate ways to highlight their activities in the public interest?

Where is the engagement? The reasoned argument? The substantive debate? How do we restore it in the 140-character world of Twitter? We seem, more than ever, to be living in a world where we say, “My mind’s made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts — or alternatives.” We sense that the outcome will be determined by 1) the most money spent on TV ads or 2) whichever candidate best fires up his or her base.

Almost everyone knows there’s too much money in politics, but some revel in it as it pours into their corporate coffers: CBS Chairman and CEO Les Moonves said, “Bring it on, Donald, go ahead. Keep going…For us, economically, Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.” Others dismay that money is undermining the democratic principle of one person, one vote. The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer’s new book DARK MONEY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE BILLIONAIRES BEHIND THE RISE OF THE RADICAL RIGHT delineates the threat to democratic values that began before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

As an avid watcher of the both parties’ debates and town halls this political season, I appreciate MSNBC’s campaign coverage — especially Rachel Maddow’s and Chris Matthews’ post-election commentary. I yearn, however, for more background documentary reporting, for more civility, and fewer complaints about the media. Recently MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff reported on Unbound Delegates with innovative graphics and humor. It’s a reminder that TV News can do more insightful stories than it usually does. Coming soon after Mathews' incisive interview with Donald Trump, it clearly establishes MSNBC’s right to call itself "THE PLACE FOR POLITICS."

Handlers always have packaged candidates and sold them to the public. Politicians have always maligned the press. And it only takes one incident or image — real or contrived — for a candidate to implode. It had happened to Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, perceived to be crying in 1972; to Massachusetts Senator Michael Dukakis, attacked in 1988 for furloughing convicted murderer Willie Horton; and to Vermont Governor Howard Dean, assailed for screaming in 2004. Having recalled these instances for a 2004 New York Times Television Discovery Channel documentary UNRAVELING OF A CANDIDATE, I know a presidential candidacy suddenly can be derailed by the press’s and the public’s perceptions or misperceptions of events.

Most Americans would agree with Mae West that “too much of a good thing is wonderful” but how long must our elections go on? Long enough for candidates to become candid instead of canned? Long enough for reporters to dig for fresh information rather than endlessly repeat conventional wisdom? Long enough, maybe, to create changes in how we organize presidential primaries and elections? Reformers favor regional primaries, Sunday or holiday voting, and automatic voter registration. But despite the Internet, more means of communication than ever, and flat “smart” TV screens that are 40-inches and greater, we can’t seem to fulfill the public’s right and need to know —nor achieve eligible voter turnout that is greater than 50 to 60%. Fights among the followers and detractors of Donald Trump are hardly the answer. # (c) 2016 Howard Weinberg

Howard Weinberg is a television documentary and public affairs journalist who has covered politics extensively. A script-doctor, teacher and mentor —www.howardweinberg.net, he was founding producer ofThe Robert MacNeil Report in the primaries and of The MacNeil Lehrer Report in the general election of 1976; and Executive Producer of LISTENING TO AMERICA WITH BILL MOYERS — a 27-program election year series in 1992 that the New York Times praised for “elevating the dialogue of democracy.”

#msnbc politics #documentaries #presidential debate #public television #league of women voters

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