Lara Logan is in the news again. In the early years of this millennium, LL seemed to be on a path to a great career as a television journalist. She was with CBS, for gawd's sake. Its news division has given the world Murrow and Cronkite. It is presumably where a young woman or man with ambitions in that line wants to be. In 2011, as the Mubarak government collapsed in Egypt, as crowds filled up the streets of Cairo, CBS sent Logan and a camera crew to cover this huge story for them. This is where our story turns ugly. Soon after Mubarak's resignation, Logan was raped by a rowdy celebratory crowd that may have included up to 300 men. She was rescued by soldiers and flown home where she was hospitalized for four days. On a message board to which I was contributing with some regularity at the time, I remember one commenter saying that he disagreed with news coverage of the attack. He thought the mainstream media ought to shut up about Logan. said he thought i...
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CNN is launching a streaming service for interviews with newsmakers. Chris Wallace, son of legendary television news reporter Mike Wallace, recently quit Fox News. These two facts are related. Wallace announced his departure at the end of "Fox News Sunday," the closest thing Fox News has had lately to what would once have been considered a proper broadcast TV news show. Wallace has moderated there since 2003. He ended his last broadcast telling hsi viewers he had had a "great ride" at Fox but was "ready for a new adventure." He did not then make it clear, but the adventure he had in mind was with CNN+, the new streaming service. Good luck to you, if only for your old man's sake. If he is looking down upon us from some metaphysical analog of a cloud, I imagine he has seen your time with Fox News as an inexplicable detour. Now, at last, you may be about the family business.
There is little to be said about this year's Super Bowl. But I'll say the following anyway, simply to achieve a sense of closure. Congrats to the Patriots. Congrats, too, to the Rams for an amazing season. They'll almost certainly be back to the post-season, and perhaps back to flying with the Superb Owl, next year. CBS' opening bit, where we witness what purports to be a boardroom debate about how the CBS coverage of the Super Bowl ought to begin, was clever, but everything seems to have gone downhill from there. Lackluster game, boring halftime show, sub-par commercials. Props to Gladys Knight.
This is my first post-Labor Day post, so we'll write about the subject that comes to mind. Desi Arnaz. It is a fact, to be condemned or welcomed at your leisure, that labor unions represent a shrinking portion of the labor market pie. Despite (or because of?) the protection of union activity in the private sector, the role of unions there has been in decline for decades. In the 1950s one in every three private sector employees was a member of a union. By 2011, only 6.9%, roughly one out of every 14 were union members. Here's a link for that 6.9% figure, in case fact checkers are reading. I think reporter Greenhouse rather buried his lede, though: that critical figure doesn't appear until the fifth paragraph . Anyway: some conservatives talk about this decline almost as if it is karma. Unions are, in their view, inherently suspect operations, and they are shrinking because of their own cosmic badness. I disagree. Further, I'd like to tell a stor...