I turned on CNN on the morning of August 7th. Yes, I do sometimes get news from the television, rather than the net. Boomers endure! Anyway: I turned it on and was immediately hit with the release of the July jobs numbers. Dismal. Of course the administration keeps telling us the economy is great, best ever, and that anything negative anyone might say about the US economy is fake news. Even when their own flunkies provide the numbers. This is from their Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment Situation Summary - 2026 M07 Results There is, admittedly, something Orwellian in the wording of the report itself. It says, "Both nonfarm payroll employment (-23,000) and the unemployment rate (4.1 percent) changed little in July." The number, 23,000 nonfarm jobs lost in one month, is startling. But it is covered by a soothing word. That change is "little". Betweem a bureaucrat's startling numbers and his soothing words -- be...
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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.
Here's an oddity worth remembering. On Saturday evening, February 1, two days before the Iowa caucus, when the actual VOTING phase of this forever campaign was at last set to begin, CNN went on the air in a program it had scheduled in conjunction with the Des Moines Register, a program that had been promoted as a live unveiling of the final poll results before the actual caucusing. But they provided no results. The network announced that the pollsters had discovered a glitch in their own procedures that rendered them unwilling to stand by the results. After that announcement, the remainder of the hour-long program was anticlimactic filler. What kind glitch led to such an embarrassing stand down for these two institutions? You can find the particulars yourself with a little googling, and I will leave you to it. I will only say, as I do in the headline above, that poll results these days are sensitive things, best handled with gravest of care.... One of the reasons...
The new administration is already notorious for one high-profile example of this: our new first lady used without attribution a passage from a speech once given by her precursor as FLOTUS. Now, though, another example has popped up. Plagiarism may yet become a theme of the coverage of the dreary years to come. It is not the gravest of sins, but it may be a valuable symptom of what people do and don't consider important. The POTUS-elect has named Monica Crowley, of Fox News, as director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. This appointment reminded people that Crowley is the author of a book, one with a cutesy title at that: What the (Bleep) Just Happened (2012). CNN's KFile looked carefully at that book and found 50 examples of word-for-word copying, many of them quite extensive passages. Here's one example. From the book, a passage criticizing Nancy Pelosi: She also said that she was only briefed once—in September 2...
Alonso Duralde, in THE WRAP, gives this movie a mixed review. The "core audience" will get a "nice, pleasant, entertaining time at the movies," but it all feels uninspired to him, an overblown episode of "Behind the Music." Mixed reviews seem to be the fate of Jersey Boys. Roger Ebert, of the notorious thumb, says the mob-related material in the movie seems both endless and lifeless. The movie becomes worthwhile, though, when it focuses on the chemistry among the band members. Andrew Barker, writing in VARIETY, says the movie is "effective at conveying the joy of sudden harmonic epiphany" in some scenes, but in others the leads don't seem to be "surfing the same wave." Chris Nashawaty for CNN Entertainment, gave it one of the least positive reviews I've seen. It was in his view a "one-dimensional stage show" to begin with and gains nothing from adaptation. But he acknowledges that the project is saved from...