Who's Sour On the NewsHour?

 I am.

The once-staid PBS NewsHour, which was for the longest time the most serious news broadcast on television, is no longer essential viewing.  I finally gave up on it.  As my mother points out, there's nothing the program reports that one does not already know about from other sources in today's 24-hour news cycle.

That's not why I'm giving up on it. It's because its in-depth news stories aren't as deep as they used to be, and it's also focusing more on the lighter side of the news . . . arts stories that are more about entertainment, "Brief But Spectacular" essays that are neither, plus all of the other stuff I bitched about in May. 

The last straw was an eight-minute interview conducted by Amna Nawaz with writer and cultural critic Nelson George about the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop, which was seven minutes and fifty nine seconds too long.  It was yet another self-congratulatory moment for hip-hop fans like George, who have been crowing all week long about hip-hop having lasted half a century when we all know rock and roll didn't quite last that long.  Rap/hip-hop fans have always been smug (you can almost hear them say, "Hip-hop is way cooler than rock ever was - nyahh!") and for this dubious milestone, they've been especially self-congratulatory in celebrating the culture that negates culture along with its sonic expression - rap, the music that negates music.  This, of course, is not a crime.  What is a crime is that Amna Nawaz is getting paid through the generous support of tax dollars, foundation contributions, and viewer donations to devote and waste expensive air time to discuss such a frivolous topic with anyone.  Public television was created to provide news and commentary from a perspective unavailable anywhere else.  But discussions of hip-hop are plentiful on commercial TV news - just turn on Ari Melber or Joy Reid on MSNBC.

Of course, if there was ever a discussion anywhere on the news of how hip-hop represented the coarsening of American civilization and the need to support music education in inner-city schools to teach kids there how to play real instruments and sing, I must have missed it.  

So that's it.  I'm done.  I'm perfectly comfortable to admit that the PBS NewsHour is not the American equivalent of BBC News and that I shouldn't expect a greater investment in public television to bring it up to par with the Beeb, because I know that is not going to happen.  Fortunately, I can watch BBC newscasts on American public television - a half-hour broadcast on weeknights.  As to Amna Nawaz and her supposedly regular (at least I think he stays regular) co-host Geoff Bennett . . . see you 'round the clubs.

And by the way, Stephanie Sy . . . if you want to take your daughter to a Taylor Swift concert, go right ahead.  Just don't play with your viewers by showing footage of it in the guise of a "news" story about "arts and "culture!"

P. BS.

What happened to the PBS NewsHour?

The PBS NewsHour, the only commercial-free television news program in the United States, is supposed to be more serious than the commercial network newscasts, who are supposedly kowtowing to the bottom line while PBS delivers the news that matters free from worrying about profits (forget for a moment the corporations that have been "underwriters" of the PBS NewsHour or decades).  Don't you believe it.

This past Tuesday night's broadcast of the PBS NewsHour demonstrated how less serious the broadcast has become, though there are earlier examples I will refer to later.  Among the stories it reported last night was a charity group of transvestites in Los Angeles who dress in nun's habits and wear whiteface, called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were invited to a gay pride event by the Los Angeles Dodgers, disinvited by the Dodgers after Catholic groups complained about how they were offended by the group, then re-invited by the Dodgers when ay-rights groups complained.  Okay,  maybe it was in bad form for the Dodgers to disinvite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and I'm sure the Sisters mean no offense toward Catholics.  But when Stephanie Sy, who interviewed sportswriter L.Z. Granderson for the story and asked him about the offended Catholics, Granderson just shrugged it off:  

[W]hen it comes specifically to religious ideology and imagery, you can go back to Rosemary's Baby in the 1970s, and I believe the Catholic Church was upset about that. You can go back to Madonna and "Papa Don't Preach," and they were upset in the '80s about that. And so there's been consistent examples in which people have used religion imagery to try to have a cultural moment, maybe a satirical moment, and that people of that faith have been offended by it. This is not unique to the Sisters. This is not unique to the Dodgers. This is something that we have witnessed in this culture for many decades.

So, offending Catholics (unlike offending Jews and Muslims) is no big deal.  Oh, all right.

And Stephanie Sy, who's normally a serious woman, talked about the Dodgers "striking out" by disinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for their "original sin."  What is this, MTV News?

And why was this story even reported on the PBS NewsHour?  Threats to non-heterosexual liberty far worse than this go on all the time, and they're doing stories like this?

On the same show, arts reporter Jeffrey Brown did a story about an artist whose art is apparently putting things next to other things - the sort of art children can do, which is becoming too frequent in Brown's reports.  Also, substitute anchor William Brangham trivialized the debt ceiling debate that's about to blow up in everyone's faces by saying that amount owed by the federal government would make thirteen piles of $100 bills as tall as the Washington Monument, while Capitol Hill correspondent Lisa Desjardins used barbells to explain the interest on the debt.  

Such silliness has been going on for years now.  Where Judy Woodruff used to sign off making an offhand comment about the last (and least important) news story of the evening (which was annoying enough), new anchors Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz joke or banter about whatever the last news story of the evening before signing off like they're anchors of a local-news program in Des Moines or Sioux Falls. Sometimes they address their audience personally, like when Amna Nawaz said that a pet-adoption story that had just aired made her want to adopt a pet in addition to the three pets she and her husband already had, followed by her saying, "Just kidding, honey." 

And of course, obituaries of many famous people are ignored for not being "passings of note."  For those  new to this blog who only get their news from PBS, we lost two power-trio drummers - Cream's Ginger Baker in 2019 and Rush's Neil Peart in 2020 - but the PBS NewsHour never bothered to report either passing.  Ansd while Tom Hanks and Bob Newhart will of course be memorialized on the PBS NewsHour when they die, Peter Scolari, who worked with both actors on television, died in 2021 without the NewsHour mentioning him.  And in September 2022 - about two weeks after Queen Elizabeth's death - former New Jersey governor Jim Florio died without the NewsHour reporting it.  This has to be a joke, I thought, channeling Molly Ringwald's Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles.  The PBS NewsHour failing to report a politician's death?  They live for that stuff!  The PBS NewsHour has reported the deaths of back-bench U.S. House members and forgotten one-term U.S. Senators, but it couldn't acknowledge the death of a former Governor of New Jersey? 

Needless to say, I'm getting tired of TV news, as it's not as sober and serious as it used to be, so perhaps I should subscribe to a newspaper to get my news, before all of the newspapers go away.  Because if you can't rely on the PBS NewsHour, who can you rely on?

On The Mark

For the longest time, I always expected sharp, clever insight from Mark Shields, who died last week at the age of 85, on the PBS NewsHour on Fridays when he and one of the many partners he had - first David Gergen, then Paul Gigot, and finally David Brooks - reviewed the week in politics.  Shields, an unpretentious Irish-American columnist who had honed his skills of political analysis from having worked in the trenches of Democratic politics (he worked for Bobby Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign), was always ready with a trenchant observation and a perfect understanding of the ways of Washington.

What made Shields a perfect political analyst was his plain speaking as well as his experience with politics.  He treated people the way he wanted to be treated - with respect - and he never talked down to anyone.  A native of Massachusetts, Shields was someone who lived inside the Capital Beltway but always knew what people inside Route 128 (the freeway that goes around Boston) were thinking and feeling.  He conveyed that Middle American sensibility on both PBS and, back in the 1990s, on CNN.  If there was any decency left in Washington, it's because of Mark Shields.

Mark Shields retired in 2020 after 33 years on public television, and made his exit at the right time, going out on top.  He knew when to quit.  In 1982, he ended his talk radio show because, as he aid, he had nothing left to say.  And I'm going to stop here in waxing rhapsodic about Mark Shields, because I have nothing left to say, either. RIP.       

The Grass Is Greener In the Other Field

In light of the Build Back Better Act being on death's door, I took consolation from the fact that at least the bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed in November, and that means better highways, better bridges, better transit systems - you know, building back better. 

Think again, sucker.  The PBS NewsHour's Jeff Greenfield (above) was on the program's weekend edition this past Sunday, and he explained that the new infrastructure bill isn't going to produce any visible results any time soon or even any time later.  He said that many of the projects will be, as they have always been, bogged down by cost overruns and delays (he didn't cite the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan but I could), as well as local opposition to projects no matter how badly they're needed - mainly due to NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard).  Also, Greenfield noted design flaws in infrastructure projects - like the wheels of passenger trains in the Honolulu area misaligned with the track gauge.

Which is a roundabout way of making the point that, even with the infrastructure bill passed, the Democrats won't have anything to boast about for the 2022 midterms.

Tell me how proud I should be to be an American . . . I keep forgetting.