Media

What Does the Media Really Want in Ukraine? – 7

March 10, 2022

Unless you’re spending hours a day scouring the internet in search of critical news from Ukraine, you probably missed President Volodymyr Zelensky’s essential compromise that his nation is now willing to forgo membership in NATO. That should have been the lead story on all platforms around the world. Instead, we heard Zelensky evoke Churchill by…

Read More

Supermarket Bulletins

December 7, 2012

In supermarket checkout headlines and color photos pronounce this star’s fatter than you, that one’s more wrinkled, both had botched plastic surgery, another’s anorexic, he’s drunk, they’re addicted, she’s in treatment, he’s in jail, she’s spendthrift, he’s abusive, she’s vain, he’s unfaithful, she’s gay, wonder what rag publishers are like.

Read More

Women in Television News

August 21, 2012

In the vast and luxurious clubhouse of Seven Oaks Country Club, the League of Women Voters of Kern County hosts three female veterans of television news broadcasting in Bakersfield. Prior to their appearance the audience is treated to cashews and cake and a political history lesson: eleven states allowed women’s suffrage before the Nineteenth Amendment…

Read More

Limbaugh Loves Kony

October 21, 2011

As child like thousands in Uganda I was kidnapped by Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony and tortured and raped and brainwashed for years as thousands died and am confused why free American radio talker Rush Limbaugh calls Joseph Kony Christian and attacks Barack Obama for trying to help us and through mangled lips I…

Read More

Old Newscasters Never Die

August 27, 2011

The chronology unfolded about like this: I recently visited my hometown Sacramento, which I’d left in 1991, and was as ever moved by familiar places laden with ancient memories, and shortly after returning to Bakersfield I wondered what had become of several television newscasters from my youth. And in particular I was interested in Harry…

Read More

Son of John Gotti

February 14, 2011

I hereby celebrate avoiding every commercial during the Super Bowl between the wildcard Green Bay Packers and the hardscrabble Pittsburgh Steelers. I didn’t have to dodge any pitches during the first third of the game since I overslept as I battled sinusitis. Joining the showdown with the Pack leading fourteen to three, I thereafter held…

Read More

Letter to my Cable Company

December 14, 2010

Dear Cable Company, Please excuse me for annually asking you to send a technician to upgrade my service from a “limited-basic” menu of twenty-one channels to the still-merely-“basic” package of seventy-five, and then a few months later recalling your cable guy, always a different one, to climb the telephone pole in my back yard and…

Read More

Richard Nixon Rebuts Frost/Nixon

June 4, 2009

Don’t for a second think I’m upset by this new Frost/Nixon movie.  My enemies again tried to get Nixon and again they failed.  Watch documentary films of my speeches and interviews and you’ll hear an unusually articulate politician.  Actor Frank Langella portrayed me as a stiff-necked and tormented bumbler.  If you know Nixon the leader,…

Read More

Highlights from the 2008 Olympics

August 28, 2008

I see many noble commentators have downplayed if not altogether ignored Olympic sports in order to rebuke China for a range of civil rights concerns and thereby imply the nation today is as ill as in the era of Mao, who shred at least as much flesh as Hitler and Stalin.  China has in fact…

Read More

Bob Costas Explains Olympic Coverage

August 23, 2008

BEIJING – Every night during the Olympic Games I’m frequently overcome by sensual gratification and the release of absolute power: this invariably occurs as I tell billions of inconsequential viewers that, in essence, their time matters not, and fragments of headline sports they’ve waited months to watch will be shown in two or three  hours,…

Read More

Skipper Stu Nahan

December 27, 2007

Wednesday night, after I’d scurried around the airport in Fresno, looking for luggage that wasn’t there, my cell phone vibrated but I ignored it and instead stepped to customer service and politely scolded the airline representative for shoehorning me into a connecting flight that, especially during holiday season, was unlikely to receive bags from my…

Read More

William Bennett on Ultimate Morality

October 7, 2005

“It is most ironic and unfair that I, a supremely righteous man and the epitome of moral rectitude for a generation of divine white conservatives, am currently being pilloried for making an immoral statement.  My statement was in fact taken out of context.  And that is the only immorality in this tale.  What I said…

Read More

Liberals and Conservatives Calling each other Nazis

May 10, 2005

A few days ago I opened my email inbox and was surprised to see a message, from a member of a conservative online publication, stating they’d used my column “Sixty Years after Hitler” but had forgotten to tell me – much less ask permission to use it.  The member further noted that many people had…

Read More

Michael Savages the Nation

December 29, 2003

Perhaps I shouldn’t have. I knew what could happen if I switched radio stations during weeknight time slot. But I was desperate. PBS, oasis of thoughtfulness and moderation, was not less so at moment but I was bored by voice of gentle man chronicling love of cartoons. So I pushed button for ESPN radio where…

Read More

Navigating the Amazonian Universe

November 19, 2003

“Find Hitler Here,” I said to the computer expert. “It’s right there,” he said. “Not the old, out-of-print edition with the swastika on the cover. The current edition, with Hitler’s menacing portrait on the cover, the one you designed.” The expert, who in his living room has two monitors as large as respectable television screens…

Read More