Media time killers

Sam Smith - Watching Andrea Mitchell drone on about the post-Breyer Supreme Court reminded me of a media problem that gets virtually no attention: all day news channels have to fill all their days with news, or an imitation of it. Analyzing who is going to replace Breyer is of magnificent assistance in this  since …

Getting started in alternative journalism

Sam Smith – After graduating from college, I found work in a basement office of a row house on New Jersey Avenue SE, a few blocks from the Capitol. Out of this long, sunken, slovenly one-room den qua office was published Roll Call, a weekly paper for those thousands who worked on Capitol Hill. In …

Why the media doesn’t like Green Book

Sam Smith – I can’t remember an Oscar winner getting so much criticism as Green Book Admittedly, it is a charming story that does not reflect far more painful ethnic relations of the time and it may be historically inaccurate. But it was released when ethnic issues seem stunningly void of possible decent resolution, when …

Media essays

The conspiracy theory card The other day, Politico ran a typically sneering article about the Bilderberg Group. As usual, anyone who shows the slightest interest in the hyper secret meeting of some of the most powerful people in the world is a "conspiracy theorist." This is smug, childish, mindless establishment journalism at its worst. By …

Telling just the bad part of the story

Sam Smith - Watching Green Book, I was pleasantly relieved to see a film dedicated to telling a story of improved ethnic relations. If you base your assumptions on the media, it would appear that nothing much in this sphere is getting better. While the media is not at fault for telling the true bad …

Rest in peace, Radio Shack

Rest in Peace, Radio Shack This photo on Reddit - another Radio Shack folding - reminds us of the key role Radio Shack has played in the life of the Progressive Review. In the early decades of this journal, Radio Shack was our technological guardian angel. Here are a couple of our favorite devices– Sam …

The neighborhoods of Fred Rogers and Donald Trump

Sam Smith - An exceptional new documentary on Fred Rogers hit a theme for me about two thirds through: I realized that Mr Roger's neighborhood was the exact opposite - in decency, integrity, friendliness and happiness - of that being created by Donald Trump. Fred Rogers wasn't a perfect individual. He was, in that fine …

When television took over politics

Sam Smith - It's been my long held thesis that few things have altered American politics more than the arrival of television's popularity as a source of news and opinion.  As noted here before, for example, it had a profound effect on political corruption. Prior to television, corruption was a feudal arrangement i.e. politicians were …

Of superheroes and super media

Sam Smith-  Four days after the Parkland killings I went to see Black Panther. I normally avoid such films because of their level of gratuitous violence, but given the rap on Black Panther, I gave it a try. As I watched I began to wonder if I  end up among those blamed for some future …

There’s no business like show business. . .and certainly not politics

Sam Smith – The other day I came across a poem I wrote about a week after the first Kennedy-Nixon debate (probably for Roll Call newspaper where I was working at the time): I’ll Take My Candidate Without Cream or Sugar, Thank You Pollster, spare that candidate Give him a chance to run Free from …

Dealing with the banality of political evil

Sam Smith – Having been in this racket for six decades, I’m aware that some things have changed dramatically for the worse and yet the public and the press regard them as normal –as Peter Dreier points out, what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Among these has been the fading of moral voices …

My time with Billl O’Reilly

2004 - Reader Chas Edwards used the right word when he described your editor's appearance on the Bill O'Reilly show as a "smackdown," for television of this variety has far more in common with professional wrestling than with professional journalism. And like a professional wrestler I went on the show knowing full well that I …

How the media could rediscover journalism

Sam Smith One of the scary side effects of the Trump disaster is how badly the media is covering it. It is one of the biggest stories in the history of the United States yet the media is granting Trump and his mob a level of normalcy by coverage not even as reflective of reality …

Filler items for young journalists

Sam Smith The basic rules of good journalism are fairly simple: tell the story right, tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, 'if you can't be funny, be interesting.' Journalism is to thought and understanding as the indictment is to the trial, the hypothesis to the truth, …

WHRB: Unofficial sounds of Harvard in the 1950s

Sam Smith WHRB was started during World War II as an AM station, using as its antenna the university's electrical wiring system running through huge tunnels for the steam pipes. Its signal was not supposed to be heard beyond the campus, but there were periodic reports of it being picked up as far as Medford …