Deja Vu — Not!

Hey — you didn’t even see it the first time!  Until we tell you what it was!  And that’s what makes it so much fun.  And us so special.

I remem­ber when CBS TV decided to try to get some use out of the old Mur­row gang.  After all, they were pay­ing them good salaries, so why not use them?

Prior to this NBC had Hunt­ley and Brink­ley.  They were fun.  I remem­ber them doing the 1960 con­ven­tion with their man-​​about-​​town airs and their cool head­phones; it felt like watch­ing the moon land­ing, except back then we didn’t know what that was.  Chet Hunt­ley would tell you the first half of what hap­pened and then David Brink­ley would sub­mit the other half with a wry quip and a sort of rib­ald je né sais quoi.

And then we had CBS.  Well, you can’t really fault them.  They were run by Bill Paley, a failed cigar maker from Chicago who almost bank­rupted the fam­ily busi­ness by bring­ing out a line of cig­a­rettes that gagged peo­ple.   So we had Mr.  I’ve got a voice like Lorne Greene so I know bet­ter than you do Wal­ter Cronkite.  Oh, no.    Then CBS afflicted us with Eric Sevareid.  He’d come on and tell us what the news we’d just heard meant.  I was just a kid so I didn’t know much about news or about jaw­bone and gums reced­ing and so thought it was weird that he had the LONGEST BOTTOM TEETH that I had ever seen.  Like some sort of aquatic mam­mal, for scoop­ing dead sea­weed off the sea bed.  But there he was, every night, a loom­ing pres­ence, lean­ing for­ward, his shoul­ders hunched, his teeth poised to scoop any unwary seabeds, and then we were told what to think of the news.  I remem­ber Nixon going absolutely wild about this.  He’d give a speech and the Sevareid and Harry Rea­soner (what a name for a news­man, eh?)  would tell the peo­ple what the speech MEANT.  Nixon, silly boy, would think that he said what he meant to say.  He was always proved wrong.

So, today, when you read arti­cles in Time and Slate which tell you that you are an absolute moron for NOT ACTING RIGHT I just wanted you to know there is a long and dis­hon­or­able his­tory to it.

Well, he was the first.  But not the only.  As Harry Tru­man said about reporters,

They’re just like a bunch of young pups — once one of ‘em pisses on a fire hydrant, then they’ve all got to do it

And now they are all call­ing us stu­pid.  Boy are we dum­mies for not doing what the cur­rent bottom-​​scoopers are telling us to.

Good for us.

Tags: media bias, news, press