Cancer has taken so many people I’ve loved and admired. This new interview with two hugely admired and much-loved celebrities reminded me of how deeply it affects us all . We know, in our heads, that the presence of beauty, courage, fame and an amazing marriage and family can’t keep the monster at bay. Neither can being the most respected broadcast journalist of the past 30 years; Tom Brokaw had cancer too. So did my husband, by the way. Thankfully, they are still with us. But it’s a roll of the dice, not fame or fortune, or even education, that’s made it so.
So why are we not all enraged? Why do we refuse to keep this plague at (or at least near) the top of our agenda? We face so much right now: attacks on women, racial tension, income inequality, climate change, declining education systems and infrastructure – fill in your own particular blank. But no matter how we feel about any of these issues, we all grieve for those we’ve lost to cancer; we all long for their presence in our lives and know that it is just a lack of knowledge that took them from us.
No family is untouched; the lucky ones face it among older members but so many lose loved ones — family and friends, well before they’ve seen their children grow up, or get married or find their way in the world and before they’ve exhausted the gifts that brought so much to all of us. I’ve been thinking about them a great deal recently, and have felt, for some time, a need to honor them once again here. Many died before there was an Internet but I’ve added links where I could.
Listening to Viola Davis last night and reading responses from so many of my friends was inspiring, but hardly surprising. I’ve written often about the gift, through the Internet, of access to the ideas of women of color their perspectives on America and race.
But last night and this morning, it was as if it was brand new, with this post from AwesomelyLuvvie saying it all. The depth of joy and pride wasn’t surprising, of course. It was just so wonderful and passionate. I remembered all the “first women” of the 70’s and 80’s: astronauts and VP Candidates, fire fighters and West Point grads, Supreme Court justices, rabbis, and orchestra conductors, and could only imagine how much bigger this must feel – especially since Davis’ speech was so phenomenal.
So hats off Luvvie! And hats off to Viola Davis and her sisters, those who won, those who didn’t and the fierce women who supported them.
Will, Charlie’s grandson and Jim sing That’s How I Got to Memphis
Stuck in my head ever since the end of The Newsroom, this song really seems to want to spend today with me, which would be fine if it didn’t make me so sad.
It won’t matter much if you didn’t like the show, or if music doesn’t carry you forward and back or if you don’t mourn the decline of integrity as a core value of journalism, but the use of it at a funeral for Charlie Skinner, (Sam Waterston,) the keeper of the flame, the leader who defended the honor of every journalist and story, is a spectacular metaphor. YouTube won’t let me embed it, but here it is if you have the patience to link, it’s worth it.
Aaron Sorkin says Charlie represented the loss of decency offered by each of us to the rest of us, but for me, as Newsroom closed down, he stood for the rules that made journalism credible and critical to our country*; rules eroded in surrender to commerce and coarseness and fear. Even so, The Newsroom closed with the first moment of yet another day’s show. As Sorkin said, “They’re going to keep doing the news.” It will, though, be with the loss of just a little more of the combination of honor and power, the Charlie Skinner, that had protected them, and us, for so long.
*The Atlantic called it a funeral for “old media” but I’ve lived in “new media” for decades now and the show wasn’t about that change – at least not to me.
Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days. If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.
Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling. It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.
Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty? It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:
Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.” (Seymour, an Introduction)
Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.
My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:
The child of a black couple in Harlem in the early 60’s was bitten by a rat in the tenement where they lived and no cab driver would stop pick them up to take them to the hospital ( East Side, West Side (1963-64) ( George C. Scott (Patton, Dr. Strangelove) and Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane PIttman, The Help) as a social worker and his secretary.) It was cancelled after one season because no Southern stations would carry a show featuring interracial colleagues.
What do you watch at 11:30? Are you even up? The Daily Show is over, but there’s still Steven Colbert. Or are you sucked away from basic cable to join one of the Established Hosts on those antiquated broadcast networks? And if you are, which one? The answer to that question probably depends on how old you are.
Last week’s Saturday Night Liveincluded this imaginary Larry King Show, mocking, as both hosts have, the ham-handed dismissal of the younger Conan to honor expensive contract obligations made to the older Leno. For many of us, this is simple: Jay Leno is old and grouchy (well not as old as I am but still…) and O’Brien younger, more creative and definitely holder of the “younger, cooler, hipper” mandate. (Yes I know there’s David Letterman (and George Lopez) but for now let’s think about NBC.)
Younger viewers have been up late watching Conan for years – after many of the rest of us had gone to bed – and they know and like his ironic, goofy, smart persona. The Harvard-educated O’Brien, (who wrote for the university’s humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon,) and served as a long-time writer for Saturday Night live and later for The Simpson’s, is a perfect 21st Century personality.
Leno, on the other hand, is a real 20th Century man. He came up through comedy clubs and Tonight Show appearances and is a car collector and motorcycle freak. His humor is less subtle and, somehow, although less arch than Conan it’s also less friendly. Mostly though, it’s old-school. In my view, it’s for the dwindling older audience and not for the emerging majority of TV viewers (and of Americans) born well after we Boomers had finished college.
It’s funny, but as much as I loathe the idea of age discrimination, I also see this decision as a symptom of a generational division visible in the women’s movement, in life on the Web and in the politics that brought out so many younger voters for Barack Obama and then betrayed them with posturing and partisanship.
I first thought about all this when I saw an interview with the gifted and admired Dick Ebersol, long an icon of sports coverage who has led NBC Sports for many years and presided over several Olympics seasons on the air. In the Huffington Post, he called Conan’s Tonight show a “spectacular failure.” In his long career, in addition to sports, Ebersol was an executive in charge of the TODAY SHOW (full disclosure, I worked for him – and happily) and of Saturday Night Live so he’s no slouch. But it seems that seven months, preceded by a failing Leno show with ratings so bad the affiliates, bleeding audience for the local news that followed Leno, demanded a change, was hardly the best audience-builder for Conan, whose show followed that news. More than all of that though, Ebersol is far from the days when he had his finger on the pulse of the emerging audience, the Gen Xers and Millennials and those younger than they are. They want something different, something cooler, something more like — Conan.
I’ve written about, and been on panels about, the generational divide. The economic crisis has only exacerbated it as young people consider the disappearing Social Security benefits and their own futures in a world where job security and benefits is hazy history. They’re mad at the Boomers, blame us for more than we’re responsible for and often have no idea what we really accomplished in the 60’s and 70’s — for the better. Events like this one, however superficial and entertainment-based, are just another example of the disregard in which they are too often held. NBC will pay for that — in the PR game it already has (did you see the Golden Globes?) and, I fear, in a larger sense, so will the rest of us “older” Americans. We should be listening to them about more than product preferences and if we don’t, we’ll be sorry.
Leave it to Norman Lear, founder and early funder of People for the American Way and creator of All in the Family and Maude, two of the most successful sitcoms in American television history, to produce the remarkable Playing for Change. Musicians – street musicians, from all over the world, recorded and filmed separately and combined into a multi-national, multi-ethnic concert, recorded (with high-tech equipment) on city street corners and the red dirt of townships, Congo, New Orleans and right in front of the White House.
The message, as Lear freely admits "sounds like claptrap" but somehow it can't help but sink in: music, the universal language, reminds us how much we have in common across the barriers that separate nation and race, faith and gender. It won't change anything by itself, certainly, but it's a lovely reminder of what could be.
I gave up my alma mater, THE TODAY SHOW, for C-SPAN's Washington Journal. But no more – nope. Now I'm strictly a Morning Joe girl. My insomniac husband and I start our day with these characters, and there's good reason. They're smart, they're funny, they have real personalities, and they think and react. Both they and their guests deftly provide more information and perspective, than anywhere else you can go in the morning.
When I started at TODAY the theory was that people felt as if we were in their bedrooms. That Deborah Norville failed at replacing Jane Pauley (as if anyone could) because she was so perfect, so slick, that she was intrusive. TV was still one-way then; we produced the show, trying to make it as accessible as possible, but still, we were sending it to the audience, not talking with them.
At Morning Joe – the perfect Millennial programming, Scarborough, (former Congressman) the shredding (den mother? Zen master? daughter of Zbigniew) Mika Brzezinski, wise-cracking Willie Geist (former Tucker Carlson producer, son of CBS News Sunday Morning contributor Bill Geist) and the rest of the crew are not in our bedrooms, we're in the studio with them. There's no "third wall" (I always wanted to produce a show like that,) you see
the cameras, the cardboard Starbucks cups and even the
producers. We're all in it together. Conversations with their (very well-booked) guests are smart, sassy and collegial; lots of information emerges but from conversation, not inquisition. There is very little distance between the audience and the studio – bluster is deflated and humor is the tool of choice. ALL with considerable elan, explication, foresight and accessibility.
I almost forgot the music. Most commercial breaks are punctuated with music – often Bruce Springsteen, always connected to the last topic of conversation. During the campaign, of course, Born to Run and Jackson Browne's Running on Empty were favorites. It's another way of communicating with the audience – fun and usually spot on. When it's not music, it's clips from late night comedy or other relevant but irreverent television.
I'm not alone in this – didn't invent a new wheel. The New York Times has called the show "oddly addicting" (my experience exactly); the Washington Post described it as "a provocative, alternate-universe newstalk show." From six to nine AM Twitter is full of Joe sightings.
I spent many years in broadcast news, nine of them at the TODAY SHOW, and I've mourned its transformation from the informative show I knew to what seemed to me to be an undisciplined mush called, by many production alums, "Friends in the morning." It's wildly popular so I'm not condemning it – just saying that it isn't the show I worked for. Now, after a long, sad period of missing what TODAY was, I see in Morning Joe what it could have (and should have) become.
OK so you’ve probably seen this but just in case I’m posting it here (probably like half the web.) I’ve (embarrassingly) never heard this woman speak before. I thought she’d sound horrible but she’s not half bad. And the ad? Pretty funny, huh?
