Category Intellectual Dishonesty

Houston’s News Authority has left the building

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Today they smothered the last vestige of what once was the most kick-ass radio news station in Houston when KTRH Radio fired morning anchors Lana Hughes and J.P. Pritchard.  “Eh, yeah, 27 years…but it’s just not working out for us; we feel like we need to go in a new direction.”

JPP(Full disclosure: I worked with Lana and J.P. at KTRH, liked and respected them both.  I anchored afternoon drive with Jean Jangda, and then Tom Bacon, while they held down the mornings.  In fact, I was already at the station when they were hired, separately, and then when they were made the morning drive team.)

Today’s KTRH (740 on your AM dial) is just a faint echo of the real news organization it once was: full of reporters and writers and producers who bested every other broadcaster in town, and competed with two daily newspapers despite the papers’ overwhelming advantage in resources.  But that station is long gone, and I haven’t listened to KTRH in years.  It lost all depth of coverage, all its authority…become almost feathery, just a series of short readers ping-ponged back and forth between the morning anchors, and the rest of the day filled with Limbaugh and Limbaugh imitators, local and syndicated.  I can’t even turn it on for the Astros’ game (this part is not the station’s fault) because the Astros won’t can Milo Hamilton.   Lana and J.P. were the last link to that past.

As is the norm in these cases, station management has nothing but the highest praise for those so hastily dispatched—“been blessed to work with” them—and J.P. is quoted as saying he knows this is “nothing personal,” just part of a changing business.  But management let them know about “the change” after they got off the air this morning, and after 27 years they just won’t be back.  Makes you wonder: if they were so valued, and so loved, why weren’t they given an opportunity to say goodbye on the air?  To the audience, they will simply vanish, perhaps to be referred to by the new people, in mock reverent tones, for a week or two.  And why has every scintilla of evidence of their existence already been scrubbed from the website, like they were never there?

Station management reportedly admits that this decision means the end of a “traditional morning news show” on the station, and they hope for something more like “Fox and Friends.”  (Great.)  They say they’re making this change based on research and feedback—ah, the magic words that signal another victory for consultants…

In 1984 KTRH was the powerhouse news/talk station in Houston, making a ton of money, when it committed ritual hara-kiri of the talk component because a new program director (who would go on to become a consultant!) proclaimed that talk was a dying format that appealed only to the older demographic…well, we’ve all seen how right he was about that!  Since then subsequent management slowly brought back in the talk shows to fill time, because no one can bear to listen to the same news stories over and over and over again all day, but you need to keep the cume ratings up.  Then the station was bought, and ended up absorbed into Clear Channel Communications, and like most of the other tentacles of that beast it became a rebroadcaster—of right-wing talk, and right-wing news.  Today, they announce they’re going all the way…back to news/talk, but now with a partisan political point of view.

Hey, it’s their station (broadcasting on my airwaves and yours, free of charge), and they can do with it what they want.  What they want is to make money, and I’m fine with that—but don’t any of you for one minute think that they’re trying to do anything other than that.  Any informing or educating or entertaining, or whatever, that happens along the way, is gravy—they’re here to make money.  Today’s decision is, ultimately, undoubtedly, one they believe will make them more money (which, as I said, I’m fine with).  Any consideration about serving “the public interest, convenience and necessity” is an afterthought.

Lana and Jeeps: well done, old friends…sleep in.

Even Fred Flintstone was down with having a gay old time

Pat Ryan 9 Comments

Quick follow-up on the New York gay marriage vote, while waiting for a rational explanation from those in the “states’ rights” crowd who support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would prevent states from exerting their rights on this issue:

–hooray for the mayor of New York’s unequivocal support for gay marriage: it’s the right thing to do, opposing it is the same as opposing women’s rights or civil rights or the abolition of slavery, the law won’t require religions to perform or sanction a same sex marriage…and although people are free to belong to any religious group American society as a whole places its faith in the Constitution, not some set of religious laws.

–the Obama Administration isn’t defending the Defense of Marriage Act, and when House Republicans threaten to fight an 81-year-old woman over it even the lawyers bail out.

–the gay marriage issue helped a president win re-election in 2004; now some political pros think the Democrats can use gay marriage to hammer Republicans in 2012 because it could pull traditional Republicans away from the right-wing Christian evangelicals taking over the GOP.

–and looking into the future far beyond 2012, how many of us have even thought about how all this kerfuffle over gay rights will be viewed by our descendants?

Trump Treats Palin to Pizza Party, Sparks Stewart’s Riotous Rip

Pat Ryan 2 Comments

I’ve resisted the occasional urge to write something about the pretend politicians Sarah Palin and Donald Trump because I don’t think they’re worth the ink, so to speak.  Now, maybe I’m just ignoring reality and pretending that life is the way I wish it were, but in the grand scheme of things what do these people add to the constructive dialogue of American civic life?

Why give them the attention they’re screaming for?

Donald Trump was never running for president, he was promoting his television show…which exists only to promote him.  Self-promotion isn’t the worst thing in the world, I grant you, but it’s not especially attractive.  Sarah Palin?  Well, it’s not her fault John McCain chose her as his running mate, and she’s not the first (or last) ignorant self-involved demagogue to come down the pike.  That these two enjoy a certain popularity with self-described conservatives is owed more to the fact that they are not Barack Obama than it is to anything either of them stands for or has ever done.  And the fact that we hear so much about them is more evidence of the ongoing betrayal of the public interest that David Shaw identified as “the four horsemen of the journalistic apocalypse: superficiality, sensationalism, preoccupation with celebrity, and obsession with the bottom line.”

But today I can’t resist, because Palin and Trump were the jumping-off point for a(n) hilarious Jon Stewart rant in defense of New York pizza!

Trump Palin Stewart pizza

Beware of those peddling politics for dummies

Pat Ryan 6 Comments

The chattering classes say Republicans are in trouble because of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed changes to Medicare.  They say that because, across the land, there has not been a rousing call for its adoption by acclamation, and therefore we can ascertain that the proposers are on the outs with the American people.  In fact some people do object, and for a number of reasons, but I don’t know how much trouble the whole GOP is in over this issue, since I try not to make the sweeping generalization my first conclusion or give myself credit for being able to see the future or into the minds of others.

But I think that what’s happening right now on this subject is a good thing.  We need to talk about details if we’re going to find a way out of our federal budget mess.  No one has wanted to talk specifics because, well, talking about paying more and spending less is not fun.  But beyond that, few in power dare to address specifics for fear that the short attention span American voter and the heat-before-light American news media will fixate only on the fact that someone proposed something and rain down ridicule and ignominy upon them until the end of days (no, not until October 21, for much longer than that).  Any open discussion or real give and take on a serious issue becomes more and more unlikely as it becomes more and more clear that the discussion will be intentionally twisted into a negative campaign ad.

We have to talk specifics on this, but that doesn’t mean that we have to do everything that is proposed, or that every unadopted proposal is a failure.  Ryan’s plan may never become law, but it already served the purpose of getting us talking about details.  Now we need to keep talking, not recoil from the negative reaction to the first serious plan and never say anything ever again.

The budget crunches in this country are real and can’t be solved just with accounting tricks; it’s going to mean painful cuts in programs that people need as well as ones they want.  For example: here in Texas our state law requires a balanced budget and there’s only so much money available this time around—tens of billions of dollars less than the current budget.  Absent a multi-billion dollar windfall of biblical proportions, the only way out means someone’s ox gets gored…or likely in this case, everyone’s oxen.  As Patricia Kilday Hart made the point in a recent column, the discussion is about what gets defined as an “essential” government program.  In order not to reach into the state’s savings account this time, there are budget plans that make some changes:

It cuts state Child Protective Services “intake” offices so severely that officials predict 85,000 calls about abused children will not be answered.

It shortchanges school districts for the 80,000 new students expected to show up at the front doors of public schools next year.

It cuts Medicaid reimbursement rates to nursing homes so drastically that the industry predicts 75 percent of the nursing homes in Texas will shut their doors, leaving 60,000 elderly Texans without care and 47,000 employees without jobs.

The polls have been showing for a while that people want the budget fixed, they just don’t want the fix to hurt them.  Well, “they” are going to have to get over that or “we” will get nowhere…except closer to the edge as the wind picks up a little bit.

News on the march

Pat Ryan 3 Comments

Tidying up the files and hoping no one has noticed the “funny” little comments at the top of the page while I find out where they’re coming from:

I am still annoyed at the decision announced last month by the Obama Administration not to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged September 11 attack plotters in civilian court…actually, “shameful” is the word that first came to mind.  It caved in to bullying and fear-mongering from those who don’t really trust the justice system and want a guarantee of a conviction, which they believe they get from a military tribunal instead of a dozen New Yorkers off the street (I refer you to a prior discussion to the issue last year).   On the other hand, Osama bin Laden didn’t get a public trial, either…

Good news and bad from our Texas Legislature.  The state senator who took heat for her plan to railroad accused sex offenders by changing the rules of evidence in their trials had the temerity to defend her position in the paper by claiming her plan actually protects the rights of the accused!  On the other hand, the bogus statistical machination that the state education agency has been using to falsely pump up the annual student assessment test results is on its way out.

In another development on the fungible facts front, the Arizona senator who intentionally misspoke on the Senate floor about the use of funds by Planned Parenthood, and who had his press secretary try to explain it all away by assuring reporters that those words were “not intended to be a factual statement,” has had the Congressional Record edited so that he’s not lying misspeaking anymore.  Because members of Congress have granted themselves the “privilege” to do things like that.

Some days you think you have a pretty good handle on things and the world is spinning in greased grooves…and then you’ve got to figure out how to reconcile that world with one in which an Iranian government power struggle in the 21st century has led to arrests on charges of sorcery, and where the Chinese have outlawed time travel in works of fiction.  If they’re against mythical stories, why do they keep calling their country a republic?