This site hosts the original broadcasts of the cult radio comedy show “A Half Hour Radio Show,” syndicated around the US in the early 1990’s.
Marilyn Armstrong‘s insight:
When I was in college, I worked at the radio station. This show was a very big hit at the time. Since then, it has gone through a lot of iterations, refinements, rewriting … and it’s still hilarious. Take a trip in time. Enjoy a type of entertainment that used your imagination instead of special effects. Fall in love with radio!
In case you’ve failed to notice, the importance of something going on in the world has an inverse relationship to the amount of attention it gets in the press. By “press,” I’m not referring only to newspapers, radio, television, or newer sources like social networks, websites and blogs. I mean all of it plus the other stuff — newsletters, email — the collective dissemination of information from a wide variety of perspectives. If you care about truth and facts, you have a lot of ways to find it.
The current definition of “news” is what news organization say it is. Whether or not this actually is the news is an entirely different subject. The control of news content is not, as many people seem to think, in the hands of reporters or even editors and publishers. Control lives in corporate boardrooms run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, people who have no interest in keeping us informed. It’s all about power, politics and money. Mostly money. It’s business, not public service.
I’m not sure when the news stopped having to do with “what’s new (subtext: important)” and became “what corporate suits think people will watch and make them buy our sponsors’ products.” To a degree, that has always been a part of the news business. For a brief shining period from the mid 1940s through the early 196os and perhaps a bit beyond, the “Ed Murrow” effect was a powerful influence in American news. Reporters were invigorated by getting some respect for their work and tried to be “journalists” rather than muckrakers.
People my age grew up at the end of that era. Walter Cronkite was The Man. He carried such an aura of honesty and authority, I thought he should be president not merely of the U.S., but of the world. Who would have the temerity to argue with Walter Cronkite? He sat next to God in the newsroom and some of us had a sneaking suspicion God personally told him what was important. If Walter said it was True, we believed. Thus when Walter Cronkite became the person to get Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to sit down and talk … the beginning of the Camp David Accords … it seemed natural and right. Highly appropriate. Who was more trustworthy than Uncle Walter? Who carried more authority? He walked in the glow of righteousness.
He always made my mother giggle. It was not Walter, the reporter or man who made her laugh. It was his name. “Cronkite” in Yiddish means ailment, so every time his name was announced, my mother who had a wild and zany sense of humor, was reduced to incoherent choking laughter. It was a nightly event. Eventually she got herself under control sufficiently to watch the news, but the sound of her barely contained merriment did nothing to improve the gravity I felt should surround the news. To this day, the first thing I think of when I hear Walter Cronkite’s name — something that happens with less and less frequency as the younger generations forget everything that happened before Facebook — is the sound of my mother’s laughter. That’s not entirely bad, come to think of it.
What brings this to mind while awaiting what, according to Harvey Leonard, will be the biggest snow storm in 30 or more years, is that Google is stealing our freedom, or at least a good chunk of it, and it’s not on the news at all. No one is interested.
The silence from the press is deafening. Yet this is important and it will affect a lot of people, almost everyone eventually. It’s not another celebrity divorce or trip to rehab. If left unchecked, this is the beginning of the end of the free Internet.
Virtual space is the last truly free thing we have. Everything else is regulated and costs money. Once upon a time, television was free. It wasn’t very good and our TV reception looked like a snowstorm, but the TV was all we needed to access anything on the air. After we bought the television, we had no more TV-related expenses.
Cable brought us nice clear pictures, giant monopolies, and ever-increasing monthly bills to watch television. Cable companies already charge us a hefty monthly fee to hook up to the Internet, so it isn’t really free any more than television is, but it is about to get much worse.
For the past 20 years, communications conglomerates have been looking for a way to capture the Internet and make it pay. More precisely, to make youand me pay for it. It’s the communications mother lode, the last un-mined nature resource for communications moguls. The amount of money to be made by whomever is able to get a lock on the Internet, to charge us for what we currently get free, will make some corporations so rich it makes my head spin thinking about it. All those zeroes!
There’s a gigantic amount at stake here. Not just money, but civil rights, personal freedom, constitutional issues, broad social implications. You name it, this story touches on it. Moreover, a lot of people’s livelihoods are on the line. Many of us make earn our living via the Internet, directly or indirectly. We’ve become so accustomed to shopping online, having friends online, communicating online — living online — we think nothing of it.
What will you do if they take it away? Suddenly you will have to pay your “internet bill” above and beyond whatever you already pay for high-speed connectivity.
Once they get their hooks into you, it’s going to be your cable company all over again. How much do you love your cable company? That much? Hmm. Well, you’re going to love your Internet gatekeepers even more.
Who is involved? Not just Google!
It’s not just Google, though they are the ones currently in play. AT&T and Verizon, Amazon, Microsoft and others are all eyeing the Internet as the next place to make some really big bucks now that the sale of computers is slowing. Hardware is not delivering the kind of profits it once did … time to find a new source. The Internet — cyberspace — could be the mother lode, the biggest financial jackpot in a century. Think of this as Clash of the Titans. The prize is the Internet … and we are in the way. Ouch.
Back to why no one is covering the story
This is a complicated issue. For it to make sense, you need to be familiar with the technology of the Internet, with search engines and their ever-increasing role in information dissemination. There’s a big segment of the population who won’t get it anyhow, no matter how well you explain it because they can’t understand it or don’t want to. Another bunch of people don’t care about anything that isn’t about guns, sports, or in some way related to beer.These folks will be affected, even though they don’t know it, but they don’t want to hear about it. They want to hear about the latest sports or Hollywood scandals and of course, the weather.
A story likes this requires time, research and patience. Patience to collect information, make it coherent and comprehensible, time to explain it. A newspaper would need to give it considerable space and have someone actually put more than a few seconds into writing it. Add it all together and it spells “just ignore it and maybe it will go away.”
That so much of what we value will probably go with it? Oh well.
People are lazy. I look around and see a lot of lazy, stupid people who have turned themselves to the “off” position. Folks who were once thinking entities have slid into “duh.” Maybe it’s sensory overload, too much stress and non-stop bombardment by crises so when something really important is happening, everyone is tapped out. Too pooped to pop.
Anyway, the story isn’t sexy. It isn’t going to sell beer in the coveted 18 to 45 demographic, so why bother?
Garry Armstrong, my charming husband, wanted to be in the movies. His original aim was stardom on the silver screen. Somewhere along the line, he and I and a whole bunch of people we all knew, found our way to the studios of WVHC, the radio station of Hofstra College, now Hofstra University. It was just 10 watts when Garry and I met in the studios. I was 17, Garry was 22. He was a little older than most of the undergrads because at 17, he’d enlisted in the Marines and by the time he got out, a few years had passed.
Gary, me, and President Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard.
He was the Program Director. I was dating the Station Manager, who was, coincidentally, Garry’s best friend, which is where our personal history gets pretty complicated. I was also the Chief Announcer. I knew that I wanted print, not electronic media, but the radio station was a great place for those of us who had never found a place where we fit in.
Hofstra University logo flag,
We were all oddballs, variously talented, and pretty much all of us went on to have careers in media and the arts. We turned out a couple of authors, quite a few audio engineers, a variety of talk show hosts, DJs, TV and radio producers, several news directors, a bunch of commercial writers (in which group I fall), a college professor (maybe two, I’m not sure) … and Garry, the only one of us who became a successful TV reporter. Garry’s career spanned 45 years, 31 of them at Channel 7 in Boston.
Surprisingly little footage of Garry’s on the air career has survived and until today, we had nothing at all from his years at ABC Network. Today, a friend of Garry’s found this footage from 1969, the last year Garry was at ABC before he made the jump to television and working in front of the camera. It’s a promotional piece for ABC News and it features a lot of faces and voices from the past … and one young up and coming fellow, Garry Armstrong.
Let us return to those days of yesteryear, when television cameras used film and there was a war in Vietnam. It was 1969, the year my son was born, the year of Woodstock, the end of an era, the beginning of everything else.
This is how it was, back then. Tape recorders that used tape. I used to know how to edit tape. I bet if you gave me an editing block, tape and a razor blade, I could still do it.
Look at the state-of-the-art equipment circa 1969. The equipment may be antiquated by today’s standards, but the standards by which the news was gathered and reported were incomparably superior to what passes for news reportage today.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
