The fear and hate being spewed over us by Donald Trump, the man the majority of those Republicans polled want to see become the next president, can be heard in the echoes of history. For a country founded by people fleeing religious persecution and an oppressive British king, some of us want to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of our country, and ban all Muslims from coming in because we are afraid. The attacks in San Bernardino and Paris by radical Islamic terrorists have shaken us all. We are engaged in a different kind of war with an enemy that festers from within, and can strike any time in any place during the course of our daily lives. But reacting out of fear and prejudice make us complicit with the enemy we want to defeat. (more…)

Just about all of us are walking around with a camera on our smart phones. There are millions of pictures being snapped everyday, probably more than ever before in history. They can be posted instantly to be seen around the world in seconds. Photography has always been a hobby of mine. In some ways, I find it more interesting than video. That sounds strange from a journalist who spent his career in television news always searching for the best video to tell a story.

Photographs make time stand still. Whether your taking pictures of your family, or pet, or an accident scene, or the beauty of nature, or a news event that split second is preserved, and will never happen again. Some pictures you will remember forever. The bad ones can now be instantly deleted. The ability to take a picture at any moment can make us more engaged in the world around us. We are able to share our experience as we saw it. But can good photography be considered art?

(more…)

Reporting is about the search for the truth. What is the truth? How does it affect the viewers or readers? The toughest truths to uncover are the ones people don’t want you to know. So reporters sometimes have to get through the cover up before they can get to the truth. The newly released movie “Spotlight” is the story of a group of investigative reporters in the Boston Globe’s Spotlight unit that uncovered the sexual abuse of about a thousand children by almost ninety Catholic priests and the church’s systematic cover up. They were pushed by a new editor who thought the paper hadn’t dug deeply enough into the scandal that had broken in Boston in the early 1990s with the conviction of one priest who had molested children and was moved around from parish to parish. We all now know that the Catholic church’s sexual abuse scandal involved hundreds of priests and thousands of victims worldwide. “Spotlight” is the best movie about reporting since “All The President’s Men”.

(more…)

The rhetoric is hot when the times call for cooler heads in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris. Men who want to be president like Donald Trump saying we should consider closing mosques. Rand Paul asking people to sign petitions to keep Syrian refugees out of the country. Ted Cruz telling college students it’s “absolute lunacy” to accept Syrians refugees. Ben Carson asking Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to pass legislation to block funding for the president’s Syrian refugee plan to allow up to ten thousand of them to enter the country in the coming year. If Republicans try to take this out of the budget plan that must pass by December 11th, we could be threatened with another government shutdown. Even more than a dozen governors are saying they would close their states to the refugees. Immigration experts have told CBS News that states do not have the power to refuse immigrants with refugee status. So they are just blowing hot air. The president responds by saying that refusing Syrian refugees is “not who we are”.

(more…)

The flames of autumn are falling to earth. Our beautiful run of clear, warm weather is slowly coming to an end. The millions of leaves now cover our yards and lawns and need to be blown to the curb. The turning back of the clocks foreshadows the cold darkness of winter. The beauty of nature in the fall assures us their must be a higher power responsible for this great show. Weather is universal. Having worked in local television news for decades, we knew the one story that interested everyone was the weather. There was no bigger story than a snow storm or nor’easter coming up the coast to have us mobilize round the clock coverage.

Weather can be violent and deadly. The names Katrina and Sandy will live on as terrible reminders of what weather can do. Recent wildfires and drought in California, and floods in Texas and South Carolina have affected millions more of us. There is great debate about climate change. Is it real? Are humans making it worse? Are the global greenhouse gases that are belching into the air heating up our planet to a dangerous degree? The Kyoto Protocol said greenhouse gases it measured increased by 80% since 1970 and 30% since 1990. The United Nations Conference on Climate Change meets at the end of November in Paris in hopes of getting an international agreement on climate change to keep global warming below 2 degrees C.

(more…)

It should be the most important day of the year. It’s why we fought the Revolutionary War. We wanted the right to govern ourselves. We wanted to call the shots. We wanted to say who would represent us. We wanted the people we voted into office to hear us and listen to us. It’s the foundation of a democracy, the right to vote in free and fair elections. Millions of dollars are spent to get our attention about candidates and issues. Many of us don’t seem to be listening or care. What happened?

This is what is called an off year election. It isn’t a presidential election year, or a mid-term election when the whole House of Representatives and one third of the Senate are up for election. But there are many local elections for county commissioners, county councils, township mayors and councils, district attorneys, and judges. There are some bigger offices, like Mayor of Philadelphia where there hasn’t been a Republican mayor in decades. Democrat Jim Kenney will probably get about 75 per cent of the small number of voters who do bother to vote. Some of the people who get elected to these local offices have a bigger impact on our daily lives than the president or our congressman or woman. Among other things, these local officials determine how much your property taxes will go up, and how your money will be spent.

(more…)

They had a lot to decide that summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. The Constitutional Convention was called for the 13 states to fix the Articles of Confederation. They weren’t working. Too many conflicts among the 13 independent states. A weak federal government with no ability to tax. Any changes had to be by unanimous vote. James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York knew it was a lost cause. They believed a new form of government was needed. So the plan was to get everyone in a room and figure out how to create The United States of America.

(more…)

“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

-President John F. Kennedy October 22, 1962

Fifty three years ago tonight an 11 year old boy sat in front of a black and white television set, along with millions of others, and listened to a young president look possible nuclear confrontation right in the face. He was steady and unwavering. He told us what the evidence was that the Soviet Union had transported and installed offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba aimed at the United States. He said we would not stand for it. He said they would have to be removed, and said the U-S was setting up a quarantine around Cuba to stop any future shipment of missiles.

(more…)

If we say it faster, will it sound more urgent and important? ABC News thinks so. If you watch ABC World News, you’ll have to listen faster. I’m not criticizing their content. Although they are not shy about using the broadcast clichés that should make us all cringe. They are going after the young viewer, who research shows, are not watching network evening newscasts. To their credit, they have given NBC Nightly News a run for first place since the Brian Williams episode. They have chosen a path they think works.

Full disclosure, I worked for CBS owned and operated stations in Philadelphia for 25 years, after starting at ABC owned stations in Detroit and New York. I do think the CBS Evening News and all the CBS News programs are better than everyone else. The bigger issue is how television news, whether network or local, engages viewers. The biggest historical impact on television news presentation was Eyewitness News created by Al Primo at KYW-TV in Philadelphia in the mid 1960s and then used with great success at WABC-TV in New York. It became the standard for local news.

(more…)

It is the most famous speech in American history. Given by the most important president in our history, honoring the soldiers who died in the most decisive battle in the country’s history. Gettysburg is a special, even sacred place. I have great interest in history, particularly events that changed its course.

My wife and I took a trip to Gettysburg a couple of weeks ago. We had been there years ago when our sons were young.  We had both read “Killer Angles” by Michael Sharaa and even re-watched the television movie “Gettysburg” a couple of days before our trip to reaquaint ourselves with the main players and events of the three day battle. This, in addition to having read many books on Lincoln and the Civil War.

(more…)