Site icon journal-isms.com

Journalisms Mon Feb 4

richard

Super Bowl Drew Huge Audience, but Not a Record

“It drew a huge audience, though last night’s Super Bowl did not break the record for most-watched program in television history,” Toni Fitzgerald wrote Monday for Media Life Magazine.

“It was third-best.

“CBS’s broadcast of the game between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers averaged 108.41 million total viewers, according to Nielsen, the third-largest audience in TV history.

“It finished behind only last year’s broadcast of the Super Bowl, which drew 111.3 million total viewers on NBC, and 2011’s broadcast, which drew 111 million viewers on Fox.

“. . . But it was still an impressive showing considering neither the victorious Ravens nor the 49ers have a huge national following, and neither Super Bowl participant’s city is a top-10 television market.”

As Candidate, Geraldo Would Have to Quit Fox

“Geraldo Rivera’s stated interest in running for a Senate seat in New Jersey has been derided as a joke and a publicity stunt. But his employers are taking it seriously,” Brian Stelter wrote Monday for the New York Times.

“He’d have to leave his weekend Fox News Channel show, ‘Geraldo at Large,’ as soon as he formally decided to run, a spokeswoman for the channel said.

“. . . Mr. Rivera initially brought up his interest in running for the Senate seat on his talk radio show last Thursday. The one-year-old show is distributed by Cumulus. Asked whether Mr. Rivera would have to quit or suspend the show if he decided to run, a spokesman for the distributor said, ‘Talk radio hosts talk about lots of things, and if at some point this is more than talk we’ll address the issue appropriately then.’ “

Misreading Guns and the Civil Rights Movement

“Rush Limbaugh thinks John Lewis should have been armed,” Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote Saturday in his Miami Herald column.

“ ‘If a lot of African-Americans back in the ’60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma?’ he said recently on his radio show, referencing the 1965 voting rights campaign in which Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, had his skull fractured by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. ‘If John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?’

“Right. Because a shootout between protesters and state troopers would have done so much more to secure the right to vote.

“Incredibly, that’s not the stupidest thing anyone has said recently about the Civil Rights Movement.

“No, that distinction goes to one Larry Ward, who claimed in an appearance on CNN that Martin Luther King would have supported Ward’s call for a Gun Appreciation Day ‘if he were alive today.’ In other words, the premiere American pacifist of the 20th century would be singing the praises of guns, except that he was shot in the face with one 45 years ago.

“Thus do social conservatives continue to rewrite the inconvenient truths of African-American history, repurposing that tale of incandescent triumph and inconsolable woe to make it useful within the crabbed corners of their failed and discredited dogma. . . .”

Ballentine’s Lawyers Say He May Win Hollow Victory

“Syndicated radio talk show host Warren Ballentine did not knowingly participate in a scheme to defraud mortgage lenders of $9.7 million and is innocent of all charges filed against him in connection with the scam, his attorneys said,” George E. Curry reported in his column for the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service.

“In separate telephone interviews with the NNPA News Service, Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Lewis Myers, Jr., a well-known attorney in Chicago, said they expect Ballentine to be fully vindicated.

“ ‘I have no doubt at all,’ Ogletree said. ‘This is not a close case — we will win. But it doesn’t matter now because all that is in the press is, “Celebrity Lawyer involved in $10 Million Scam.” ‘

“The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, based in Chicago, announced a week ago that Ballentine had been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly engaging in two mortgage fraud schemes, one from Dec. 2004 to Feb. 2005 and another one from Feb. 2005 to May 2006. . . .

 

Spanish-Language Paper Sees Pols’ “Canny Politicking”

“For those who were waiting for news on the comprehensive immigration reform front, Monday’s proposal by the Senate’s so-called ‘Gang of 8’ (which includes both Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Robert Menendez) seemed a bipartisan first step,” Al Día, a Spanish-language newspaper in Philadelphia, editorialized last week.

“Tuesday’s proposal by President Obama shored up that first step without adding much more to it.

“It is a measure of how disastrous the discourse on immigration reform has become since the days of the Ted Kennedy-John McCain immigration reform bill of 2005 that both of the proposals seem such a step forward to so many of us.

“Both proposals have their problematic aspects.

“Obama extolled his deportation rate without so much as acknowledging that the [astronomical] number includes nearly as many ordinary heads of household as criminals.

“The senators proposed that a path to citizenship cannot be enacted until the border is deemed secure by an advisory committee comprised of selected governors, legislators, etc. Depending on who is selected (Arizona Governor Jan Brewer? House Immigration subcommittee members Lamar Smith and Steven King?) this advisory committee might block the institution of a path to citizenship for years.

“But the proposals we heard are canny politicking. . . .

Short Takes

Exit mobile version