Back in 1975, newsman Charles Kuralt chastised TV stations for “hiring hair, not brains.”
A typical anchorman, he said, has great hair and an empty mind. He “wouldn’t know a news story if it jumped up and mussed his coiffure.”
And now – a mere 48 years later – we have the exact opposite. Geoff Bennett – half of the new “PBS NewsHour” anchor team with Amna
Nawaz (they’re shown here) – has no hair and a sharp, journalistic brain. Read more…
Now it’s convention time, a two-week stretch when TV is consumed by politics.
Well … semi-consumed. On Aug. 17-20, the big networks still have plenty of time for “Holey Moley,” “Tough as Nails,” “Ellen’s Game of Games” and five hours of Gordon Ramsay reruns.
Clearly, this is far from the era when the Cronkite/Brokaw teams covered every convention detail.
“I lean in favor of covering more,” Judy Woodruff (shown here), in her 12th round of convention coverage, told the Television Critics Association recently. Read more…
The world may be in a slow-down, shut-down mode, but you can’t prove it by PBS.
The network – now in a three-day stretch of press conferences with the Television Critics Association – somehow seems busier than ever.
There is Ken Burns (shown here), juggling films. “I am, like an idiot, working on eight projects,” he said.
And Henry Louis Gates, doing a four-hour, February film about Black churches … and glad that the church portions were filmed early. “This is not exactly the safest place to be at the time of a pandemic.” Read more…
