Was there a "Fox News" back in the day?

[31 Model A]

The only news I ever listened to and believed came from Paul Harvey, he always told "the rest of the story". Sad day when he passed.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Good... day.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Paul got most of his schtick from Bill Stern, a radio sportscaster known for his hyperdramatic style. Bill never knew a story he couldn't embroider, and "The Rest Of The Story" fell squarely into that mold.

That said, nobody could sell "Roach Prufe, spelled its own way" like Mr. Harvey.

 

[Rick Blaine]

Paul got most of his schtick from Bill Stern, a radio sportscaster known for his hyperdramatic style.

Ever seen "Radio Days"?
That was the 1st place I heard of Stern.
It is such a lovely, nostalgic, wistful and elegiac film.
I can't imagine that anyone here would dislike it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's one of my favorite Woody Allen pictures. It's a nostalgic distortion, but it's a sincere nostalgic distortion.

Bill Stern was truly a piece of work. When calling a football game he'd often get confused and identify the wrong man as the ball carrier -- and when his spotter brought it to his attention he'd simply have the ball lateraled to the correct player.

On one occasion, a fellow NBC sportscaster, Clem McCarthy, made the mistake of calling the wrong winner in a horse race, and Stern made the mistake of tweaking him about it. "Well, Bill, " replied McCarthy, "you can't lateral a horse."

 

[sheeplady]

There is so much wrong with journalism today I'm not even sure where to start.

Needless to say, everybody on TV really upsets me it seems. I can mildly tolerate about 10 minutes of national news. I can also handle about five minutes of debates before I start screaming at the TV because the moderator's questions are almost always stupidly missing the real issues, allowing the debaters to personally attack each other, not staying on topic, etc.

What I cannot stand are interviewers. There doesn't seem to be a decent interviewer left on this planet. They don't know how to ask a decent question, never push back, never counter, never drill down and seem to let the interviewee get away with murder. And if they do any of this, such as the push back, countering, and drilling; they are personally antagonistic rather than factually antagonistic to the point I get angry and turn off the TV.

Nothing is worse than an interviewer who panders to their interviewee or obviously has a personal bone to pick.

At this point, the only news I can get through is the local ones. One station is supposedly more "conservative" and the other more "liberal" (by which I mean the first follows the R race and the second the D race headquarters on election night). Honestly, I don't see any difference in how these stations talk about the news based upon the perspective; they just have different formats.

Turns out I end up hardly watching any television.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I gave up on TV news in the '90s. It was always crap, but the more "choices" there got to be, with the rise of cable, the more thinly spread the crap became. Yay for the competitive marketplace.

It's possible to be a probing interviewer without being combative. Mike Wallace had a reputation as an SOB, but go back and watch some of his 1950s-era interviews at this link -- and pay close attention to how he digs down beyond the clever quotes and canned responses to really get at what's going on with his subjects. He doesn't insult or attack the subject personally, even when the subject is someone truly loathsome -- watch his interview of a uniformed Klansman -- but he in no way lets the subject take control of the interview. Those subjects may very well have found him combative -- but one person's combative is another person's investigative.

Mike Wallace was not a trained, degree-holding "journalist." He was a radio announcer and actor who discovered he had a knack for interviewing and rode it into a successful career. And for my money he did a far better job of it than most of the so-called professionals do today.

 

[Stanley Doble]

They used to call it "reporting the war from Mahogany Ridge" (the bar in the hotel they were staying at).

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Half of today's journos are doing PR work churning out press releases and the other half are employed regurgitating the press releases and calling it a "news story."

 

[31 Model A]

News reporting 101 today has to include Drama Classes to include standing in water and hurricane winds and facial expressions. The only ones I have respect for are those who get in and out of war zones. Richard Engle I have a lot of respect for.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The most outstanding example of broadcast journalism under fire for my money was also one of the earliest. In 1936, CBS commentator H. V. Kaltenborn traveled to Europe to report first-hand on the Spanish Civil War. He found a spot on a farm in a small town near the point where the two sides were shelling each other, and ran wires from his pack transmitter to a telephone in the farmhouse. He then hid in a haystack and broadcast a live shell-by-shell account of the battle, relayed back to the US by shortwave. This was the first time Americans ever heard the sounds of an actual war in their living rooms.

H. V. Kaltenborn was fifty-eight years old when he did this. A lot of reporters half his age didn't have an eighth of his guts.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Suppose today's broadcast journalists were offered their choice of 2 magic powers

1) You will always know the truth of any story

2) Your hair will always look perfect

Can you think of any who wouldn't take the hair?

 

[HadleyH]

There has always been a "Fox News" through history.

You need a true channel for the truth ... yesterday, today and tomorrow.

 

[John Galt]

Lizzie, I enjoy reading your posts. In the context of this thread, however, it isn't clear to me how your praise for the "competitive marketplace" conforms with what I also interpreted as approval of the fairness doctrine. These actually seem to be disparate themes to me. Am I missing something?

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Anyone who believes *any* cable TV outlet to be "fair and balanced" likely also believes in garden fairies, Santa Claus, and the World Champion Chicago Cubs.

But this is my point. All news is Fox News in its own special way. Nothing should be discarded or trusted simply because of the source...even if it's from the Daily Mail. Were people sold on the idea that "their" news was The Truth and dismissive and boorish in their debates?

 

[Fastuni]

There has always been a "Fox News" through history.

You need a true channel for the truth ... yesterday, today and tomorrow.

lol

 

[31 Model A]

I take notice what news channel and what reporters/news anchors interview who and report what. I don't listen to or watch any news channels or listen to any reporters/new anchors who urinate down my back and tell me it's raining. I'd say what those channels are and who those news anchors are but I'd be getting into political opinions. Hence, local news I can verify myself, national news I'll leave to the bull****ters..................I'm too old to care anymore. Life gets shorter as you get older.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Lizzie, I enjoy reading your posts. In the context of this thread, however, it isn't clear to me how your praise for the "competitive marketplace" conforms with what I also interpreted as approval of the fairness doctrine. These actually seem to be disparate themes to me. Am I missing something?

I'm being sarcastic. Bitterly, bitterly sarcastic.

 

[LizzieMaine]

But this is my point. All news is Fox News in its own special way. Nothing should be discarded or trusted simply because of the source...even if it's from the Daily Mail. Were people sold on the idea that "their" news was The Truth and dismissive and boorish in their debates?

People were far less trusting of something published in the Journal-American than they were of something published in the Herald Tribune. Both of those papers slanted to the right, but one was well-known to be much sleazier and more scurrilous than the other. A New Dealer would no more be seen with a copy of any Hearst sheet than an America Firster would be caught dead reading PM.

The most popular "debate" program of the Era was America's Town Meeting Of The Air, in which a panel of experts would discuss all angles of some provocative question of the moment and then the floor would be opened to questions from the studio audience. Often these question periods would turn into free-for-alls, with the audience hooting and jeering and the moderator ordering the microphone taken away from some particular audience member who got a bit too personal in questioning a speaker. Many people who listened to this program looked forward to such incidents in the same way that hockey fans relish a good fight on the ice.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I take notice what news channel and what reporters/news anchors interview who and report what. I don't listen to or watch any news channels or listen to any reporters/new anchors who urinate down my back and tell me it's raining. I'd say what those channels are and who those news anchors are but I'd be getting into political opinions. Hence, local news I can verify myself, national news I'll leave to the bull****ters..................I'm too old to care anymore. Life gets shorter as you get older.

I think it's a natural thing to prefer news sources that agree with your own points of view. I read A Certain Broadsheet instead of A Certain Tabloid because reading the Tabloid makes me angry -- and I'm angry enough as it is. Why should I waste my hard-earned money buying a paper that isn't fit to wind on a roller in my bathroom?

When I read the Broadsheet I read just enough of a certain Token Opposition columnist to feel the bile start perking and then I tell him to stuff it and I move over the page to read the columnist I like. And I don't watch *any* cable TV news station because I can't think of any good reason why I should. I don't listen to any talk-radio program because I value my radio too much to be incited into attacking it with a sledgehammer.

I think that's always been the case. People prefer to read things that cause them the least irritation, and I often find that when someone chides me for "closing my mind to all sides of the issue" what they're really saying is "how dare you not read the paper/watch the channel that *I* like."