I have just finished sampling a month’s worth of the Albuquerque Journal, the papers I missed while in China from mid-July to mid-August. And the very last issue before my return, August 15, grabbed me.
Leanne Potts has a story suggesting that anchors at Channels 4 and 7 violated journalistic rules – like impartiality – when they praised Governor Richardson at a conference of governors in Santa Fe.
Potts did a fine job, putting the issue clearly and delicately. I did smile, however, at the article’s serious tone. Like raising the question, with a straight face, of whether the anchors damaged their credibility. Credibility?
And I giggled at the lame defenses offered by the KOAT news director and KOB-TV station manager.
As for the references in both headline and story to "TV journalists" I would have guffawed if sadness had not come over me.
I do not blame the anchors; they are merely making a living in a system that dominates them. But that system, local TV news, has had only the slightest relationship to journalism for years now.
Can you imagine the Governor’s office inviting them and writing scripts for them if they were in the journalism biz?
Somebody is wearing ideological blinders.
I chanced upon an old John Leo column that ran in the Albuquerque Journal in May and purported to demonstrate that newspeople are more liberal than ever and that it colors their work. So how come I find otherwise?
Take yesterday's long, fascinating report on the two-party system by David Von Drehle of the Washington Post. I cannot fault its history - the author goes back to the Founders - because I wasn't there. But when he brings it up to date, I find myself rubbing my eyes in disbelief. Get this:
"The Republicans have morphed into the party of low taxes and limited government, pushing an agenda that is conversative both fiscally and morally..."
To write that the Republicans favor low taxes without noting they favor lower taxes for the wealthy, are moving the burden from investment income to earned income and from the top to the middle-class (as recent federal reports note) is ...well, mindblowing. Doing so without a reference to the Republican motivation for lowering taxes is equally mindblowing.
Unless, of course, you consider the possibility that von Drehle wears ideological blinders.
That's not all. Limited government? He's kidding, surely. The stengthening of Washington's police powers isa matter of public record. So is imposition of national goals and means on local education. Ditto the imposition of the religious right's morality on policy, foreign and domestic. And although this President is not alone in seizing the power to make war from the Congress - where the Constitution put it - his use of that power hardly constitutes a move twoard limited government.
But I must enjoyed von Drehle's description of the GOP as fiscally conservative.
Clinton was conservative, working for balanced budgets and a reduced natinal deficit. You can call Bush many things for eliminating the surplus and deepening the national debt, but conservative is not one of them.
And John Leo writes columns on the liberal media. I don't know where he finds it or them. Wait. Yes, I do. He's channeling Spiro Agnew.
This has nothing to do with news or politics, but I cannot resist.
Last night, I heard M.J. Wilde singing with Phil Lenk and buddies at the Albuquerque Hilton.
I last heard her several months ago when I recognized her talent but found that she treated every song the same way, belting them all as if she had some deep need to do so...
Well, it turns out that was just where she started.Last night, I heard an artist.
If you live in or near Albuquerque, go hear her do the standards (and a few numbers outside the canon) at the Hilton's Ranchers Club some Friday or Saturday around 8 PM.
You will thank me for the tip.
Here is yesterday's Albuquerque Tribune column, as promised:
The World of Teens
The hot, humid Chinese weather drags us down, but the fresh faces and hopes uplift us
By Arthur Alpert
(The following are notes from Alpert’s trip to China, where he taught English in July and August.)
Nanjing, first day
The steps to the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum are too many and sooo steep. At the halfway point, I am wet with perspiration. Discretion, I decide, is the better part of machismo, and I sit. A Chinese teenager asks in English if I am American. We chat. Daisy, the teen, says her father writes novels. She has graduated from high school at the head of her class and hopes to study at Harvard.
By this time, we are encircled by a small crowd of curious Chinese eaves- droppers. When the other American teachers descend, they snap photos of the scene.
Daisy writes her father’s name and three of his titles for me and I give her my address before we part.
Her mother, who understands no English, sits, beaming, throughout.
First Classes
What neat kids! Neat as in well-dressed and well-scrubbed. Well-mannered, too.
Children of China’s new middle-class, they have been enrolled by parents determined that they will have English to get rich by. At 13 to 15 years old, they have studied grammar for years and say, "Good morning" and "How are you?" with gusto.
Several, however, don’t understand much and speak less. The majority grasp my meaning but are too timid to reply. And a handful are stars – bright, bold and hell-bent on communicating in English. They’re like Zorro, whose thinking is so fast and whose ideas are so complex that they require more words than he has.
"Zorro?" All but a few of these kids have chosen English names. Most are traditional, such as Grace, Molly, Jennifer and Jessica. But I have two Zorros in my class and next door there’s a lovely girl who calls herself "Ghost"!
I ask the kids about their ambitions. They want to be teachers, musicians, doctors and – says one quiet girl – a "superstar."
Grime and punishment
We American teachers here love the kids but hate the weather. In this sprawling school about 20 minutes from Nanjing, we calculate that it’s between 105 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit – they use Celsius – and we guess the humidity is 90 percent.
I’m dragging.
A Shanghai TV station reports one day that it is "over 38 degrees." Huh? A fellow teacher has heard that all work must cease when it hits 40.
The Chinese tube
Chinese TV viewers, like Americans, now know that Head & Shoulders shampoo will turn drab, lonely lives into fairy tales. Some Chinese commercials differ, though, from ours. They use clinical illustrations of female anatomy to sell certain remedies. And they push breast enhancement products with amazing animation; bosoms swell instantly and men, of course, applaud.
A small victory
Jian Zhu, the University of New Mexico teacher of Chinese who created this cultural exchange, often has said its success depends on our being ourselves. I think of that when Violin, 14, shares her conclusion that Chinese teachers are "rigid" and Americans are "open."
Then she floors me. "They teach words," she confides. "You teach us the world."
I refuse to tear up.
Alpert is at home recuperating from his trip. Email him at arthuralpert@swcp.com. His column runs the fourth Thursday of the month in Insight & Opinion.
John Leo's syndicated column in today's Albuquerque Journal suggests that John Kerry was wrong in saying that he crossed into Cambodia in 1968. But it's really a media story - Leo spends a lot of time on how the "major" media and "conservative media" are dealing with the Cambodia story. His underlying assumption is that the "major" media is (are?) liberal.
I remember when that was mostly true, in the 60s, even the 70s. Neither the civil rights revolution nor youth culture posed any threat to the corporate owners of the networks and big newspapers, broadcasters ran broadcasting and they gave the reporters (most of them idealists) a long leash
But that was then. Today, the corporate interest gets a new definition. First, because the networks are mammoth, secondly because they are in other businesses, thirdly because they are not run by broadcasters. Result: three out of four are risk-averse. (The fourth is, of course, allied with the White House.)
Also, the nation is split, no moral issue like civil rights unites us and younger newspeople tend to be careerists.
For these and other reasons, the "major media" today are another kind of creature. It makes no sense to talk of them in political terms.
Until, that is, we consider how radio is dominated by right-wingers.
Maybe...no, let's leave it at this - broadcasting is another kind of creature.
As I get back into this web log, after five weeks in China, I want to think out loud about it for a bit.
I don’t suppose there are many readers left after that big hiatus, but
I will persist in the hope of opening a conversation with a new audience. (Also, because writing here is therapeutic – expressing my horror at contemporary society makes it less likely that I will pick up an AK-47 and spray innocent bystanders with deadly fire.)
I suspect that I will spend less time on politics from here on in and more on
communication. (I almost wrote "journalism," but that trade has fallen on hard times and there’s not a lot of it to address.)
Where I do write about politics, I hope to make the connections that broadcasting and most newspapers and magazines fail to note.
Of course, I will continue to post my monthly Albuquerque Tribune columns here once they are published in the newspaper. Happily, the Tribune has moved it to the Insight and Opinion section and freed me from the "New Wrinkles in Aging" rubric. I will write on diverse topics.
The next column, which I emailed from China a few weeks ago, appears tomorrow. (Absent some emergency, they will all run the fourth Thursday of the month.)
Which reminds me - may I urge you to read the Tribune regularly?
As a friend reminded me the other day, the Tribune is the Albuquerque Publishing Company’s Cinderella. It is true that, the business merger linking the papers guarantees the Tribune’s existence. But the merged advertising and distribution departments favor the Journal.
This is not only unfair, but deprives citizens of the some top-notch reading. Tribune syndicated columnists, for example, include Ivins, Safire, Krugman and Will. I selected two liberal and two conservatives to make the point that the Tribune stable is balanced; as you know, the Journal’s Op Ed choices tilt far to the right. It’s also true that Ivins and Krugman write well and are strong advocates. The Journal’s "liberal" writers are less proficient and most of them are sissies.
As we go along, please let me know what you think of what I think. Thank you.
I'm back. After a month in China and almost a week with jet-lag, it's time to resume this conversation.
I will write about China, of course; it was an adventure. But I'm at an awkward stage - in between the freshness of new experiences and a framework in which to fit them.
This morning's Albuquerque Journal suffices, though, to get me going. In the Arts section, on F3, Dan Mayfield reports that Josh Franco is the new director of the Downtown arts collective. Former director Jon McConville, he writes, "handed the reigns to Franco."
So Dan made a careless error. How come it wasn't caught? In the first instance, I suppose it eluded the spell-check. But where was the editor?
I wish newspapers would rein in the galloping illiteracy that mars them these days.