Readers’ Missives Start the New Year Right

We get letters. . . .

On Channel 4 news, we were treated to the sight of a mother of a victim of the Pan Am crash collapsing and the father trying to comfort her. By what stretch of the imagination is this news?

Intruding on their grief and pain with lights and cameras is monstrous. We expect a grinning sportscaster to leap out and ask her how she felt on learning her child has died a horrible flaming death. Are there no standards?

JACQUES BELLESILES

Los Angeles

In your “TV Clinkers” story you again bad-rap KNBC news for going to Seoul. So what if they were so far away from L.A.? We’ve got satellites and stuff like that these days, instant communication. Burbank or Bangkok, who cares? Anyway, it was only for a couple of weeks.

STEVE FOSTER

Los Angeles

KCBS-TV firing Terry Murphy and John Schubeck compels me to seek a forum to rebut that contemptible bunch of sleaze called management that is withering and dying on the ratings vine because they are lacking basic creativity on their level.

Why are not some of you standing up and railing against this ongoing tyrannical mentality that you permit to overrun your lives? Management can and should fire for cause. But Murphy is on maternity leave and Schubeck is an old hand! Surely you just don’t kick them in the rear and out the door.

SUMNER C. GRANBY

Sherman Oaks

Your column on the turnaround in toy commercials for children on TV moved me to the word processor. It’s scary that in such a short time sexism (and racism) could be sneaking up through the cracks of the progress we thought we had made during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Vigilance, as we all know, is the only answer to our country’s alarming shift toward fascism in the latter 20th Century.

CONSTANCE CALLINICOS

Pasadena

Your article in our local paper was revolting. To even put Geraldo Rivera in the same sentence with Morton Downey Jr., Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey is an insult to him. Geraldo is the best investigative reporter/talk show host around today. He deals with issues that must be talked about and he exposes people that need to be exposed.

Geraldo gives us the truth when you can’t get it elsewhere. I learn nothing from the news, but I’ve learned more from Geraldo and his shows and specials than I’ve learned from anyone.

DEBBIE BRITTAIN

East Bangor, Pa.

I am still disturbed by a scene on CBS’ “Almost Grown,” and I wonder if anybody else feels as strongly as I do about it. Or is the springtime of my senility making me extra cranky?

The gist of the scene was this: A young man was driving some friends to the airport to catch a flight for Aspen. They were pulled over by a policeman and as they waited for him to approach the car, the driver became frightened. He had a few bags of cocaine on the floor. A girl in the back seat thought quickly and said, “Here, give them to me and I’ll stuff it into my skirt and you can tell him I’m pregnant and you’re taking me to the hospital.” The coke was quickly passed and stuffed into her skirt by the time the cop came to the window and informed the driver that his tail-light was out.

CBS runs public service messages against narcotics regularly, but a scene like this seems in direct conflict. It says to me that friendship is giving protection to a “friend” who is committing a felony. I don’t think it is. It made them all accessories to a crime. Where was CBS program practices? Or is this the new morality of the future?

MARTIN A. RAGAWAY

Los Angeles