Critic Casts Pearls Before Readers; They Return Fire
Reluctantly, here is the mail.
The opinions of yours truly are so infinitely wise and brilliantly expressed that you expect these pearls of intellect to go unchallenged.
But no!
There are always some readers who foolishly think they know better. Take the first of today’s excerpted letters, for example. It defiantly rebuts a column of mine (one I personally found to be dazzling) that lamented the decision to exclude TV from the civil trial of O.J. Simpson. And the second letter attacks my gleaming treatise on the new Fox News Channel.
I’m stunned by this reader rebellion. When will you, the lowly public, finally learn that we in the media must always have the last word? It’s in the fine print of the Ten Commandments.
Today, I make an exception. But hereafter, I will tolerate no more of this resistance.
Haven’t we had enough of the “Perils of O.J.” for at least a generation or, perhaps, two?
The criminal trial ended up at least as boring (except to the cast of that “show”) as the just-concluded presidential campaign. Were I not actually concerned about setting a possible precedent for Star Chamber-like secret trials, I would not object were hizzoner to bar the press from Simpson II. To paraphrase a gem attributed to Mae West, “Too much of a bad thing can be disgusting.”
HORACE GAIMS
Los Angeles
*
You refer to Rupert Murdoch as “right wing,” but you attach no label to Ted Turner. I’ve noticed over the years that news writers of the Democratic Party persuasion use “conservative” and “right wing” as interchangeable, but Ted Kennedy, a “left-winger” to many, was always “liberal.”
It amazes me how many conservatives get called right-wingers, and seldom, if ever, do radicals in the Democratic Party gain the label “left-winger.” And anarchists have become “activists.”
As is the duty of so-called liberals, you don’t see bias from the left in our communication system, [despite] a report that a large majority of reporters and editors voted for Clinton in 1992. The American voter is succumbing to insidious propaganda.
CHARLES ISAACS
Los Angeles
*
Regarding your glowing report of TV’s coverage of the “terrible destructive beauty” of the fires in Southern California: I agree the stations and reporters did a magnificent job of bringing the devastation to their viewers.
However, I am hearing impaired. I can hear fairly well with my hearing aid, but I cannot always understand spoken words that come from electronic devices, especially TV voice-overs. I do have closed caption TV. But my grievance is this:
All of you “hearing” people cannot possibly imagine the frustration it causes us to watch programs, mainly ones with news reporting, that show the anchor sitting at a desk announcing the “teaser” for a news item to follow. Then the camera goes to the reporter in the field for details. And then all we see is an individual standing with a mike, speaking to the camera and describing what happened or is now happening and where.
But with no closed captioning. Therefore we, of a very large minority, have no idea what it is all about.
JUANITA D. MUELLER
Hemet
*
“As long as it’s lawful, what’s wrong with it?” Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) said at a tobacco growers’ convention in North Carolina. It is no great stretch from Helms’ thinking to the minds of the media bosses who crucified Richard Jewell, and none at all to the FBI mentality.
J. Edgar Hoover is not dead. Neither is William Randolph Hearst.
FRED SCIFERS
Downey
*
In 50 years of TV watching, I can’t recall enjoying anything as much as I did “Oliver’s Travels” on PBS. I hope your “thumbs sideways” review didn’t cost it too many viewers. When I think of how you praised “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”!
VAL KURTIS
Long Beach
*
I taped as many of the “SCTV” shows as I could (about 40 hours or so) and continue to return to them on occasion with undiminished delight. You were right on the mark; none of the participants have equaled the success they achieved on that show.
The writing, makeup and performances were so far ahead of anything “Saturday Night Live” has ever done that it really irritates me that so few people are acquainted with the series. While “Saturday Night Live” skits trail off without any conclusion time and time again, “SCTV’s” writers and performers had an innate sense of how to construct a skit and end it with a laugh. Their satire was brilliant, and I doubt if we’ll ever see a repertory company of its equal on TV. I’m going to stick in a tape and have a laugh this evening.
RICHARD DOWDY
Carlsbad