Other Matters: Onward And Upward With TV News

I'm older than you, Bill, and remember watching Murrow's P-t-P live.

I suppose in the naivete of the time we didn't have 'celebrities' as we have these days. Murrow did indeed do personality interviews, but as often as not they were with John Steinbeck or Harry S Truman or Nat King Cole.

Even with the lighter chats (such as a Liberace or Marilyn Monroe), the subjects seemed to come up to his level, rather than the panting-after-Paris quality of current celebrity chasers.

Perhaps so, Ted, but even Murrow was not immune to the pressures of our entertainment-and-celebrity-obsessed culture. Remember "Person to Person" (which, in fairness, he reportedly did in order to keep "See It Now" going)?

Maybe it's dealing with cliche to bring what is Corporate Culture with it's subsequent "values" into this picture, but a cliche is in essence a point of reference overused, and the term Corporate Culture is not that. To understand Corporate Culture, you have to take the thing apart just like you would have to disassemble the paradigms for any other culture to inspect them. Corporate Culture is not immune from inspection even if it is immune from retrospection. Journalism is only one victim to: ritual, conformity, language, strict divisions, heirarchy, class, vision, and purpose. This dialogue has been going on around the media for a while now. What is amazing to me is how the thing is disassembled as there is so little awareness or recognition as to what Corporate Culture is or how it clings to the status quo as a survival mechanism. That "change" is not easily facilitated within the context of Corporate Culture is a given. It is also a weakness. The inability of the corporation to adapt spells its doom and time takes care of the rest. Until we actually begin to see that we have sold virtually everything in the culture at large to the Corporate Culture that holds what wealth it accumulates quite tightly, the temple priests will remain gainfully employed.

(You will find cinematic representations of the above idea and others even more abstract at Mr. Barrus's web site,

http://www.myderelicthotel.blogspot.com

Other Matters, indeed. -- DR)

I see both the stations involved are CBS affiliates. Murrow's rolling over in his grave...