Archives for March 12, 2019

From 2009:

I didn’t have to drive anywhere to hear Paul Harvey News and Comment. I heard it every weekday morning on the kitchen radio as I wolfed down breakfast and prepared to go to school. It was my five-minute morning paper—the Daily Smalltown Standard came out in the afternoon—though even then I sensed that Harvey’s program was a lot more like Reader’s Digest than The Wall Street Journal. In fact Harvey was more quaint than I knew, for he was the last survivor of old-time radio, a voice from and of the past. The long, stagy pauses, the cornpone humor, the I-use-it-and-you’ll-like-it commercials: all were the stuff radio was made of in the days when people like Arthur Godfrey and Bill Stern ruled the airwaves….

Read the whole thing here.

“The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia