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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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| More Inmates Than The Asylum Can Manage | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Ed Liddy — Citizen, Responsible Adult | |
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Tom Brokaw At Funeral For Former President Gerald Ford
Brokaw and his crew will capture stories along Highway 50, which has been called “the backbone of America” because it runs along the geographical middle of the country from Maryland to California and spans numerous regions with different politics. The TV journalist described the project as a way to take the U.S. pulse amid the slumping economy and with Obama taking bold steps to deal with it. “This is an unusual time, it’s all happening at warp speed, it’s complicated and I think what people want at the moment is some straight talk,” Brokaw said.
NBC’s Tom Brokaw has announced a cross-country auto trip from which he might garner insight about the plight of the nation. Along the way he plans to speak with ordinary Americans in ways reminiscent of Charles Kuralt’s On The Road series for CBS News in the 1960s. Given Mr. Brokaw’s popularity, and the credibility he earned from his long tenure at NBC News and his Greatest Generation books, the proposed trip has the feel of Nero playing his Lyre while Rome was afire for like Nero, television news sometimes ignores reality in favor of more pleasurable ( profitable ) pursuits.
According to published reports Mr. Brokaw will travel along U.S. Highway 50 stopping from time to time to find out what American’s think about their new president, their political views and the nation’s economic problems. All this has the sound of Lyre playing, for asking American’s their opinion has become highly popular in recent years. It’s also immensely less costly for news media who routinely hide their failure to cover and report on what matters most behind polling data and the words and opinions of uninformed persons.
Clearly such a trip has a certain charm, but considering Mr. Brokaw’s immense experience and capabilities, such a trip reveals how little NBC-Universal is willing to tell about the role it and other television news organizations played in the immensely costly dumbing of America that followed broadcast deregulation only a generation ago. Given the anger ordinary Americans feel toward bankers, auto makers and Wall Street speculators, its understandable that the nation’s commercial television networks would far rather ask the uninformed how they feel than to explain what happened — including the role network television news played in concealing reality while making us all feel good.
Conflicts Of Interest
While all the commercial networks, both broadcast and cable, are culpable for what they have done to legitimate broadcast journalism the General Electric Company and it’s NBC-Universal unit bear special responsibility for both organizations have largely squandered their hard-won reputations by scandalously placing their own best interests ahead of all others. What the American’s Mr. Brokaw is likely to find along Route 50 don’t know is that one of the massive financial institutions who acted wrongfully is GE’s Capital Finances Division. In recent years GE’s financial activities contributed growth and stability to GE earnings — offsetting profitability problems in the other four GE divisions including NBC-Universal.
GE’s Finance division provides a broad range of financial products and services worldwide. Among GE’s financial products are commercial loans, operating leases, fleet management, financial programs, home loans, credit cards, personal loans and other financial services. The extent to which GE engages in banking and finance activities, including its recent acquisition of Interbanca S.p.A., an Italian corporate bank, has gone largely unreported.
Americans have a great many opinions — some of which are ill founded, manufactured by organizations or persons with obfuscatory motives, or the result of widespread failures by and within journalistic institutions. Given that most Americans prefer to get their news from television, and the near total collapse of probative news on television, a road trip to collect opinions from people you have failed to fully inform has the feel of avoiding responsibility if not outright exploitation. To the degree either may be true, we wondered how might NBC, General Electric, and nation be better served by Mr. Brokaw’s enduring energies and hard won reputation. Why not ask him to do what no one else might be competent to do — inform his fellow Americans, television viewers, and General Electric shareholders and employees, what happened — what they need to know to form opinions in preference to asking for such opinions absent knowledge.
GE might want to ask Mr. Brokaw to tackle the job of Explainer in Chief — free to inquire into and report on all aspects of the problems afflicting America today. Free to reveal what bankers, financiers, corporations, government and journalistic institutions did, or didn’t do that brought our nation to where it finds itself today. Including the role network television, major corporations, big banks, investment firms, insurance companies, the congress, the administration, journalists and everyone else played — even General Electric if warranted.
Given Tom Brokaw’s immense credibility among his countrymen, wouldn’t it be a better to make him America’s Explainer In Chief? Then, instead of asking the uninformed and ill informed their opinions he would be free to explain to them them what they need to know. He might begin with a series of long format reports about how the horrible mess those folks along Route 50 find themselves in came about. Instead of airing people’s opinions about bonuses, stock market fluctuations and who’s flying around in private jets, with Tom Brokaw stirring up the pot, television news could focus on covering and reporting on things that really matter. Maybe even some stories about how big media, big banks, big insurance companies and big investment banking firms wrongfully served only their own interests at the expense of the nations’.
For some this might raise questions about Tom Brokaw’s willingness, or abilities to address such weighty issues with the same level of clarity, independence and insight as Jon Stewart. They’d be wrong. For covering the biggest story in his lifetime is not something Tom Brokaw would treat lightly. Were he asked to address the issues with the same fidelity-to-truth that made his Greatest Generation books so successful, and some of Jon Stewart’s fidelity-to-reality directness, Brokaw might well save his generation and mine by telling the world what we did to make such a gigantic mess. Brokaw might even include stories on the state of television news, or journalism — or the role of media in American life.
What would he say you wonder? He’d tell the truth — the whole truth and nothing but the truth — something that badly needs telling.
