What Day Is It?

      It's Star Trek day, among other things, the day the first episode of the series aired on NBC, the first step in a long cultural arc that took science fiction from being that crazy stuff your parents razzed you for watching and your English teacher despaired of you reading* to a cherished institution featuring Star Wars day every May and Star Trek day as summer comes to an end.

     Fun stuff, but it's a reminder that every day is History Day.†  I was reminded of that more forcefully while listening to a radio news piece from Kyiv this morning, covering the Russian drone strikes in that city.  The reporter had been awakened in the night by the sound of incoming Sahed drones and recorded parts of her story with the engines of the weapons throbbing in the background.  It's an eerie sound, and reminds me of Edward R. Murrow of CBS, broadcasting live from a London rooftop during the Blitz.‡  Or, much later in that war, the guttural buzz and sudden halt of an incoming V-1.

     We're in the run-up to World War III, or at least to a wider European War.  This time, America First holds the White House and Congress; Zelenskyy is no Churchill, nor is Putin Hitler: history does not repeat.  But it does rhyme, and the present verses carry a familiar rhythm.

     I hope I'm wrong, but there's a chill in my bones that freezes optimism.
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*Not quite a decade later, my high school offered a class on "Science Fiction."  But the English department was pretty desperate, in that huge Sports, Shop and (slightly) Math-heavy high school.  My Dad, on the other hand, never stopped regarding it as silly stuff, unworthy of adult interest.  He preferred Westerns.
 
† Is there a history Day?  Well, yes and no.  It's not just one day.
 
‡ At first, BBC didn't want him up there, and refused use of the roof of their main studio location, Broadcast House, fearing Germans might use the sound to fine-tune their bombing.  Eventually, someone realized the value of broadcasting live coverage of the attacks, and British resolve in the face of them, to the then-neutral United States.

About Mass Murderers

     Every time it happens, the same general coverage plays out: normal shock and horror at the horrific crime, and once the initial outrage begins to fade, everybody but everybody, from NPR to your uncle who shares loud opinions at every family gathering, from Fox News to gun-control organizations, starts trying to suss out the mind of the killer, often with an eye towards catching the next one before they go off the rails and usually grinding their own axes in the process.

     And they keep on saying the name of the killer, over and over.  Making them famous.

     You want to know the prime motivation of all of these murderers?  They want to be famous.  Many of them treat the stats on similar criminals as some kind of twisted leaderboard.  Sure, the nominally-religious ones say it's for their faith, the racist ones give racist justifications, the political ones claim its for some greater good or to silence their enemies, the seething nutjobs talk about striking back at whatever institution, authority or peer group they think wronged them, yadda-yadda yackety-yak, but it's blather.  They're looking to write their names across history like misbehaving boys peeing their names into fresh snow in their neighbor's front yard.

     Every single person doing a deep dive into the supposed mind of these criminals, "Whatever made Firstname Lastname commit their horrific crime?  We talk to the former yoga instructor of their neighbor across the alley and analyze their MySpace page from twenty years ago," is just feeding the next would-be mass killer: Look how much attention Firstname Lastname got!  Look at how many views their manifesto got!  Look how angry they made people!  They want to be just like Firstname Lastname, only more so -- and they don't mean the killer's religion, politics, or particular flavor of non-murderous nuttiness.  Nope.  It's the killing -- and the fame.  It's the attention.

     We have to stop stoking the flames of criminal celebrity.

     These crimes, striking though they are, are rare.  Over a hundred people die in traffic accidents in the U. S. every day and we scarcely blink.  One person kills two and injures nearly ten times as many, and it makes headlines and gets live special reports.  The overwhelming majority of people in this country didn't kill anyone; Sunday School teachers and the worst racists you can think of, hardcore Antifa people and the nice little old Republican ladies who work as pollwatchers every election didn't kill anyone or even plan to; nearly every Muslim, Evangelical Christian, agnostic and Sikh (etc.), along with just about all Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Whigs (etc.) didn't commit mass murder.  Even most insane people are, in fact, not murderers.  How lovely if we could point at some demographic group and say, "Yes, these people are the ones who commit mass murder," and stop them.  But that's not how it works.

     The most recent mass killer as I write this was apparently a member of a stigmatized group (and also a rabid fan of other mass murderers, from the available evidence).  That is being leveraged in ways that are, in fact, lies; lies that contribute nothing to finding and stopping mass killers and instead deflect attention elsewhere.

     The specific bent that these mass killers share is an intense desire for posthumous fame earned through terrible crimes.  That's as deep as it goes; politically, religiously, socially, they're all over the map, and while most are white males, there have been female, nonbinary and non-white mass shooters -- and all of them wanted to be known for their crimes.

     Deny them that attention.

Parade Of Clowns

     The most disconcerting element of the Sunday morning political talk shows was the persistent sound of sirens and shouting in the background of NBC's Meet The Press; I kept expecting police or soldiers or rioters to burst into the room, push Kristen Welker aside, make a hurried, largely incoherent announcement and fall back under fire.  Didn't happen; moderator, guests and panelists alike all ignored it with the determination of the prospective heirs of a wealthy, elderly great-aunt pretending her dire flatulence isn't happening.  I still don't know what the noise was about, though if I had to bet, I'd split my money between starvation in Gaza and general Presidential protests.

     Kevin Hassett continues to toady and smirk; he behaves like a tween-age boy passing a set of silent-but-deadly farts and letting his rich great-aunt take the blame.  Today, he thought he'd put one over by pointing at the normal review process for employment data as "evidence" of some sort of skullduggery.  Nope, sorry, won't wash; it's routine, and the numbers come from scads of scribbling statisticians, not one (now-fired) appointee.  It'll be interesting to see if they can find someone who can both understand the math and sugarcoat it for Presidential consumption.  Hassett's glee is in part motivated by his sure and certain knowledge that he's playing to an audience of one, and he thinks he'll always be able to play that one like a cheap harmonica.  ...It'll work until he blows it wrong.

     Over on CBS, Doctor Oz showed up, trying to add a spoonful of sugar to the Medicaid cuts.  It didn't go over nearly as well as any segment of his old TV show, and we know about the snake oil it peddled.

     All of these people -- and many more, throughout the Trump administration -- got their jobs by coming across well on TV.  Look, being on TV and not looking like a fool is a lot harder than it appears, but the only skill it proves is the skill of giving good television.  A narcissist who can't find the off button for his TV -- and would not use it if he could -- in charge of Executive branch is filling it with people who have two main skills: A) Being on TV and B) Flattering the boss. And he's steadily dumping people who bring him inconvenient truths, especially if they're not telegenic.  In the process, he's ascending a pyramid of fantasies, building it as he goes, a process that never ends well.

Shares In Futility Up Sharply In Early Trading...

     Listening to a steady drumbeat of news this morning, the local TV stuff that wakes me up, NBC, NPR, BBC, and it strikes me that "Alas" is a damn poor motto to live by.  People are starving and it's become an opportunity for online grifters and self-serving propaganda vids from the nations causing the starving, or at most throwing pennies at the problem while looking the other way and hoping it will end soon.

     "Alas."  Guess it'll make a nice epitaph.

A Waste Of Ink And Electrons

     Over the last two days, news media have made very very sure -- to the point of program interrupting news bulletins for one of 'em -- that I was aware how the criminal trial of Sean "I have an enormous number of nicknames" Combs came out, and that another group of Men With A Theory are launching a brand new search for the remains of Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their airplane.

     Precisely why I should be concerned about the unsavory and at least partially criminal sex life of a celebrity -- a thing as statistically predictable as the sun rising in the east for as long as there have been celebrities -- and one more search for a lost aviator (she's dead, guys, and so is he) is a mystery to me.  There's a huge, tragic mess in Gaza, Iran may or may not presently have a viable nuclear weapons program,* U. S. domestic politics are getting crazier, our government is building straight-up concentration camps and treating one of the most outrageous examples as a no-humans-involved occasion for levity and Congress is in the process of pushing through a massively unpopular bill that is certain to have far-reaching effects, but I need to be told about the titillating details of what the rich and famous get up to behind closed doors, and that the sons and grandsons of the same kinds of men who misplaced her are going to go digging for whatever's left of a famous aviator and her slightly less famous crewman?

     No.  I do not.  There's actual serious grownup news to be reported and it would be damned nice if they'd act like it.

     I'm not holding my breath.
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* Fission, fusion, or--  One of the things that frets me is that a desperate and fanatical government with a smashed-up atom-bomb program probably still has loads and loads of nasty stuff with a long half-life, and a dusting of that on enemy territory does both immediate and lasting harm.  Dust and wind being what they are, most nations won't risk the fallout (other than as an add-on oopsie to actual nuclear war, at least).  Iran, however, is not most nations, and they have a history of funding groups even more heedless of consequences.

A What, Now?

     A local radio newsperson just told me over the air that the storms that knocked out my electricity the day before yesterday -- and that of hundreds of thousands of other people along their track -- also spawned "Eee Eff Oh" tornadoes.

     Tell me you're reading copy in a "book" font like Times New Roman without telling me you're reading Times New Roman.  Old-time paper wirecopy from an Extel dot-matrix printer or an older Teletype Model 15* had a dot in the center of the zero or a slash through it, preventing confusion between "0" and "o" in the all-capital-letter output.  So, too, did some computer fonts.  Local newspeople, if they were leaving a story for someone else to read, were careful about making the distinction when they typed it up.  "Orator" was a popular typewriter font (especially in television), simple and clear.

     But it's 2025.  Nobody (well, hardly anyone) prints this stuff out and the "wire machine" is not consuming several reams of fanfold paper a day: there's no reason not to spell it out.  Those E F zero tornadoes can be just that.

     A person reading news copy has enough to do.  (Try it sometimes.  Don't go too fast!  And remember, you've got to make the sentences make linear sense using only intonation and pacing.)  These days, they're scrolling through their script with a hand or foot controller, reading it a line or more ahead if they've been in the business longer than a few weeks; in TV, they're taking it from the camera-front prompter while a producer talks in their ear and in radio, they're running their own levels, watching the clock so they don't get steamrollered by the next ad or program and making sure all the sound bites are ready.  Scoping out a "0" from an "o" (even if you typed it yourself) doesn't need to be among the tasks.
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* Mechanical teletypes made the most wonderful rumbling clatter, a sound that meant "news" to several generations; stations used to hang a microphone in the wire-machine closet and run the sound at low level under newscasts, or to at least under the opening.  Those mics were still there when the cheaper, simpler dot-matrix printers replaced the Model 15 -- and made a sound like tiny robot farts as they printed.  Somehow that noise never caught on.  

Context Stripping

     One of the things a news story should do, past "who, what, when, where, how," is provide context: a Mob hit done by running the victim over with a car may look just like a pedestrian struck down by a driver busy texting, but an English teacher from Springfield arguing online about WWE wrestlers who flattens an elderly shopper and a "button man" from Hoboken taking out a damaging witness with a stolen Caddy are not, in fact, the same story.

     Early coverage is going to be the same -- "[NAME] was killed at [TIME/DATE] by a hit and run driver while crossing [LOCATION] Street.  Police are seeking...."  Follow-up should tell readers/listeners/viewers more: what notable connections did the victim have to wider events? If the suspected driver is arrested, what is known about him and his circumstances? If he is charged, what are the charges?  Did accused killer and victim know one another?

     There are limits.  News stories aren't trials; you'll notice I wrote "accused killer" in the previous paragraph, not "murderer;" he or she will not be the latter unless they are charged and found guilty -- and in the case of the distracted wresting fan, "manslaughter" is the more likely charge.  Ledes (the first few sentences or opening paragraph) are generally written in neutral language.  It should not be so neutral that it obscures what happened: "Died following a shooting incident" is mealy-mouthed avoidance; the victim was shot and killed, presumably by the accused killer.  This kind of dancing around is most evident when police kill someone -- the facts are often not in much dispute, though circumstances may be murky, but the Press shies away from admitting that yes, sometimes the police kill people, in favor of passive-voice construction in which people are, somehow, killed.

     Of late, this kind of "exonerative" construction has been bleeding over into non-police killings; when a gay voice actor was shot and killed at the site of his family home, itself recently destroyed by fire, after what appear to have been months if not years of conflict with neighbors, news stories have carefully tiptoed around the situation; he's another person said to have "died following a shooting incident," as though a mistaken hunter or some wandering, self-animated firearm shot him, and not a guy from his street, presently in police custody.

     Maybe it's the influence of corporate attorneys, worried about lawsuits; maybe it's just lazy writing.  Maybe they're trying to avoid delving into what appears to be a complicated situation.  But I'm here to tell you, when a person is shot, someone's finger was on the trigger.  Maybe it was a distracted English teacher; maybe it was a hitman.  Maybe it was a homophobe shouting slurs or a hothead annoyed about late-night parties and beer bottles over the fence.  Whatever it was, those things are part of the story and the lede should at least put alleged fingers on real triggers, and not just float the gun in via a telekinetic poltergeist.  It's not too much to ask.

News Cycling

     I'm so tired of a news cycle that consists of "Crazy/extreme politician does something crazy" followed by "Mass violence and/or war crime," followed by "Crazy domestic politician clashes or communes with crazy foreign politician" replaced by "Crooked politician gets caught and/or commuted" followed by "Crazy politician(s) rattle sabers" followed by "New fighting in [site of long-term conflict]," on and on, all of it a sameness and very much in the mode of our always having been at war with (or in) Eastasia or Eurasia.

     Call me soft and sentimental, but I want a news cycle with headlines about curing cancer or an HIV vaccine (which we almost had, until the Feds decided to cut the budget and spend whatever was left on trainee plumbers), about Moon landings or progress on self-sustaining, controllable fusion reactions.  Not "Economy tanks because some nitwit pulled the wrong cord."

Turbo-Dopey Authoritarianism

     The thing about rule by edict is, it'll make your head spin.  Take news about the news -- four days ago, the White House put Federal funding for PBS and NPR in the crosshairs, by telling the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting (of which the President is, literally, by statute, not their boss) to stop sending them money, and by telling the affiliate stations they cannot use their CPB funding to pay "membership fees" or individual programming fees to the networks.

     The first is no big deal; NPR, long in the culture-wars spotlight, has spent decades weaning themselves from Federal largesse, receiving just 1% of their budget from that source.  PBS counts on the Feds for somewhere north of 10%  of their funding.  But the second strikes deep: the smallest NPR and PBS affiliates rely on CPB money to stay on the air -- and their network membership fees are among their largest single expenses.  New York City and Indianapolis will have plenty of NPR and PBS on their air; Bushwhack, Alaska and Back-of-Beyond, Montana may end up with 24/7 polka music or nothing but static.  Many of the small-town and rural stations have only one or two people on staff, and spend a lot of time "riding the network" with nobody at the controls.  Don't like what you hear?  Spin the dial; you'll tune back during local bad weather or natural disaster.

     And here's the kicker, in two parts:
     1. The EO is titled, "ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA" and complains "...that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."  I don't know if any news media manage a hundred percent unbiased objectivity, but those two give it an honest try, and differentiate between news and opinion.  The Ad Fontes chart puts both of them not too far from the middle politically and rates them high on accuracy; NPR's News Now podcast, which consists of nothing but the same five-minute hourly newscasts you hear on the radio, comes in nearly at top dead center.
     2. Five days ago, the Trump Administration launched "White House Wire," a Federally-funded, White House run website devoted to positive coverage of Mr. Trump and his Executive Branch, modeled on news and opinion sites: it is wall-to-wall taxpayer-subsidized biased media.  How does the PBS/NPR EO put it?  Oh, yes, "At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage." Y'don't say?  But websites are different?  I doubt that.

     Do one or do the other, and it's pretty much politics as usual.  In a free society, the correct comeback to speech you don't like is to speak up yourself; through most of my life, Republicans have chafed at having to foot some of the bill for Sesame Street and All Things Considered and tried to skip out without paying.   But doing both at the same time?  Mr. Trump and his gang have not just murdered irony and left it bleeding out in a gutter, they are enthusiastically violating the corpse and sharing selfies of the process.

Voiceless America?

     As I write this, President Trump has recently issued an Executive Order* defunding the Voice of America to the greatest extent possible within the power of the Executive Branch, along with Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.  (All under the United States Agency for Global Media.)

     He appears to bear some personal animus toward VOA, as may be seen in this clip from a few days ago, prior to the EO.  A White House Press release cites a number of complaints about VOA, all but one in the period between 2016 to 2022, mostly from partisan sources, alleging bias.

     It's an interesting quirk of VOA that while it is somewhat isolated from being told what to cover by the Federal government, it is quite firmly required to be accurate and objective, -- and can be held to account when it is not.  VOA is America's face to the rest of the world, and while they can at times be a little bland and overly upbeat, they take their mission seriously.  You can go to their website and judge for yourself -- for instance, this explainer covering the circumstances under which Permanent Resident status can be revoked.  Or at least you could do so at the time I wrote this.  There's little reason to believe the VOA website will still be around next week.

     The Voice of America dates back to the Second World War -- and yes, it's propaganda, but it's honest propaganda, demonstrating the workings of a free press and a representative democracy to the entire planet, delivering truth to people who were often being lied to.  Shutting it down is hiding our light under a bushel.  It has been an inexpensive effort, measured on the scale of Federal projects, and has paid off over and over.  If the President thinks they're slanting the news, he's got the power (via their overseeing agency) to get them back on track.  If he doesn't like how they cover him, he can restrict their access to White House events.  Pulling the plug instead sends the wrong message to the world -- and while VOA directly operates only a few transmitting facilities these days, once you walk away from a high-power shortwave transmitter and antenna installation, it can be tricky bringing it back up again.
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* The same order yanks the rug out from under the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a big source of funding for public libraries, especially in areas where the population is too thin to support much of a library.  Plus several other Federal organizations, none of which amounts to much more than a rounding error in a budget dominated by defense spending, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. It all seems more mean-spirited than frugal, more culture war than penny-pinching.

Can't Even? Not Even!

     It's exhausting, but the unceasing churn of the news cycle bears watching, mostly to see who they're after now.  It's basically a Junior High School slumber party, with AP presently on the outs and the mean girl who's playing hostess talking smack about 'em, but there are whole cliques of insiders, outsiders, wannabees and news orgs trying to get their hair and outfit to match the prevailing style, and it's all--

     Bullshit.  It's all bullshit.  I want the President -- any President -- and Congress -- all of 'em -- to be covered by the widest possible variety of news outfits, from toadies to skeptics, from liberals to conservatives, from budget hawks and war hawks to pacifists and save-everybody socialists.  I want 'em singing praises and digging through trash to find evidence of malfeasance, I want 'em doing deep-dive backgrounders, chirpy puff pieces and viewing with alarm.  I want all of it -- because I am paying for that damn fed.gov, I am subject to its benefits and laws, and when they get hinky, I am sure to be screwed over.

     I don't think the White House ought to be picking and choosing exactly who gets to sit in on their news conferences and events, and who gets left out.  Limited number of seats available, okay, got it -- but the Press has done an okay job of sorting that out among themselves, and the pols and their flacks could then seek out special pals and sneer at best enemies among those ranks, just as they have always done.

     No matter who is in power or what party they belong to, they should be under a microscope, warts and all.  Especially the warts.  --And we need all of the Press there, not just to watch the gummint but to be watching one another.

     Evil fears the light.  So does incompetence.

About Those Frogs

     In a move that is more rock-throwing than frog-boiling, FCC head Brendan Carr has started an inquiry into KCBS in San Francisco, a radio station that had the audacity to -- gasp -- report on real-time events in public view as they were happening!

     Commissioner Carr says the station has been sent a letter of inquiry, pending "...a formal investigation[...], and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations."

     Indeed, the radio spectrum has limited space for stations, which are charged with operating in the "public interest, convenience and necessity."  We've also got the First Amendment, the relevant sections of which read, "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press [...]."  The FCC has their own read on how those principles interact.

     The old Photography Is Not A Crime website was built around the fact that in the United States, it's not a crime to take or to share pictures of anything in public view.  If you ever wondered why the government kept extending the fences and "No Trespassing" areas around Area 51, now you know.  And if you can photograph it, you can report on it.  Simple as that.*

     Then-candidate Donald Trump was very open about his plans for Federal forces to round up and deport illegal immigrants if he won the Presidency.  He did and they have begun, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)† doing most of the work.  So the Press knew well in advance and looked for activity.  When ICE acted in the San Francisco area, KCBS covered it, who-what-when-where-why, live as events went down.  "What" included ICE raids in East San José ("where"); "who" involved uniformed agents in unmarked vehicles.  It's not a secret: anyone could see what was going on.  Commissioner Carr is nevertheless unhappy.  (The Völkischer Beobachter, er, New York Post seems worried about "rootless cosmopolitan" involvement -- but having been there, I can tell you the distance between corporate shareholders and a field reporter is impossibly vast.  Not only do the shareholders not tell 'em what to do, they don't even know who they are.)

     Elsewhere, there's unhappiness all around in Denver, where ICE covered up a home-security camera while knocking on doors.  Border "Czar" Tom Homan wants an investigation -- not into the illegal interference with video recording, but into how local news reporters found out about the raids that, this past October before he'd even got the job, he had promised were coming.  9News reporter Chris Vanderbeen has the skinny on that (BlueSky thread):
      "As a local news operation, it's routine for various people to tell us [...] when a boatload of federal agents are amassing in a parking lot [...]  A number of our crews went to these staging areas and then -- mostly this is because it's what journalists do -- they followed the teams when they went out on the raids. [...] Keep in mind, the ICE presence was OBVIOUS to anyone nearby too"
     His thread is accompanied by multiple pictures of uniformed ICE agents in marked vehicles.  A crew from the Fox News Network was embedded with at least one ICE squad in the area during the raids.  These were not covert operations.

     This isn't a new administration finding their way, unsure of the rules and customs; the principles of press freedom and "in public view" are very well established.  And, yes, there is always some tension between what the Press wants to drag into the light and what governments want to keep quiet.  That's normal.  In the United States, our Constitution and legal tradition favors truth and daylight over night and fog --  or Nacht und Nebel, if you'd prefer it in the original.
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* Interestingly enough, if you're in the military or working for Uncle Sam or a government contractor, there may be things in public view that you, personally, cannot talk about or share images of.  But that's a you and your employer issue.
 
† You'll recognize them in the field by their vests and jackets that say "POLICE ICE" in letters at least six inches tall.  They are indeed ICE, Federal Agents, but they're not, strictly speaking, police; it's there to keep other kinds of law enforcement from making embarrassing mistakes with firearms, etc.

Darwin Doesn't Need Your Help

     Channel-surfing this morning, on three separate occasions I happened on an NBC reporter, live from the latest big wildfire in southern California.

     She was about as close to the fire as she could get, with smoke drifting through and hints of flame in the background.  The report had "B-roll" shots from even closer, nightmarish images.

     But what kept giving me the shivers was the immediate background for the live report: A downed high-tension power line, the pole slanting away from the viewer's lower left to center screen, with a couple of crossarms making a steeper angle from lower right to upper left, big insulators gleaming, fat cables in slack catenaries crossing behind her making a dramatic scene--

     Dramatic and potentially fatal.  A downed live power line does not always arc, smoke or hum.  Electricity itself has no color, no smell, no sound.  Not every inert-looking wire is dead.  Power companies do not protect the high-voltage lines with the kinds of fuses and circuit breakers that trip once and stay off until reset.  They use "reclosers:" gadgets that open on a fault, wait some set amount of time, re-energize and try again, over and over.  It takes less human intervention and most faults -- a swinging branch, an incautious squirrel, a Mylar balloon -- will clear themselves.  Your lights at home flicker a little, maybe go out and come right back on.

     You not only can't tell if a downed power line is live or not, you can't even count on it to stay off!  California electric utilities routinely shut off power in lines feeding fire zones, especially if there's an evacuation.  They (somewhat reluctantly) shut them off in high-risk areas during fire season; power grids allow a certain amount of re-routing, though it takes extra effort.  Re-routing can light up a previously-off downed line, too; there's nothing magical about monitoring a power grid and the central control at even the most up-to-date utilities have only a limited picture of what's going on.

     The voltage gradient from a downed power line tapers off gradually with distance, in a logarithmic or inverse-square way.  The current is limited by the resistance of the soil, and current  across a resistor gives us a voltage differential.  The reality of this rough math means if you're too close, even standing with your feet too far apart can be fatal.  Holding onto a microphone connected to a wire plugged into a camera that is itself connected to a van some distance away will be fatal if the juice comes back on.  Oh, maybe she's got a wireless mic; maybe the camera is plugged into a video-over-cellular backpack.  Maybe -- and even then, maybe a long step to get back to the news van and make ready for her next live report will be her last.

     In most TV markets, the news photographers (don't call 'em "cameramen," they're photojournalists), any tech who runs a remote truck and as many live-news reporters as can be rounded up and made to hold still for an hour are subjected to regular training sessions on the dangers of overhead* and downed power lines.  The industry didn't used to do 'em, but a string of fatal and near-fatal accidents over thirty years ago caused our insurance carriers to insist.  The NBC crew ought to know better.  I hope they don't learn better the hard way.
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* Overhead?  Way up there?  Yes indeed.  For a terrestrial microwave link, those trucks carry tall pneumatic masts that will easily reach power lines -- if the operator was fool enough to park under them.  Filling in on an ENG shift, I was once waved into a spot at the State Fairgrounds, started the mast up, grabbed a reel of audio/video cable and stepped out of the truck to run it into the venue -- only to look up and see they'd put me right under a ridiculously low power drop.  I darned near broke a wrist, flailing for the air compressor shutoff, and had a short, heated discussion with the well-meaning Fairgrounds worker.

Not Gonna Do It

     Just downstream of the Inauguration, the news media has locked themselves into a familiar cycle of "OMG, look what the President has done!"  Thrilled or horrified per their political bent, the coverage is long on generalities but short on specifics, and I find myself having to dig for details on the actions that strike me as significant.*

     I suppose I could turn around and share them with readers, but at that point it only throws a teaspoon of signal into a boiling pot of noise, and there's enough steam and fog already.

     Let it settle.  One of the few in-depth stories I could find sorted the flurry of Executive Orders and related actions into three categories: things unquestionably within Presidential powers; things that are going to take considerable adjustment, changes in rules and possibly Congressional action, and which may be challenged; and things that are most likely unConstitutional and either will be challenged or have already been challenged.  The last two sets aren't going to have much effect for some time, if they ever do.

     Presidents do not operate in a vacuum.  The Executive Branch is just one leg of the Federal tripod.  It happens to be the only one with a single individual at the top of it, and the full focus of the Press is on him in a manner impossible with Congress or the U. S. Supreme Court, but that's not the entire show; it's not even close.
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* An example: over 1,500 people were given pardons by the new President; fourteen had their sentences commuted instead, leaving felony convictions on their records.  Can you name the fourteen?  I couldn't find their names in any news story and had to go back to the White House press release instead.  It's an interesting group.

It Was An Insurrection

     Quick reminder: January 6, 2021 was an insurrection.  It wasn't a successful one; it wasn't well-coordinated.  Vice-President Mike Pence's stiff neck impeded a critical step and he sacrificed a political career that he'd compromised a lot to advance, in order to preserve the orderly and lawful function of our system of government and prevent an autogolpe.

     I watched live and near-live coverage of the assault on the U. S. Capitol as it happened and it was not a "day of love."  It was a violent, poorly-organized attack on the building and on Congress.  We came within minutes and feet of serious harm to the Senators and Representatives, and multiple police and citizens were injured.  One rioter was killed while charging at law enforcement personnel through a just-broken window in a door with a raging mob behind her.

     There's a real push on the Right to retcon these events as some kind of overly-enthusiastic hijinks at worst; after all, there were lulls in the fighting (as there are in any such conflict.  Sorry, Hollywood tends to skip over the dull parts) and there's plenty of video of that, too.  But men (and a few women), many armed with clubs and more, scaled walls, burst through barricades, smashed windows, broke down doors and put Congress to flight.

     It was an ugly day.  There may be more ugly days ahead.

The Problem

     Okay, this one's kind of political.

     The one tiny little caveat to Jeff Bezos's claim that his decision to have the Washington Post refrain from endorsing a Presidential candidate had nothing at all to do with any worries about antagonizing former President Trump is that the two men had already crossed swords in the past.  There's plenty of reason to believe Amazon lost out in a big cloud computing contract with DoD during the Trump administration due to personal enmity between the two men.

     It's happened before.  If Mr. Trump wins in November, who could say it won't happen again?  Mr. Bezos has a lot to gain if his paper sits this one out -- and nothing to lose if Vice-President Harris wins.

     From a business standpoint, it's a no-brainer, and that holds no matter what high-minded justifications he puts forth.

     Newspapers often make candidate endorsements, and I doubt those endorsements move a lot of voters; it's usually pretty obvious where a paper's editors stand.  It's just an honest choosing of sides for the opinion pages.  Staying officially neutral is unusual.  We expect the front page to be neutral.  The opinion page has got to stand for something, even if it's something half the readers don't like.  (They'll probably find something on the op-ed page.)

     The Washington Post -- and the Los Angeles Times -- have chosen to stand for not getting beat up if the bully hits the big time again.  It's a choice, and one that gives readers valuable information about their papers: they're owned by spineless men.

Some Circus

     The ringmasters -- there were two -- mostly looked bored, except when a pie fight broke out between a clumsy magician and a fake strongman with cardboard weights.  A sad clown led out a poodle on a string, walking on its hind legs, but it didn't do any other tricks.  The Human Cannonball promised several times to launch himself the entire length of the Big Top, but he kept falling well short and missing the net.  He even complained about it, saying, "The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact-check."

     The acts didn't strike me as especially well-rehearsed.  Yes, I'm talking about the debate and while I think Senator Vance lost on facts, especially his refusal to admit Mr. Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election and in claiming the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio under Temporary Protected Status are "illegals" (they're not), I wasn't impressed.  I think Governor Walz would do okay if he had to step up to the big job; I'm not too sure J. D. Vance has the chops.  Tim Walz and his opponent would have both benefited from doing more interviews with neutral to hostile press -- and so would we.

     These two are what we have.  Their running mates are what we have.  Most voters have made their decision already.

"Honeymoons," Hacks, Halfwits And Haters

     The campaign trail has gotten interesting, in much the same manner as the trail over Donner Pass. The campaign of Kamala Harris a basking in mostly-positive press, which the pundits have labeled a "honeymoon" and are whispering like the fellow behind a general being feted in ancient Rome, "This, too, shall pass."

     They're probably right.  All politicians have feet of clay -- all, one hundred percent, each and every one.  Being human, your guy or gal has done something stupid, thoughtless or awful, something suspect or shady at some point in their life.  Maybe a little, maybe a lot; maybe on purpose, maybe unknowingly.  But they did it, and it probably will come out.

     Meanwhile, some entity, probably Iran (who are known to be up to something) is probing the Donald Trump and Harris campaigns, looking to hack in.  Somebody succeeded with the GOP, and the buzz is that Roger Stone fell for the kind of trick your IT department warned you about: a plausible-looking email with a link in it.  The ancient wisdom claims that nobody's easier to trick than a trickster and Stone certainly qualifies; but he's also in an age group that gets tripped up by online scams.*  Social media's all abuzz that news providers who were given some of the hacked material aren't sharing it; but they've been burned before and they're still stinging over it.  They have decided it's better to report solemnly on those wicked folks who tried to sell stolen information than to look like a tool of some foreign interest.

     Over on X, Elon Musk has once again staged a failstacular for a political candidate he favored, almost exactly as he did for Ron DeSantis.  Here's a tip: when you fire most of the engineers, you may find you can't pull off the big-deal, high-visibility stunts.  There's no Buck Rogers without an army of Dr. Zharkovs behind the scenes making the magic happen.  It turns out that unlike building rockets to outer space, a social media company doesn't attract a pack of talented people willing to work long hours under bad conditions for industry-average wages.

     And I have to tell you, there's plenty of criticism of both party's offerings for the act in the center ring this November.  While Kamala Harris doesn't attract the same kind of loathing Hillary Clinton drew out, the people who don't like her really don't; and Donald Trump's detractors are legion.  I'll never like him, and while I find his personality and behavior repugnant, my primary objection remains as it has always been: he's the distilled essence of every bad manager I ever worked for, men who wrought chaos, caused turnover, dissension and discontent in underlings, and treated everyone who was fool enough to work for them as fools indeed, and disposable to boot.  I don't think that's any way to run a country, and I thought very little of his previous attempt at the job.  I'd vote for a guy who wears a boot on his head, if I thought he had the best chance of preventing another Trump Presidency.
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* Here's free advice to everyone's campaign for political office: keep the old people isolated from the Internet.  Yes, this is harsh and condescending, but they'll never click on a bad link in a printed out email and compromise the servers holding all your important data.  If you can't do that, stop putting the actionable/salacious/vulnerable stuff online!  Make the bad guys have to show up in person and pop a lock to get at it, and they may remember Watergate and think twice before proceeding.

Speaking Of Broadcasting

      I have long preferred to listen to radio news in the morning while I catch up on dishes,* make breakfast and rearrange the kitchen clutter.  These days, there's not a lot of news on the radio in Indianapolis, so it's the local NPR station† or nothing, unless I dig out a shortwave receiver and go hunting.

     This morning, closing a long story about an Olympic field hockey player who had part of a broken finger amputated rather than repaired so he could make it to the Paris Olympics, NPR played nearly all of what sounded like the John Williams arrangement of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the inspiring fanfare used for most U. S. network TV coverage of the Olympics since 1964, across two different networks.  The TV networks are protective of it; NBC was a few years getting the rights to the music after they wrestled Olympic coverage away from ABC and if you decide it'd be a great accompaniment to your "Olympics tire sale" commercial, better lawyer up and buckle in for a bumpy ride that will end in a crash.  Public radio sometimes gets a pass, on a "You wouldn't hit a skinny kid with glasses, would you?" basis and a tenuous extension of Fair Use: even big corporations don't like to get caught looking like a bully.  Or they may have worked something out with NBC, which is effectively out of the radio network business these days.

     One thing for sure: every time I hear those big kettledrums lead into that uplifting theme from the brasses, it chokes me up.  And I'm not even much of a sports fan. (Here's an interesting piece on music for the Olympics, with plenty of examples.)
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* Judge me if you must, but several dropped ceramic mugs, drinking glasses and nice plates back, I decided that if I was sleepy, I wasn't going to do the dishes after dinner, just scrape them, rinse them and let them soak until morning.  It was the trying to sort out razor-sharp shards from slippery, soapy silverware while sleepy that convinced me.
 
† They've got a local news department as least as good as the best county-seat AMs had forty years ago, which counts as pretty darned good these days. Without a subscription to the crumbling, tattered remains of the local newspaper, how else would I find out about scandals involving city government officials?

Living In A Glass House

     There's limited room on the airwaves.  Digital TV made it easier to get more signals into the same channels -- and the FCC promptly stacked stations closer together to make more room for police radio and commercial users.*  Mostly-analog FM and AM† is even more pressed for space, with an array of technological fixes helping to find and fill in available slots anywhere there's enough of an audience to turn a profit.

     Radio and TV spectrum is a limited resource.  You can run out of it.  It's not like newspapers (just print more!) or cable TV (filled up one wire?  Run another -- or use fiber-optic for more bandwidth) or the Internet (make more webpages, run fatter data pipes!).  So the government regulates it via the FCC and one of the things they have required since early on is transparency: stations have to ID themselves with every transmission and you've always been able to go look up which owners go with what call letters. 

     Broadcasting is a big megaphone, and broadcast stations have to prove they're of some use to their community.  The way that happens is by a thing called a "Public File."  It used to be an actual file at the studios that anyone could show up during business hours and leaf through; now it's an electronic file, accessible through the stations website and the FCC's as well.  In it you'll find the current license (including ownership information) and any applications pending with the FCC, agreements the station has made with citizens (usually advocacy groups), contracts, complaints, details of political broadcasts, a copy of the FCC's guidebook The Public and Broadcasting, a list of issues and of programs that address them (including children's programming), and so on.  "And so on" has for years included EEO requirements: equal opportunity in employment.  There aren't any hiring quotas, but the FCC wants stations to make sure they're reaching out to all qualified applicants when they have job openings.  And they used to require stations keep track of staff demographics, and post that information in their public file.  Twenty years ago, that requirement was dropped (at least for radio stations) due to a court case, but time marches on and they were able to reinstate it recently.

     Of course a station owner objected.  Remember, there aren't any quotas; the FCC just wants that data out there so the general public can see it, along with all the other information about how the station has addressed matters of public interest and who's running the place.  But that's too much for the folks who run "theDove" and they've filed suit to block it.  The NAB loathes the notion, too, and have filed their own lawsuit. 

     I don't know.  Over-the-air radio and TV stations are using a scarce resource, and nobody's keeping them from making money; but since they're getting to use the public's airwaves (and at a pretty cheap price, too), the public deserves to get some direct benefit, and the public ought to be able to check how the sausage is made, too.   It doesn't seem out of line to include demographic data not linked to names.  NAB suggests it may enable doxxing individuals, and I will leave it to readers to decide if that's a genuine concern or a legal stratagem.

     Radio and TV stations are allowed a disproportionately-loud voice, and subjecting them to a greater degree of scrutiny in return is about as close to fair as we're going to get.
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* Yes, it's true.  UHF TV, which used to end at channel 83, now stops at channel 36, just shy of the channel 37 spot that was never used: radio astronomy finds 608 - 614 MHz useful and above that, it's all cops, military, Feds, fire departments, ambulances, phones and so on.
 
† There is, kind of, available room on the AM band these days, but it's more like vacant buildings than wide open spaces -- and decrepit buildings, at that.  An AM radio station is a big pile of sunk costs, especially the antenna tower(s) and ground system, costly to build, expensive to maintain and vulnerable to theft.  But AM listenership has been declining for years and advertising revenue has followed.  If you ever wanted to own an AM radio station, now's the time; but the way to make a small fortune with an AM station is to start out with a large fortune and be very, very frugal.