1940 film classic His Girl Friday with dream team of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a film which I've seen, conservatively, about four dozen times. Speaking of Medill, http://www.northwestern.edu/features/snapshots/ a place that I came to know and truly appreciate when I was living, learning and loving in Evanston, hard by Lake Michigan http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/pan/ and becoming friends with so many of their students, faculty and administrators, here's a site full of great media blogs that you might want to consider bookmarking for future use: http://blognetwork.poynter.org/media/
(To repeat what I wrote Tuesday: I watched the Dolphins' 1985 MNF win over the undefeated Bears wearing my Dolphins cap and the Bears mauling of the Patriots in the Super Bowl at the Norris Student Union at Northwestern with my friends at Medill and Kellogg, the same place I watched the Shuttle Challenger disaster live from the very beginning on ABC-TV.)
It's worse than sad, it's tragic really that none of the South Florida-based foundations has ever thought to have the good sense to fund anything approaching either the necessity, scope or quality of Medill Reports in order to keep the myriad bureaucrats on their toes: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/aboutus.aspx
About Us
For the People…around Chicago is a project launched in the spring of 2008 by the Medill News Service to merge in depth reporting with social networking. For years, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism has reported on news and affairs through affiliations between Medill’s graduate journalism program and news organizations throughout the world. We still do that with a flourish through Medill Reports Chicago and Medill Reports Washington.
This project attempts to expand our universe, or more importantly, to create linkages beyond news organizations to groups that have a particular interest in an issue. That enables our stories to continue to be a part of the ongoing conversation about that issue. We cover stories that examine what’s working and what’s not around Chicago. We are well aware that news organizations, including Medill, tend to move on to the next issue, and then another one. Our work gets buried in the flow of continuing events, and those groups and individuals who stay with an issue can feel abandoned.
What we hope to do with this project is to become more connected with you; the network of groups and people who invest in particular issues. Any stories we cover are available to you to redistribute over the web, to republish in your newsletters or other material, to link to from your website, or to embed directly onto your site. Only one proviso; that you credit us with the stories so people know we’re involved. If you are an organization or individual or blog that cares about the issues we cover, let us know so we can link back to you to enhance the network.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/
It would be great to have Larry Lebowitz of the Herald as a field general and Gabriel at Transit Miami as his trusted aide-de-camp ready to unleash their smart, savvy eager beaver reporters at FDOT like a kamikaze squad, forcing the ever-elusive FDOT Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos to finally make a public appearance in South Florida where she's made to answer questions from actual taxpayers, not the industry/trade types, per her usual MO.
And when I think about what such a squad of eager reporters could've done to the Miami-Dade School Board years ago to ferret out the real facts on the $100K crowd that Rudy Crew sought to inoculate himself with, as well as hammer the sclerotic legion of bad teachers and cranky administrators, it literally my heart skips a beat.
By the way, after having missed it many times on Turner Classic Movies over the past 20 years, I finally caught 1952's The Captive City on TCM.
See http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=17060 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044476/
It was great to once again see the under-appreciated John Forsythe, always so good in almost everything he was in, and a former baseball broadcaster, to boot, cast here as a small-town newspaper editor trying to battle organized crime getting its tentacles into everything he holds dear about his town, and later testifying at the Kefauver Hearings.
(Always wanted to say 'get their tentacles' in a sentence.)
Afterwards, with some time left on my videotape, as I was leaving for an errand, if you can believe this, per a recent conversation of many months ago with a reporter friend, I was almost able to tape Ace in the Hole for her right afterwards.
That's the great 1951 Kirk Douglas film, him as the world-weary once-promising reporter needing a fresh start, and lucking into a great story in a New Mexico cave-in and positively milking it dry -by hook or by crook. The first time I saw it was part of a double feature with Sweet Smell of Success at an art house, probably in Chicago.
Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=154055&titleId=613826 Warning: It's loud at the beginning!
http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=186689&titleId=613826It replays on TCM at Tuesday 10/28/2008 10:00 PM , Friday 11/07/2008 2:30 PM , and Tuesday 12/09/2008 9:30 AM
Catch it if at all possible!
See my previous post on Ruth Shalit from South Beach Hoosier on February 17th, NBC's David Gregory's Super Tuesday brain fart; Michelle Cottle the bore; Ruth Shalit is a charmer!http://southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/2008/02/david-gregorys-super-tuesday-brain-fart.html
Having lived in Chicago and Evanston for a few years not too long before I met Shalit, whom I'd constantly run into all over D.C., esp. between K Street and Dupont Circle, I found her 1993 TNR cover story on one-and-done Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun devastatingly accurate!
Other reporters I knew in Washington, esp. those assigned to Capitol Hill, told me at the time that they marveled at the column's power, sweeping away all the senator's alibis and excuses so deliciously and completely.
Many of them were pre-disposed to like her, but they found her so un-prepared for office that it shook them up that someone like her could become a senator for a big state like Chicago.
See Shalit's interesting essay on pp. 38-43 of POLITICIANS AND ETHICS
http://www.apubb.ro/Documents/Ringsmuth/Cozic_Politicians_and_Ethics.pdf
(Since I mentioned the bookstore, I should say here publicly that by far THE friendliest media personality who was a frequent Borders customer was the late Jack Smith of ABC News, son of the legendary Howard K. Smith. He was very un-assuming and couldn't have been nicer! I was very sad at the time to hear that he'd died of pancreatic cancer, just as NFLPA head Gene Upshaw did on Wednesday. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jpsmith.htm )
New York Times, August 21, 2008
At Rally, Finding Clinton's Aid to Obama Too Tepid
By Damien Cave
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/us/politics/22clinton.html
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, August 21, 2008
headline above newspaper masthead: Hillary Clinton fires up Democrats in South Florida
headline on story, front page of local section: Stumping for Obama, Clinton calls for unity
By Mark Hollis and Lisa Huriash
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-flbclinton0822xsbaug22,0,3207003.story
7th paragraph from above reads as follow: (my emphasis in red)
"Obama campaigners were looking to sway minds at Thursday's events. But in characterizing her party as steadfast for Obama, Clinton came across to some of her supporters as overly optimistic. Several said after Clinton's speeches that they know many local Democrats and independents who aren't convinced Obama has the credentials they demand in a president."
So which is it, tepid or overly optimistic?
Miami Herald, August 21, 2008 headline on page 5A: Clinton stumps for Obama in South Florida by Beth Reinhard http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/story/652652.html
Meanwhile, at midnight, the lead headline at the Herald's website,http://southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-heels-of-jim-leyritz-arrest-another.html
As it happens, back in the days when he was talking and acting more like a DLC Democrat than the person he's become since then, in 1988 I defied South Florida's supposed Democratic CW (conventional wisdom) about the electability of Michael Dukakis and voted for Al Gore during the FL primary on Super Tuesday, March 8th. (Gore's senior thesis at Harvard was on "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency.")
After voting, I promptly drove up to Washington, listening to election returns on the radio throughout the South on my drive up, which had been my game plan all along. Lots and lots of Charlotte's WBT and Nashville's flamethrower, WLAC, as well as many smaller stations reporting local races with just as much drama, intrigue and backbiting as farther up on the ballot. Lots of talk about whether Gore would be able to win in northern states!
Mostly, they were the very same radio stations I'd always listened to for American Top 40 with Casey Kasem (AT40) during its heyday, so I was a veritable walking-talking Billboard hit list by the time my drive north ended, just as I'd been on my drives down here and back from Indiana for spring break. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Top_40 and http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/index.jsp )
(jingle and lines that are always in my head on long droves by myself)
"Casey's Coast-to-Coast!"
"Hi, I'm Casey Kasem on American Top 40, coming to you on great radio stations like...
We're counting down the top hits...
Now on with the countdown!...
When Sen. Biden entered Walter Reed Hospital because of the brain aneurysms, I wrote him a letter expressing my thoughts and concerns, thanking him for his kindness months before and sent along a (new) cassette of one of my favorite and most relaxing albums, featuring lots of Gershwin, so that he could listen to it in his hospital room when nobody was around.
A while later, after he was back on the Senate floor, completely out-of-the blue, I received a wonderfully penned Thank You note from his wife, Jill, a school teacher, which was about as classy as you could possibly ever imagine, especially given the awful circumstances.