@MLive 12 hours ago

Detroit reporter tells 'On the Media' national press reluctant to cover Flint water crisis http://bit.ly/1SbQjKa

@onthemedia: Curt Guyette of @ACLUofMichigan on why mainstream media attn was so late: #FlintWaterCrisis http://wny.cc/Xq4s1

Lengel: Trashy Tabloid Can't Resist False Jimmy Hoffa Story

By Allan Lengel
allan@deadlinedetroit.com

January 5th, 2016, 7:24 AM

In a drugstore or grocery store line, tabloids are like fool's gold, eye-catching and enticing and capable of duping the naive. Some of the stories seem so outrageous, so far fetched. Yet, we often glance at them and read the headlines.

I was shopping in a suburb the other day and saw the Globe, a 62-year-old paper that's part of American Media, Inc. , a New York publisher of magazines, supermarket tabloids, including the National Enquirer, and books. The front page headline reads: “Search Ends After 40 years…Jimmy Hoffa’s Body Found! It has photos of Richard Nixon, mobster Carlo Gambino and Sen. Ted Kennedy with the subhead: “One of these three ordered him killed.”

I did stories on the Hoffa disappearance years after the 1975 abduction, first for The Detroit News and then the Washington Post. So I bought it for $4.99, just out of curiosity and amusement. My mother used to love to read the tabloids, and I’d buy them on occasion for her, even though I was often embarrassed to do so, and sometimes even told the clerk: “This isn’t for me, Really, it’s for my mother.”

I’ve had first-hand experience with tabloids. Starting in 2001, I was one of the lead reporters at the Washington Post on the case involving Chandra Levy, the D.C. intern who disappeared and was having an affair with Congressman Gary Condit. Condit was a “person of interest” in the case and made for good fodder in the tabloids, though he was never charged. At the Post, we were forced to run down the flashy tabloid stories about the case and Condit. More often than not, they were totally false...

read more: http://deadlinedetroit.com/articles/13988/lengel_trashy_tabloid_can_t_resist_publishing_untrue_story_about_jimmy_hoffa#.VowAGk9O-uK

@lisapease: Recording of JFK telling Sargent Shriver not to let CIA infiltrate the Peace Corps.

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-TPH-17B-1.aspx

Title: Telephone Recordings: Dictation Belt 17B.1. Keeping CIA out of the Peace Corps (Item 17A.4 Continued)

Date(s) of Materials: 2 April 1963

Physical Description: item 1 on 1 dictation belt (2 minutes, 13 seconds)

Copyright Status: Public Domain

Description: The recording of this conversation begins on Dictation Belt 17A.4. Sound recording of part of a telephone conversation held on April 2, 1963, between President John F. Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps. They discuss speaking to Richard M. Helms about the suspicion that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is trying to place people in the Peace Corps. They also discuss facilitating the movement of members of the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service. Machine noise follows the conversation.

Transcript included. This sound recording was originally recorded on Dictation Belt 17B, which contains additional sound recording(s) following this one. To hear all of the recordings on the Dictation Belt, see Digital Identifier: JFKPOF-TPH-17B, Title: Telephone recordings: Dictation Belt 17B.

Contributor(s):

Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
Shriver, Sargent (Robert Sargent), 1915-2011

Series Name:

Presidential Recordings.

Subseries Name:

Telephone Recordings [Original accession].

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-TPH-17B-1.aspx

@billmon1: [font color=darkred]Koch CIA[/font] is actually headed by hack GOP oppo researcher, paid $286k a year. But connection with REAL CIA (PT) is classic "deep state" stuff.

Jonathan Kwitny was one of the few, and perhaps the only, mainstream reporter(s) doing any real reporting on this part of the world.

Scott Simon of NPR on the other hand seems to have fallen into the Bill O'Reilly camp here .. along with most of the other mainstream reporters. I recall at the time that it sounded as though Simon was doing mostly solid reporting from that region.

Looking back at it now though and given what we now know really went (goes) on down there it's clear that the reporting from the likes of Jonathan Kwitny was the exception.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110837250#post6

Terkel: The Public Broadcasting System is supposed to be immune from corporate pressure, and PBS does occasionally air hard-hitting news programs. The half-hour weekly Kwitny Report, which first aired in 1988, was such a program. Produced by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny, the show frequently exposed hidden skeletons in the closets of the powerful.

Kwitny: WETA in Washington and WNET in New York both welcomed us, invited us to come produce out of their studios, and would feed us to the system which wanted to broadcast us. The trick is that in order to do that, you have to pay them for those studios. They expect you to go out and raise the money, which means getting underwriting from corporations.

Nader: They are heavily based on local business donations, national corporate donations like AT&T and IBM, and also corporate foundations. And they have clipped their wings, and they’re as much subject to self-censorship as the commercial media.

Terkel: Shows such as this one, which examined the U.S. links to Guatemala’s dictatorship, did not endear The Kwitny Report to corporate sponsors.

Kwitny : Guatemala. Thirty-five years after we intervened in that then-peaceful and democratic country, human rights groups say Guatemala runs on state-sponsored murder, torture and pillage of property from the destitute millions. And just as American business had spearheaded the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, it was deeply involved in the new repression.

Speaker : In all, there were more than a dozen American firms where workers attempting to organize unions were assassinated. At the Coca-Cola plant, more than a dozen workers were assassinated.

Kwitny: The public-affairs shows are funded by corporations who want certain views put forward. Take a guy like John McLaughlin — bear him no animosity — but what kind of reporting credentials? He was a kind of cantankerous editor of a conservative publication, the National Review. I don’t know of a single story he broke, or a reporting award he ever won. But the head of GE loved McLaughlin to such a degree that they gave him three — not one, which is all I ever wanted; not two; but three national television shows, because he was saying the kinds of things that the number two defense contractor and major corporation would like to have said on television. And they could spend out of their pockets as much as it took to put him on.

Terkel: After its second year, in which it won the prestigious Polk Award for investigative journalism, The Kwitny Report went off the air because it could not secure corporate funding...

http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/06/1502.shtml

BOB GARFIELD: In your review of that film, 13 Days, you made another point about learning from history. It was about the supposition that a president, surrounded by a circle of trusted advisors, can be depended on to make the right decision. And you made a, a connection to the George W. Bush White House. Make it again.

FRED KAPLAN: The point was - I think [font color=blue]George W. Bush had just been elected president, and a lot of people were wondering if he would be smart enough to deal with crises. And the common explanation at the time was well, don't worry, he has a lot of really smart people around him[/font]. And [font color=red]the point that you can take from the fourth draft of the history of the Cuban missile crisis is that the people around John Kennedy were really smart - I mean these were the people that David Halberstam later called, in a note of irony, "the best and the brightest," and yet John Kennedy realized that they really weren't very smart, after all. And the lesson of that is that you can have good advisors but the crucial thing is that you need a president. It's the president who makes the decisions[/font]...

http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/aug/27/missile-crisis-memories/

...Tim Busfield was an East Lansing kid, a baseball player, a fun guy. Melissa Gilbert was Hollywood.

“Her grandfather created ‘The Honeymooners,’” Busfield said. “He created ‘The Dean Martin Show.’ She’s from that world.”

Clearly, these people – who will be featured at the East Lansing Film Festival Wednesday -- had nothing in common ... except things that matter. They learned some of that gradually, after marrying in 2013 and moving to Howell...

Soon, a California kid was visiting Michigan on a night that looked like the inside of a snowglobe. “By the time we got to Milford, she thought she was in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’” Busfield said.

That did it, Gilbert said. “I fell in love with the state and the man at the same time.” ...

Both had learned from the best. Landon showed his young actors a sense of fun and focus, Gilbert said. “We were always expected to be very professional.”

And Busfield had worked with writer-producer Aaron Sorkin, director Phil Alden (“Field of Dreams” and “Sneakers”) and the “thirtysomething” producers. “It was like an extensive (American Film Institute) course,” he said.

Most of the “thirtysomething” stars became top TV directors. On five series, Busfield has also been the producer who was in charge of hiring and supervising directors.

This season, he’s directing seven individual episodes. In a late change, one assignment – directing an “Aquarius” episode – will keep him away from his home town on Wednesday, so he’ll do the film-festival event by Skype. Gilbert will be in East Lansing and Busfield will be on the set of a TV show... which is the opposite of how they started...

http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/entertainment/events/best-bets/2015/11/09/film-festival-features-tim-busfield-melissa-gilbert-tribute/75298386/