No Coverage of the John Glenn Funeral

It was deeply offensive to me that John Glenn's funeral was not broadcast in its entirety on all the news channels and major networks.

Glenn was a unique and important American hero, who served our country as a fighter pilot, astronaut, and distinguished United States senator, as well as a candidate for president.

He has left our country an important example of a life of service. We need examples like this for our young people. We need opportunities on occasions like this for parents to sit down in front of their TV sets with their children and explain what it means to be a citizen of the greatest country in the world.

And we need to honor such servant leaders.

Shame on the networks for failing to take advantage of a perfect moment for mass civic education, a desperate need in these times.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

'Proportional' reporting on possible terrorism?

That's the subject of this piece I wrote for The Moderate Voice.

Saturday This and That

Things that caught my eye this past week...

Typography geeks say that résumés should never use Times New Roman...
...typeface and that Helvetica is the way to go.

Helvetica is safe, and it "feels professional, lighthearted, honest," designer Brian Hoff tells Bloomberg.

The article from The Week points out that Helvetica has a whole movie about it. Nerd that I am, I have seen it. I like to use Arial.

Have you heard about Plenti?
Received a mailing this past week, inviting us to join Plenti, a cross-brand customer loyalty program presently involving lots of retailers, including Macy's, Rite Aide, AT & T, Hulu, Nationwide, and others. People who use their Plenti cards or numbers, earn and redeem points for purchases from the participating companies. I hadn't heard of this program until we got the mailer. According to this article from the March 18 edition of USA Today:

...70% of the U.S. population lives within 5 miles of at least two participating locations. And brands without physical locations, such as Hulu, still have broad national reach online.

The article also says that a similar program has existed in Germany for about fifteen years in which almost half of all German households participate. What's the catch? Can't see an egregious one. American Express, the catalyst behind Plenti, seems simply to want to spread more plastic--nothing new there--and the retailers think that by joining an all-for-one, one-for-all loyalty card, they'll increase sales. Haven't signed up myself. But I could see it as a win, at least in the short run, for consumers.

For Christians, there's a difference between freedom...
...and license.

As of Tuesday, according to Chris Cilizza, Hillary Clinton has answered...
...seven questions. The Washington Post's Cilizza then enumerates them. My reaction: While it may be in a candidate's interest to speak to the press, Clinton isn't legally bound to do so. If she wants to reach the public with town hall meetings, advertising, conventional campaigning, and social media releases, that's her choice. But it's likely to backfire on her...even if this is the opening "listening" phase of her campaign. In the linked piece, Cilizza also lists seven questions he would like to ask the former Secretary of State.

God bless Ashlea's family as they grieve her passing...
...and kudos to the Reds' Skip Schumaker for being the only player in Saint Louis that day to take the time to meet and visit with Ashlea before the Reds-Cardinals matchup. Heard Reds color commentator Chris Welsh say, in discussing this visit and Ashlea's passing, that Schumaker may not be a starter, but he is a leader in the club house, precisely for gestures like this.

I need everyone to do me a favor..SHARE this photo until it goes viral! My sister (in law) Ashlea has battled cancer...
Posted by Updates on Baby Bennett on Thursday, April 23, 2015

The 'Louie Louie' singer nobody could understand...
...has died. Like Lenny and T.B. in That Thing You Do, singer Jack Ely left the Kingsmen just after he recorded the lead vocal on the best-selling cover of the song.

'The Bible Series'

The Bible Series premieres this coming Sunday on the History Channel at 8:00 ET. This is a music video with clips of scenes from the series. It looks like it's going to be very good!

News Purveyors: Don't Give Mass Killers the Fame They Crave

I would love for all the major media outlets--conventional network news departments, cable news channels, and internet news publishers--to engage in an act of collusion behind an idea mentioned on this evening's PBS NewHour by David Brooks.

When tragic events like today's Connecticut shooting happen, don't identify the alleged killer, don't display that person's image, don't dig up their Facebook page, don't track down people who know them, don't publish any of their rants.

Refuse to give killers, like the one alleged to have perpetrated today's rampage, publicity.

People who do things like this often desire a kind of dark fame for their evil actions. When some sick people see that mass murderers get saturation coverage, seeming to hold an entire nation hostage for days, it likely incites them to go for their own twisted glory, too.

There are undoubtedly many factors contributing to the number of mass murders we have experienced in recent years. But, I beg the major news outlets to stop one of those factors in its tracks: Don't give mass killers the fame they crave.

Just read in the car...

Paula Urburu's fascinating account of turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th, by the way) New York. Evelyn Nesbit, underage beauty, was arguably America's first supermodel, her image appearing on everything from serious art prints to bars of soap. This is a story of parental negligence, financial desperation, celebrity, and scandal in a city then emerging as more than a center of commerce, but also as a media dream machine.



[Below, Evelyn Nesbit]

Sometimes Mainstream Media Doesn't Bother with Facts

I'm not a mainstream media basher. By and large, I have great respect for the media. But I do have a pet peeve with some in the media, particularly columnists, who, enamored of a story, fail to get all the facts. Take a trivial, but evocative example appearing in newspapers all across the country today.

In Newsday, Verna Gay has a column about Soupy Sales, the comedian who passed away yesterday. (I'm not linking because Newsday is moving to paid subscriber access and a link would be pointless for most readers.) For people of my generation, Sales was a kind of comedic dadaist whose antics both hearkened back to Vaudeville and Seltzer and foreshadowed the stand-up hilarity of Steve Martin. Gay's fond remembrance of Soupy was well-deserved.

But, for the column's topper, Gay tells an apocryphal story as though it were factual. Gay wants you to know how influential Sales was, even on those revolted by his work. The story goes that a young Fred Rogers, freshly minted from seminary, was at his parents' home. They had a TV set and the young Rogers had never seen TV before. According to Gay's story, Rogers saw Soupy Sales' pie-flinging antics and, horrified by the unkindness of it all, decided right then and there to go into television.

Nice story, right? It puts the mousy, religious, naive Rogers in his place while elevating Soupy as a proponent of chaotic comedy.

The problem is that it can't be true. Or, at most, it can only be partially true.

Fred Rogers already was involved with and appearing on television before he went to seminary. In fact, while presiding over his own show at WQED in Pittsburgh, he spent eight years pursuing his Master of Divinity degree on a part-time bases. (Depending on the seminary, it usually takes a minimum of three years to get a your M.Div. That's if a person is a full-time student.)

Despite the implication of Gay's article, Rogers was also already married and had two sons, in addition to being a TV personality, when he graduated from seminary. When he did, in light of his already-established career, Rogers was called and ordained by his fellow Presbyterians into a pastoral ministry of creating television programming for children.

So, Gay's story told as if it were absolutely true, isn't.

It's a minor point. But it's the kind of thing that makes a mainstream news consumer wonder sometimes, whether in reading or listening to straight-up news accounts or commentaries: If a reporter botched this story about which even I know better, how many other stories get botched about which I don't and can't know better?

Facts are important. Even the little ones that are missed undermine media credibility.

Mr. President: Less is More

A bit of unsolicited advice for President Obama: Reduce your number of public appearances.

Even before his turn on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, when he committed the first gaffe I remember coming from his mouth since he became a national figure in 2004, the President was at risk of being overexposed to the point of becoming background noise.

Mr. Obama is personally popular and the entire country has a stake in his success. But since the Thursday after he was elected last November, we have been hip deep in All-Obama-All-the-Time. No president in my memory has been so visible during the transition from election day to the White House.

And while it may be argued that the then-President-elect needed to assure a troubled nation facing a unique set of economic problems, Obama chose an entirely different path from that of another Democratic President-elect, Franklin Roosevelt, during a much lengthier transition, one that came at the height of the Great Depression, from his election in November, 1932 to his inauguration in March, 1933.

Roosevelt, in fact, refused overtures from the Hoover Administration to be more visible and publicly engaged, to present something of a united front on mutually agreeable measures for dealing with the economic crisis. Roosevelt, in essence, said what Obama said several times prior to his January inauguration, “We only have one president at a time.”

FDR’s ploy was surely marked by a degree of cynicism. But it also spared him the one thing any leader dreads having: responsibility without authority. The leader who is given responsibility without authority is far likelier to be blamed than to be praised. The moment a leader is perceived to take responsibility, the expectation develops that he or she will begin to exercise authority, even if they don’t have it. During his transition, Obama became the de facto leader of the nation without any presidential power. This underscores the significance of perception when it comes to being an effective leader.

All leaders—even those duly inaugurated—have only the power that others think they have. There are formal powers and informal powers that we give to our presidents. Formal powers are what the Constitution has given to every president, whether it was George Washington or Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln or Calvin Coolidge. But presidents are limited in what they can achieve, even in exercising their formal powers, by the informal power given to them. Informal power is rooted in a president’s relationships with the voters, Congress, the media, and so on.

Those relationships aren’t always enhanced by constant public appearances, which is something I’m not sure this president or his staff fully appreciates. The day before the President taped his appearance with Jay Leno, he spent a little time with what was called “Baracketology” on ESPN, making his picks for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Sandwiched between those two TV gigs were a couple ot town hall meetings in California.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of those activities. The President is the head of government and he’s helped in doing that by meeting with voters, whether in person or through the media. The President is also the head of state, like kings and queens and ceremonial presidents elsewhere, the living embodiment of the country. Getting out of Washington among the people is a gesture that helps unify us. George Washington himself was the first president to recognize this: He took a tour of all thirteen original states at the conclusion of the first session of Congress, about halfway through his first term.

But Obama might well heed the example of Roosevelt, In her book, No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin points out that over the course of his presidency, FDR averaged just two of his famed “fireside chats” per year. He opted for such a sparing use of the media on the theory, Goodwin says, that less was more. It still is.

Admittedly, the world of 1933 to 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt was president, was very different from the one of 2009. We live in a hypermediated world of instant communication. The reputations of public figures and their beliefs, even of private figures who someone decides to display on Youtube, can be marred and dismantled in a matter of hours.

So, the President and his handlers are well-advised to stay out front, in establishing and maintaining his image and promoting his agenda. The White House does well to help us see our president for ourselves, and to decide for ourselves what he’s like and whether he can be trusted, unencumbered by the uncomplimentary slants provided by character assassins acting as pundits, policy analysts, partisan political strategists, and late night comedians.

But successful presidents must strike a balance between presence and distance. There’s nothing inherently wrong with an appearance on Leno or with giving Jay Katz your NCAA picks. But the constancy with which President Obama appears on TV, risks turning him from a formidable political figure, which he clearly is, into a Leno, or a Stewart. There’s nothing wrong with those guys. But we didn’t elect the President to entertain us. We elected him to lead us.

Roosevelt struck the balance between presence and distance. His fireside chats were like homey conversations with a caring father, a person you loved but also respected, not very different from the “Father Abraham” image cultivated by Lincoln. Neither FDR nor Lincoln were much older than Mr. Obama is today when they first effected these images. Roosevelt was 51 when he became president. Lincoln was 52. So, Mr. Obama’s age need not be an impediment to enhancing his reputation as our national father figure.

Mr. Obama has an historic opportunity to be a president who does great things. But to get there, I think that he needs to learn the lesson of less is more. There will be times for public addresses, Oval Office speeches, and the occasional appearance on an unexpected television venue. But the impact of each such appearance and address will be enhanced by the President doling them out more sparingly.

This is...

intriguing. (Thanks to Nancy on ShoutLife for linking to this story.)

Imus: What Took So Long? Why Just Imus?

Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team was both racist and sexist. And frankly, shocking to me.

I live in a conservative enclave of southern Ohio. Several years back, we did a demographic study of the area within a five mile radius of our church building and found it to be 98.2% white. But I can't imagine any of my acquaintances or friends around here making comments like those Imus made from a New York City radio studio a few days ago.

Imus got the axe because his tasteless comments finally registered "objectionable" in the financial marketplace and in the marketplace of ideas. He was voicing a morally despicable notion that, finally, in the twenty-first century, could not be accepted by the public. That's good.

But I have two questions:

• What took so long? AND
  
• Only Imus?
  

Imus has been an equal opportunity dispenser of hate for some time now. Back in May, 2005, I asked Is Don Imus' Fifteen Minutes Up? The immediate occasion for that post was his assault on MSNBC news reader Contessa Brewer. But I also recalled his Clinton-era appearance at the White House press corps dinner in which he spoke nastily about Bill and Hillary Clinton's personal life. I wrote that, as of that moment:

...the high and mighty Washington elite [still] bow and scrape to him, apparently deeming his classlessness to be hip or something. Isn't it time the guy got the axe?

But to me a deeper issue than what happens to Don Imus, deeper even than the racism and sexism reflected in his most recent comments, is the nastiness he and a number of others have been allowed to spew for so many years now.

Imus is gone. But there are many supposed entertainers, artists, and satirists left in music, talk radio, television, movies, and video game production who are making big money through nastiness. They promote a culture of physical, psychological, and emotional violence that disdains the humanity of groups and individuals. They coarsen our culture, degrade our discourse, and balkanize us all. These folks have every right to spew their junk. But the rest of us also have the right to turn them off, tune them out, and ask Big Media to deprive them of their platforms and any income derived from their invective.

Satire is a legitimate thing. Putting down self-absorbed power mongers in politics, business, or the arts is a necessary step in improving our common life. Satire can also puncture the inanities of current fads and social conventions, also useful.

Imus was, questionably, seen as a satirist. But Imus and others have used their media platforms not to satirize or even entertain, but to vent hate and stereotyping against whoever they want to pick on.

Don Imus is off the air because advertisers and an aroused public said, "Enough!"

When will we say the same thing about the Michael Savages, Snoop Doggs, Rosie O'Donnells, the creators of games like Grand Theft Auto, and others who, each in their own ways, use hatred and disdain of others as part of their schtick?

[See here, here, and here.]

[UPDATE: Moanna asks if my reason for including Rosie O'Donnell on her list is attributable to my listening "to those those who misquote her as she speaks out for the right of all Americans to question their government and make choices in their lives."

I respond:

No, Moanna, I include Rosie O'Donnell in that list of media hate mongers because of her racist stereotyping of orientals and her hateful lumping of Christians with radical Islamic-based terrorists.

To poke fun of [sic] Chinese people on national television with the "ching chong" stereotyping of past generations or to say that all Christians--who account for much, if not most, of the charitable giving and serving in the world today and are so involved because of Christ's call to love their neighbors as they love themselves--represent the same sort of threat to the world as that of Osama bin Laden is not only factually inaccurate, it's hateful.

That's why I include Rosie O'Donnell in that list of haters.

On the Christian front: Perhaps O'Donnell was exposed to a form of Christian faith that was all about rules and nothing about grace. I'm sorry for that and would love to acquaint her with the God revealed in the Bible. But before she spews hatred, she ought to know what she's talking about.

Thanks for your question and for reading the blog.

God bless you!

Mark Daniels

[THANKS TO: About.com's phantom Conservative Politics: US editor for linking to this post.]