#from Audience of One by James Poniewozik

[mariacallous]

Now that the Democratic National Convention is over, the next major battleground in the 2024 election is the media.

The Harris-Walz campaign needs to be ready.

Although former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has struggled to respond to the new Democratic ticket, Republicans will likely get in line with a unified media strategy. The message they will seek to promote is that Democrats are running the most radical, leftist candidates in U.S. history.

In recent elections, Democrats have had difficulty with the new turbocharged, fast-moving and unfiltered media landscape. In 2016, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, harping on the investigation into her emails. In 2020, President Joe Biden defeated Trump, but under unusual pandemic circumstances that put much of the conventional campaign processes on hold. As campaign conditions returned to normal this year, things did not go as well for Biden. One televised debate, noted New York Times columnist James Poniewozik, brought his candidacy to an end: “There was simply a horrendous TV outing—less than two hours that changed history.” But even before Biden stepped onstage, his poll numbers were lagging after a conservative media onslaught about his age and alleged corruption.

To sustain the energy that boosted Vice President Kamala Harris through the convention in Chicago, Harris’s campaign needs to devise an effective media strategy tailored to the current era. To do so, her team should look back to 1992, when then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s savvy war room figured out how Democrats could thrive in another new age—of cable television, investigative journalism, and state-of-the-art political advertising. While the news media has evolved significantly in terms of form and content since Clinton won the presidency, Harris will need to achieve a mastery similar to that of Clinton’s historic campaign team.

The early 1990s seem like simpler times. In January 1994, NBC Today Show’s Bryant Gumbel asked his cohost Katie Couric: “What is the internet anyway?” Email was a novelty. Surfing was done in the ocean. Cable news played by the traditional rules of objective reporting. Smartphones were in development, and cell phones remained a luxury. Social media meant going to the movies with friends.

Yet the 1992 presidential campaign—which pitted Clinton, then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush, and independent candidate Ross Perot against each other in a race for the White House—took place across a media landscape that had changed dramatically since the 1960s. Cable had created a 24-hour news cycle where stories came out quickly. These stations, as well as the increasingly popular one-hour network news zine-style shows (Nightline, for example), depended on a healthy audience share for their livelihood, in contrast to the public service ethos of the half-hour nightly news programs from earlier times. This shift meant that sensationalism became a hot commodity. Investigative journalism born from Watergate had given rise to a generation of reporters who were constantly on the hunt for wrongdoing. Moreover, conservative talk radio had exploded after the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the fairness doctrine in 1987. Syndicated hosts such as Rush Limbaugh commanded between millions of listeners on over 600 stations. Daily tabloid newspapers and comedic shows, too, were having a greater impact on politics.

And in advertising, the “Morning in America” campaign that helped then-incumbent President Ronald Reagan win reelection in 1984 set a new standard for sophisticated production techniques. Television spots became like short films, capable of seducing and devastating all at once.

Starting with the 1980 election, and as a party felt to be on the outs from the mainstream culture, the GOP saw an opportunity to shape the national conversation through an aggressive media strategy that defined the way the public perceived its opponents and itself. As they built a new conservative majority, Republicans made huge investments which very often paid off.

In 1980 and 1984, Reagan’s campaign team managed its message to transform the one-time conservative extremist into the nation’s savior. Then, in 1988, Bush pulled together one of the most brutal campaigns of modern history under the direction of South Carolina campaign consultant Lee Atwater. Atwater tore down all the guardrails as to what was permissible, institutionalizing an anything-goes philosophy. Playing on themes of patriotism, religious nationalism, and a racial backlash, Bush and Atwater redefined the promising Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis—an intelligent technocratic reformer—into a heartless left-wing radical who looked terrible in a tank.

In 1992, from its perch in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton’s inner circle was determined not to repeat these experiences. It had been hardened during the primaries when its candidate barely survived a sex scandal involving Arkansas state employee Gennifer Flowers. James “the Ragin’ Cajun” Carville had guided Clinton through the crisis and emerged as the central figure behind the “comeback kid.” In a scene captured in the 1993 documentary The War Room, which provides the best look into this critical campaign, Carville warned his staff that Democrats needed to step up or conservatives such as Fox News chairman Roger Ailes would destroy them. With Carville leading the way, Clinton’s war room also included George Stephanopoulos (communications), Paul Begala (chief strategist), Stanley Greenberg (polling), and Mandy Grunwald (advertising).

Several principles guided Carville’s army. Speed was essential. In the cable era, sitting out of stories was no longer an option. Being patient could leave a candidate in the dust. The war room deployed a rapid response style that left no charge unanswered for long and aimed to provide counterarguments before allegations could set in the public mind. When reporters raised an accusation, Clinton’s team rejected the claims with resolve and force. At the same time, whenever Carville and Stephanopoulos got hold of any potentially damaging information about Bush or Perot, they released it to the media immediately rather than trying to think up the best spin.

Tired of the defensive and despondent outlook of Democrats following the political bloodbath in 1988, Clinton’s war room insisted that Democrats needed to play offense. “Why can’t we attack George Bush?” the documentary shows Carville asking his team. The film portrays an effort that fizzled as the team tried to stir a story about Bush having campaign material made overseas rather than in the United States. Nor was it shy about ripping into the weaknesses of Bush’s record.

In doing so, the Clinton war room also elevated clarity into an artform. Carville’s team grasped how long and complicated arguments did not fly in an age of soundbites. They famously drew on a board: “the economy, stupid.” There were two other punchy slogans to guide them: “Change versus more of the same” and “don’t forget health care.” That reminder to staffers was also an example of how to convey a message with simplicity. According to the Los Angeles Times, the crew in Little Rock “share[d] a belief in the primacy of ‘the message’ as the driving force in a presidential campaign, downplaying the importance of such traditional political tools as precinct organizations, registration drives and Election Day turnout efforts.”

The team also worked to sell the message through the realm of popular culture, traditionally dismissed as undignified. Clinton appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show and MTV, in People, and more. The campaign blitzed talk show hosts with information that made Bush look like an out-of-touch well-to-do who only cared about foreign policy while constantly reminding them of Clinton’s humble origins.

In November 1992, Clinton won with 370 Electoral College votes. Four years later, he defeated Sen. Robert Dole and was reelected.

Subsequent Democrats could not replicate his success. In 2000 and 2004, respectively, Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry failed to be as effective on the media stage. Decorated Vietnam veteran Kerry, for instance, was shell-shocked when then-incumbent President George W. Bush’s campaign tagged him as a flip-flopping politician and an independent group invented the concept of “swift-boating” by throwing out false accusations to discredit his military record. Political consultant Chris LaCivita, who is currently co-managing Trump’s campaign, was one of the people who produced the spot for the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” smear campaign.

Barack Obama reset Democratic campaign strategy in 2008. David Axelrod and his band of campaign operatives updated Carville’s model, demonstrating how effective use of social media tools such as Facebook, well-produced television spots with Reagan-like narratives, and not responding to the daily noise from the internet and cable television could provide a recipe for victory. Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, were no match.

Of course, the media campaign was a complement, not an alternative, to an aggressive turnout strategy that focused on driving up total votes in all 50 states.

The media challenges in 2024 have expanded again, even as the old ones remain relevant. One of the most grueling challenges facing Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be to survive the onslaught of disinformation, deepfakes, and openly partisan news that will hit them from all sides in the months to come. The recent hack by Iran, which Trump claims targeted his campaign, is a reminder that foreign interference will also be a problem.

Harris also needs to compete successfully in what New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has called the “attention field.” News moves at a fast speed and those who consume political news tend to move on very quickly. Attention spans are not easy to maintain. An effective campaign has to figure out how to keep the media focused on its candidate and message for substantial periods of time.

Between now and Election Day, Harris will be facing an opponent who has proven to be effective at working the media. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated an instinctive feel for the rhythm and dynamics of the news cycle. As president, he capitalized on the interconnected relationship between social media, cable news, online newspapers, and podcasts to dominate the national conversation and harden perceptions about opponents. He handled televised debates like a reality show, using body movements, facial expressions, controversial comments, and vicious insults. Most recently, he capitalized on an attempted assassination, standing up with blood dripping down his ear, surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents, defiantly pumping his fist in the air and yelling: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It was as if he could see how the event looked on a television screen.

Thus far, Harris’s team has been extremely effective on this playing field. It has staged the rollout methodically to generate good feeling, excitement, and constant media attention. Harris’s memes have caught fire on social media. Harris appears to have selected Walz as her running mate in part because of how adroit he has proven to be in this playing field despite being 60 years old. By uttering one word, “weird,” Walz remade the messaging of his entire party. When Republicans lobbed their initial attacks against Walz’s military record, the social media army hit back hard, although some commentators believe it needs to hit back harder.

The fight is only beginning. Democrats should not fool themselves into thinking Trump will simply lay down his gloves and walk away. When backed into a corner, Trump traditionally becomes more brutal.

But as Clinton’s war room demonstrated in the 1992 election, a savvy Democratic campaign updated to suit the modern media environment can take down the fiercest opposition and pave a road that leads to the White House.

[verifiedaccount]

@blinditem

[thebreakfastgenie]

‘M*A*S*H’ at 50: War Is Hell(arious)

Five decades ago, “M*A*S*H” anticipated today’s TV dramedies, showing that a great comedy could be more than just funny.

“M*A*S*H,” which debuted in September 1972, feels both ancient and current. With Jamie Farr, seated, and, from left, Mike Farrell, David Ogden Stiers, Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan and William Christopher in a later season.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

By James Poniewozik Sept. 16, 2022 Updated 10:59 a.m. ET

The pilot episode of “M*A*S*H,” which aired on Sept. 17, 1972, on CBS, lets you know immediately where and when you are. Sort of. “KOREA 1950,” the opening titles read. “A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.”

The Korean War could indeed seem a century away from 1972, separated by a gulf of cultural change and social upheaval. But as a subject, it was also entirely current, given that America was then fighting another bloody war, in Vietnam. The covert operation “M*A*S*H” pulled off was to deliver a timely satire camouflaged as a period comedy.

The year before, CBS had premiered Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” a battlefield dispatch from an American living room. But “M*A*S*H” was another level of escalation, sending up the lunacy of war even as Walter Cronkite was still reading the news about it. The caption acknowledged the risk by winking at it: Who, us, making topical commentary?

Today, “M*A*S*H” also feels both like ancient history and entirely current, but for different reasons.

On the one hand, in an era that’s saturated with pop-culture nostalgia yet rarely looks back further than “The Sopranos” or maybe “Seinfeld,” “M*A*S*H” is often AWOL from discussions of TV history. Sure, we know it as a title and a statistic: The 106 million viewers for its 1983 finale is a number unlikely to be equaled by any TV show not involving a kickoff. But it also gets lost in the distant pre-cable mists, treated as a relic of a time with a bygone mass-market TV audience and different (sometimes cringeworthy) social attitudes.

Yet rewatched from 50 years’ distance, “M*A*S*H” is in some ways the most contemporary of its contemporaries. Its blend of madcap comedy and pitch-dark drama — the laughs amplifying the serious stakes, and vice versa — is recognizable in today’s dramedies, from “Better Things” to “Barry,” that work in the DMZ between laughter and sadness.

For 11 seasons, “M*A*S*H” held down that territory, proving that funny is not the opposite of serious.

Alda’s Hawkeye was a forerunner of the modern dramedy antihero.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Off the beaten laugh track

The characters serving in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea were professionals whose vocation was to save lives. But their assignment was to patch up soldiers so that they could return to the front lines and kill other people or get killed themselves. This was the eternal, laugh-till-you-cry joke of “M*A*S*H.”

“M*A*S*H” stepped into, and outside of, a tradition of military sitcoms. “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and “The Phil Silvers Show” poked fun at the hardships and hustles of life in uniform; “Hogan’s Heroes,” which preceded “M*A*S*H” from 1965 to 1971 on CBS, was about shenanigans in a Nazi P.O.W. camp. But as for the abominations of war, these sitcoms, like the bumbling Sgt. Schultz of “Hogan’s,” saw nothing.

Only three years earlier, CBS had canceled the successful “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” amid controversy over its antiwar stances. But by the early 1970s, even die-hard anticommunists saw Vietnam as a lost cause. Pop culture was changing, too, as evidenced by the success of “All in the Family” and of Robert Altman’s 1970 film “M*A*S*H,” based on a novel by Richard Hooker (the pseudonym of H. Richard Hornberger).

The show’s creators, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, imagined a version of the story that was more pointedly political than Altman’s dark-comic film, and certainly more so than Hooker’s cheerfully raunchy book.

The staff of the 4077th, mostly draftees, channeled their frustration with their situation into pranks, drinking, adultery and gallows humor. The insubordinate-in-chief was Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda), who was dead-serious about surgery and dead-sarcastic about every other aspect of the wartime experience.

Casting Alda as the ensemble’s moral center and chaos agent was key. He could caper on set like the love child of Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (Hawkeye would imitate the latter while making rounds with patients). He gave Hawkeye’s flirtations with nurses a bantering lightness (though from a half-century’s distance, they can come across more like straight-up harassment).

But Alda also conveyed Hawkeye’s exhausted spleen, which the doctor poured into letters to his father in Maine, a frequent episode-framing device: “We work fast and we’re not dainty,” he writes in the pilot. “We try to play par surgery on this course. Par is a live patient.”

“M*A*S*H” borrowed bits from its sitcom predecessors. It was a workplace comedy, with a goofy boss, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), and uptight antagonists, like the gung-ho lovers Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville) and Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit). The staff wrestled with bureaucracy and gamed the system, as when the hyperefficient company clerk, Cpl. Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) mailed a jeep home one part at a time.

But the zaniness came with constant reminders that the realities of war could intrude at any moment, like the incoming choppers ferrying the wounded. The producers pushed CBS to dump the laugh track — what’s a studio audience doing in the middle of a war zone? — and eventually compromised on shutting off the yuk machine during operating-room scenes.

The show earned its belly laughs and its quiet. Even the sitcom-standard high jinks — dealing with the black market for medicine, inventing a fictional officer in order to donate his pay to an orphanage — were forms of protest.

In Season 1’s “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” Hawkeye meets a writer friend, doing research on the war, who later turns up on the operating table with a mortal wound. The executive producer Burt Metcalfe told the Hollywood Reporter that a CBS executive said, at the end of the season, that the episode “ruined ‘M*A*S*H.’”

The show would run for another 10 years.

“M*A*S*H” shows its age in various ways, including in a subplot in which Farr’s Klinger sought discharge from the Army by dressing in women’s clothes.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Comedy meets dramedy

“From any angle, ‘M*A*S*H’ is the season’s most interesting new entry,” the critic John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times in September 1972. Audiences came around in Season 2, after CBS moved the show to a better time slot. It spent most of the next decade in the ratings Top 10 (even as its own timeline hopscotched among different points from 1950 to 1953).

The early seasons worked in a vein of joke-heavy dark comedy, branching out into more story forms and social issues. A Season 2 episode involved a gay patient, decades before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, who had been beaten up by other soldiers in his unit. (“M*A*S*H” had its share of gay-tinged jokes — as well as a long-running subplot about Jamie Farr’s Cpl. Max Klinger trying to win a discharge by dressing as a woman — but they usually played as banter rather than gay panic.)

Then, in the Season 3 finale, the series exploded a land mine. Stevenson had signed a deal with NBC, and Henry was written off in affectionate sitcom style, with goodbyes and a party. In the episode’s closing moments, Radar — a farm kid who saw Henry as a father figure — walks into the operating room to read a bulletin: “Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”

Henry’s death kicked off the series’s peak era, in which it evolved from a lacerating comedy into something closer to what we would recognize today as dramedy.

The new commanding officer, Col. Sherman Potter, was a career Army man, played by Harry Morgan, once Jack Webb’s stoic sidekick in the revival of “Dragnet.” (Morgan played a crackpot general earlier in “M*A*S*H.”) More competent and less malleable than Henry, Potter had a gravitas befitting a show that was growing in ambition.

The Kafkaesque absurdism deepened, too, as in “The Late Captain Pierce,” in which Hawkeye is declared dead in a bureaucratic mix-up and tries to exit the war on a morgue bus. “I’m tired of death,” he says. “I’m tired to death. If you can’t lick it, join it.”

The experimental episode formats became more daring. “Point of View” is shot from the vantage of a wounded soldier whose throat injury renders him mute. In a repeated format, a reporter visits the 4077th for the new medium of television. The unit’s chaplain, Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher), described seeing surgeons cut into patients in the winter cold. “Steam rises from the body,” he says. “And the doctor will warm himself over the open wound. Could anyone look on that and not feel changed?”

Just as important, the show evolved its supporting characters, especially Margaret, spoofed as a harpy and sex object in the early seasons. In a Season 5 episode, she vents to her subordinate nurses about the pressures that have made her into the stickler they know. Eventually, she becomes a more complex foil and ally.

Swit and Larry Linville in the first season of “M*A*S*H.” Her character, Margaret, became more complex as the show went on.Credit...CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

The hilarious but one-dimensional Frank even earns some sympathy before his eventual exit, as Margaret throws him over for a fiancé. He’s replaced by the snobby, intelligent Boston Brahmin Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), while Hawkeye’s partner-in-pranks Capt. “Trapper” John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) makes way for the dry, laid-back family man Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell).

Even in the matured version of “M*A*S*H,” a lot has aged badly. A largely male story, it subscribed to the kind of counterculturalism that saw sexual freedom mostly as license for men. For much of the show’s run, various minor nurse characters were so interchangeable that they were repeatedly named “Able” and “Baker” — literally, “A” and “B” in an older version of the military phonetic alphabet.

Ironically, Alda — an outspoken Hollywood feminist and co-star of “Free to Be … You and Me” — became a disparaging shorthand for “sensitive men” among gender reactionaries in the “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” era. Late in the show’s run, “M*A*S*H” intermittently interrogated its own attitudes toward women, as in “Inga,” a Season 7 episode with Mariette Hartley as a Swedish doctor whose brilliance Hawkeye finds threatening.

Those later years of “M*A*S*H” could be didactic, and few fans would consider them among its best. The camp got cleaner and the hairstyles suspiciously modern. The show’s heart got as soft and the stories as shaggy as B.J.’s mustache. But the final seasons are interesting as a model for how TV would find ways to tell stories pitched between comedy and drama.

In the movie-length finale, which aired on Feb. 28, 1983, the laugh track, which had been scaled back over the seasons, was gone entirely. And while the scenario — the war finally ended, after three real-life years and 11 TV seasons — yielded the expected sentimental goodbyes and even a wedding, the core story was as dark as any the series had ever done.

Hawkeye is in a psychiatric hospital after a traumatic experience whose repressed memory his psychiatrist, Maj. Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus), is trying to tease out of him. Hawkeye recalls a carefree day trip to the beach, a bottle being passed around on the bus ride home. Then the booze becomes a plasma bottle; the bus had taken on a group of civilians and wounded soldiers. One Korean woman holds a chicken, whose noises threaten to expose the stopped bus to a passing enemy patrol. Hawkeye urges her to quiet the bird, and she ends up smothering it.

Finally — as you will never forget if you’ve seen the episode — the memory clears: The “chicken” becomes a baby. “You son of a bitch,” Hawkeye says, “Why did you make me remember that?”

Is it melodramatic? Sure. A downer? Of course. It is also, on rewatching, a striking bit of filmmaking for an ’80s sitcom. Hawkeye’s memory unfolds with the uncanny clarity of a dawning nightmare. No music cues you in to the horror; the images just grow more unsettling and the scene more grim. It is, in a way, like the journey of “M*A*S*H” over the years: A romp in the midst of a war zone goes, bit by bit, deeper into night and the heart of darkness.

And 106 million people came along for the ride. A year and a half later, Ronald Reagan, a Cold Warrior who was elected partly on a backlash to post-Vietnam sentiment, won a second term in a landslide. Yet more Americans than voted in that election tuned in to watch a big old liberal antiwar TV show.

After ‘M*A*S*H’

For most of its 11 seasons, “M*A*S*H” was one of TV’s most popular comedies. But its style went mostly unimitated for decades.

It’s not really until the 2000s that you see its heirs emerge. The British version of “The Office” shares its ability to turn from blistering comedy to seriousness. (Stephen Merchant, a creator, has talked about the influence of watching “M*A*S*H” episodes without laugh tracks in Britain.) The mockumentary format of the American “Office” and other comedies hark back to the news-interview episodes (while Dwight Schrute is a kind of Frank Burns of the paper-business wars).

Cable and streaming especially became fertile ground for finding laughs in grim situations. “Rescue Me” made trauma-based comedy in a post-9/11 firehouse, “Getting On” in a hospital geriatric wing. The Netflix prison series “Orange Is the New Black” was as thoroughly female as “M*A*S*H” was dominantly male, but it brought anarchic ensemble humor to a deadly dangerous setting.

In Hawkeye, meanwhile, you can see a forerunner of the modern-day dramedy antihero, charismatic but damaged and driven by anger. As a kid watching “M*A*S*H” reruns religiously, I loved Hawkeye’s rascally wit, his principles and his pranks. (One of my elementary-school music pageants had us sing the theme song, “Suicide Is Painless.” The ’70s were complicated.)

Rewatching episodes as an adult, I enjoy all that still. But he’s also kind of a jerk! He’s self-righteous, attention-seeking, snide and, if you’re on his bad side, a bit of a bully. In a Season 5 episode, Sidney Freedman diagnosed him succinctly: “Anger turned inward is depression. Anger turned sideways is Hawkeye.”

This describes not a few difficult modern dramedy protagonists, human and otherwise. In one of the best episodes of “BoJack Horseman,” built entirely around the self-destructive equine protagonist’s eulogy at a funeral, you can hear the echo of the episode “Hawkeye,” in which Alda’s character, concussed in a jeep crash, spends nearly the full half-hour monologuing manically at a perplexed Korean family, to stave off unconsciousness.

Making serious comedy is a feat of balance, and some might argue that the legacy of “M*A*S*H” was to give sitcoms license to be self-important, unfunny bummers. In a 2009 episode of the TV-biz sendup “30 Rock” — a proponent of the joke-packed school of entertainment if ever there was one — Alda made a tongue-in-cheek version of that critique himself.

Playing the biological father of the NBC executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), he witnesses Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), a performer on the sketch-show-within-a-show, crying over the memory of being too “chicken” to dissect a frog in high school, which he’d covered up with a phony story of having been asked by a drug dealer to stab a snitch named “Baby.”

“A guy crying about a chicken and a baby?” Alda’s character says. “I thought this was a comedy show.”

Of course, if you got the joke, it was precisely because “M*A*S*H” did its job. It proved, memorably, that a great comedy could cut deep and leave scars. A half-century later, “M*A*S*H” has had the last laugh, or lack thereof.

[bountyofbeads]

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/sunday/trump-reality-tv.html

Great analysis by James Poniewozik🤔 To understand the wacky, outrageous, demented mind of Trump is to know that Trump is nothing more than a self-grandized TV character (D-rated).

"To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy."

"And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch."

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV

Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.

By James Poniewozik | Published September 6, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 8, 2019 9:00 AM ET |

Mr. Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The Times and the author of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America.”

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: Never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

[representationsinparksandre-blog]

How Parks and Rec Represents the Complex World of Politics and Political Agreement/Disagreement

Along with successfully representing the diversities surrounding race, injustices of gender, and different economic classes in the media, Parks and Rec also dives into the complex world of politics and attempts to simplify it for their viewers. I mean, the show is named “Parks and Recreation” after all based on where the characters work, and their particular department deals with a lot of local government issues in Pawnee; it’s pretty clear that a majority of the series’ episodes involve politics in some way. Parks and Rec accomplishes depicting how people with vastly different political views can succeed in getting along with each other, learning from each other, and ultimately agreeing that each person’s opinion is valid.

To start off, let’s give the show’s motivations some background. Co-creator Michael Schur stated in a 2015 interview with The Huffington Post that the development of Parks and Rec was initially inspired by him and Greg Daniels’ frustration with the overall political process in America, and more specifically, the bitterness surrounding the 2008 presidential election. Pawnee, Indiana is intended to be a small city environment where dysfunction and disagreement between the citizens are quite common. Its residents do indeed have many different political views, but most of the time they keep plugging away to set aside their differences and come to a decision to ultimately make a positive change for their community. In this way, Parks and Rec actually represents a sort-of-utopian society where everything is rainbows and butterflies. The creators strive to suggest that coming together to find solutions for community issues is truly a lot easier than it seems in real life. Schur described his viewpoints by discussing that “in very broad strokes, Republicans and Democrats in this country simply don’t talk to each other and they don’t try to fix problems… the sort of cynicism of government, I think in my opinion, is worse than it’s ever been. And we just wanted to say one guy could have a set of extremely fervent beliefs that run completely counter to the beliefs of his coworker and they can still just get along and respect each other and admire each other and find things in common and they can sit down and have a glass of whiskey together at the end of a long night.”

This is seen directly between the relationship Leslie Knope has with her co-worker Ron Swanson. The show resists coming right out and stating Leslie Knope’s political party, but the writers make it evident in her beliefs and actions that she leans left and passionately supports the representation of strong women in politics. She is a loud and proud feminist who ends up running and successfully winning a seat in Pawnee’s city council with her supportive husband Ben by her side as her campaign manager. As the only female on the city council sitting next to stuffy, uneducated men, Leslie makes it a point to be the progressive woman with energy to get the job done and make Pawnee a better place to live. On the other hand, Ron Swanson is an avid libertarian and absolutely despises how the government can obtain his personal information. His personal views and beliefs are not so much intensely conservative, he just really hates the idea of the government in general. He’s even outrageously (yet hysterically) stated, “the government is a greedy piglet that suckles on a taxpayer’s teat until they have sore, chapped nipples”.

Regardless of their extremely opposing views of how the government should interact with citizens and society, Leslie and Ron remain close acquaintances throughout the ups and downs they have in the series. They also find certain issues and experiences they can actually fundamentally agree on. An example of this is when a big corporation named Gryzzl proposes a buyout of the land where a small, family-owned business called JJ’s Diner lies. Leslie, caring deeply for the prominence of local businesses, and Ron, a self-proclaimed “simple man” that appreciates a hearty breakfast, conclusively find a way to keep JJ's Diner alive and well. They come together to look for other locations in Pawnee where Gryzzl can purchase land that isn’t even used, rather than buying the land where an authentic breakfast restaurant is. This outlines the creator’s objective of creating a climate in the media where it’s not too difficult to imagine a world where people of different political beliefs can happily coexist.

Here’s a Youtube video that perfectly showcases how Ron and Leslie famously agreed to disagree:

Parks and Rec also finds ways to educate their audience on the mechanisms of “real world” politics. There are a vast number of episodes that install political lessons and tips when it comes to engaging with politics and elections, especially during the season where Leslie is running for Pawnee’s city council. Certain episodes include messages to not believe everything to read, follow your conscience when it comes to political candidates, consider the reality of the outcomes that follow politicians statements, and as I previously discussed, make an attempt to stay friends with those who do not share the same points of view. In this way, Parks and Rec leaves the sphere of being a workplace-sitcom to becoming a politically informative comedy.  

To finish my final blog post off, I’d like to include a few comical quotes from the series that demonstrate how the characters of Parks and Rec view the complex world of politics, government, and the beauty of community life in Pawnee, Indiana:

“When I was 18, I ran for mayor of my small town and won. Little bit of anti-establishment voter rebellion I guess. Here's the thing, though, about 18-year-olds. They're idiots. So I pretty much ran the place into the ground and after two months got impeached. Worst part was my parents grounded me.” - Ben Wyatt (Leslie’s husband)

“I like Tom [Haverford]. He doesn’t do a lot of work around here. He shows zero imitative. He’s not a team player. He’s never wanted to go that extra mile. Tom is exactly what I’m looking for in a government employee.” - Ron Swanson

“These people are members of the community that care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.” - Leslie Knope

“The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that’s beautiful.” - Ron Swanson

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Works Cited:

Lapidos, Juliet. “The Politics of Parks and Recreation.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 25 Apr. 2011, slate.com/culture/2011/04/the-politics-of-parks-and-recreation.html.

Poniewozik, James. “Knope and Change: The Politics of Parks and Recreation.” Time, Time, 22 Jan. 2015, time.com/3678205/parks-and-recreation-politics/.

Ryan, Maureen. “'Parks And Recreation,' 'The Wire' And The Politics Of Pawnee.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 Jan. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/13/parks-and-recreation-final-season_n_6459726.html.

Winarski, Claire. “What ‘Parks and Recreation’ Taught Me about IRL Politics.” HelloGiggles, 19 Apr. 2016, hellogiggles.com/lifestyle/parks-and-rec-politics-lessons/.

[graffjamie]

Sweet Baby James cover James Taylor tribute James Graff Takamine 12 string  "Sweet Baby James" is a song written and recorded by James Taylor that serves as the opening and title track from his 1970 breakthrough album Sweet Baby James. Taylor considers it his best song. Now the First of December was covered with snow And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frostin' With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go The song is composed as a waltz, in 3/4 time. The chorus echoes the lullaby sentiment, with a reference to "Rock-a-bye Baby". "Sweet Baby James" was included on Taylor's diamond-selling Greatest Hits 1976 compilation. Invariably, the second verse mentions of the Massachusetts Turnpike, Stockbridge, The Berkshires, and Boston bring cheers from people in the audience who had lived in Massachusetts...concert in Tanglewood or Great Woods... He performed the song as part of his set on the first episode of Saturday Night Live's second season, which aired 1976. 15 years later, Taylor performed the song again on the Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live 1991. In the "Four Together" benefit concert arranged by Harry Chapin in 1977, John Denver sang the harmony part of the chorus on this song. Jay Leno requested Taylor's live performance of the song on his final The Tonight Show... Taylor performed the song when campaigning for Deval Patrick's re-election... Tom Rush, who made a practice of recording material from the best new singer songwriters of the era, put it on his October 1970 album Wrong End of the Rainbow. The Seldom Scene added harmony on their bluegrass version, released on their debut album Act 1 in 1972. Highway 101 closed their 1989 album Paint the Town with it. Daniel Greaves of The Watchmen often performs it a cappella during concerts. The song is sung by Hank Heywood (Thomas F. Wilson) in the season four episode "Tender Is the Nate" of Legends of Tomorrow, to lull a minotaur to sleep. It is later reprised in the season finale "Hey, World!" as "Sweet Baby Nate" to inspire enough love to revive the deceased Nate Heywood. Browne, D. . Fire and Rain. Da Capo. White, T. Long Ago and Far Away. Omnibus Press Morse, Steve "Sweet savvy James After 20 years, Taylor is still a New England favorite". Boston Globe "James Taylor: My Life in 15 Songs". Rolling Stone. White, T. "James Taylor Looks Back on His Classics". Classic Oldies Wmid. Easy 93.1 FM. James Taylor talks about Sweet Baby James 2007. JamesTaylor.com. Edgers, Geoff  "Sweet benefactor James". Boston Globe. Berger, Joseph  "When the Face in the Crowd Is Grandmotherly". The New York Times. Janovitz, B. "Sweet Baby James". AllMusic. Perrone, J.E., eThe Album: A Guide to Pop Music's Most Provocative, Influential, and Important Creations. Smith, Andy  "Sweet Baby James finds constituency". The Providence Journal. White, Timothy Long Ago and Far Away: James Taylor, His Life and Music. London: Omnibus Press. Poniewozik, James"Leno to America: Goodbye! I'm Not Going Anywhere!". Time. Finucane, Martin . "Patrick finds he's got a friend in singer James Taylor". Boston Globe. "Under the 'Covers' With James Taylor". Good Morning America. ABC. Shoemaker, Allison . "The Heywoods meet Hemingway in a rambunctious, slightly scattered Legends Of Tomorrow". The A.V. Club. Mitovich, Matt Webb  "Legends of Tomorrow Boss Confirms [Spoiler]'s Exit, Breaks Down Crossover Tease and Season 5's Big Bad". TVLine James Taylor Studio albums James TaylorSweet Baby JamesMud Slide Slim and the Blue HorizonOne Man DogWalking ManGorillaIn the PocketJTFlagDad Loves His WorkThat's Why I'm HereNever Die YoungNew Moon ShineHourglassOctober RoadCoversBefore This WorldAmerican Standard Live albums Live/Best LiveOne Man BandAmchitkaLive at the Troubadour Holiday albums A Christmas AlbumJames Taylor at Christmas Compilation albums Greatest HitsClassic SongsGreatest Hits Volume 2The Best of James Taylor Extended plays Other Covers Singles "Carolina in My Mind""Knocking 'Round the Zoo""Sweet Baby James""Fire and Rain""Country Road""You've Got a Friend""Long Ago and Far Away""Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight""One Man Parade""Hymn""Mockingbird" (with Carly Simon)"How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)""Mexico""Shower the People""Woman's Gotta Have It""Handy Man""Your Smiling Face""Honey Don't Leave L.A.""Devoted to You" (with Carly Simon)"Up on the Roof""Her Town Too""Hard Times""Everyday""It's Growing""Change" Other songs "Night Owl""Something in the Way She Moves""Sunny Skies""Steamroller Blues""You Can Close Your Eyes""Highway Song""I Was a Fool to Care""Bartender's Blues""Secret O' Life""Millworker""Summer's Here" Related articles DiscographyJames Taylor and the Original Flying MachineWorkingVote for Change TourTroubadour Reunion TourCarly SimonSally TaylorKate TaylorLivingston TaylorAlex TaylorIsaac M. TaylorTwo-Lane Blacktop Categories: Songs about Boston1970 songsSongs written by James TaylorJames Taylor songsSong recordings produced by Ashwar

[therealbarkinginthedark]

THE REAL DONALD TRUMP IS A CHARACTER ON TV

THE REAL DONALD TRUMP IS A CHARACTER ON TV

By James Poniewozik

Mr. Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The Times and the author of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had…

[izayoi1242]

Trump, TV and America

By Unknown Author James Poniewozik discusses “Audience of One,” and Bina Venkataraman talks about “The Optimist’s Telescope.” Published: September 7, 2019 at 01:30AM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/2UBspOS via IFTTT

[topnewsfromtheworld]

Trump, TV and America

By Unknown Author James Poniewozik discusses “Audience of One,” and Bina Venkataraman talks about “The Optimist’s Telescope.” Published: September 6, 2019 at 05:30PM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/2UBspOS

[thegreato1ne]

Trump, TV and America by Unknown Author

Trump, TV and America by Unknown Author

By Unknown Author

James Poniewozik discusses “Audience of One,” and Bina Venkataraman talks about “The Optimist’s Telescope.”

Published: September 6, 2019 at 06:30PM

from NYT Books https://ift.tt/2UBspOS via NYT Full Post

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: In Baiting Candidates and Stoking Conflict, Did CNN’s Presidential Debates Go Too Far?

(NEW YORK) — CNN poked and prodded for fault lines among Democrats running for president during both nights of debates this week, and that wasn’t to everyone’s liking.

The network took a hit on social media and among some critics for baiting candidates and provoking conflict. Drawing out differences in policy prescriptions and records, and seeing how politicians aspiring for the nation’s highest office handle pressure, is precisely the point of a debate, however.

“If we were doing the debate again tomorrow, we would do it exactly the same way,” Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief, said Thursday.

CNN reached 10.7 million people for Wednesday’s second night of the debate, up 2 million from what a different batch of candidates reached the night before. Both nights were well below what NBC News had for the first round of debates in June. They had one thing in common, though: for both debates, the presence of former Vice President Joe Biden meant for a larger audience.

At the beginning of Wednesday’s debate, CNN headed straight toward a conflict between Biden and Kamala Harris, whose clash over segregation was the most memorable moment of NBC’s debate. Addressing Harris, moderator Dana Bash noted that Biden had criticized her health plan as a “have-it-every-which-way approach and says it’s part of a continuing pattern of equivocating about your health care stance. What do you say to that?”

After the two candidates went back and forth, Bash told Biden that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio “said Democrats who wanted to keep the private insurance industry are defending a health care system that is not working. What do you say to that?”

That pattern was repeated throughout the debate, like when moderator Jake Tapper said to Biden, “Sen. (Cory) Booker called your new criminal justice reform plan, quote, ‘an inadequate solution to what is a raging crisis in our country.’ Why is Sen. Booker wrong?”

The New York Times‘ James Poniewozik wrote that discord that erupted during the debate was multiplied by CNN’s “smackdown aesthetic. You fight or you die — the price of attention is combat.” The Washington Post‘s Hank Stuever said CNN was “conflict-obsessed.”

Caroline Franke wrote in Variety that CNN hit the candidates with leading questions aimed more at starting fights than shedding light, and were looking for clips that would attract attention online and in reruns. “They chase explosive moments, not the kind of kind of insight that people actually need to understand where a candidate stands,” Franke wrote.

  Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist and author of “Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump,” argued in favor of more open-ended questions. “The effort to provoke conflict went far overboard,” he said. “A more useful approach would be to focus more extensively on the range of issues that the next president has to contend with.”

The critical comments were echoed by many expressions of disgust on social media, although that’s a venue where the negative often dominates. “What this shows is that there are a lot of people out there among the Democrats who don’t want to see what President Obama once called a circular firing squad,” said Frank Sesno, head of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

Many Democrats want to focus on defeating President Donald Trump instead of seeing a bloodletting within the party, but “that’s what’s supposed to happen now,” Sesno said. Booker displayed exactly that attitude when immigration reform was discussed. “We are playing into Republican hands who have a very different view,” he said, “and they’re trying to divide us against each other.”

It’s worth noting, however, that much of the conflict was generated by the candidates, not CNN. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, for instance, came prepared to confront Biden on what he wrote in a newspaper column decades ago. De Blasio tried to goad Biden into denouncing immigration policies of the Obama administration.

CNN could be faulted for giving short shrift to issues like climate change, but the network said it listened closely to what its audience cited as the most important issues.

Besides testing the candidates, the debates offer the Democrats a chance to refine and test its messages before taking on Trump in an election that’s more than 15 months away. Sesno, author of “Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors,” is a former CNN Washington bureau chief but said he isn’t afraid to criticize his old network when merited. In this case, he said CNN planners clearly spent a lot of time thinking through the issues and framed the questions to cause meaningful and strong exchanges between the candidates.

“In my view, that’s what a debate should be,” he said.

By DAVID BAUDER / AP on August 02, 2019 at 07:42PM

[globalnaijanews]

‘Game of Thrones’ Is Going Out Fighting. So Will Its Audience. by JAMES PONIEWOZIK By JAMES PONIEWOZIK The arguments over HBO’s dark fantasy made it the signature show of an era when no one agrees on anything. Published: May 18, 2019 at 01:00AM from NYT Arts via IFTTT

[ciuvba-kouvta]

‘Game of Thrones’ Is Going Out Fighting. So Will Its Audience.

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK The arguments over HBO’s dark fantasy made it the signature show of an era when no one agrees on anything. Published: May 17, 2019 at 03:00PM from NYT Arts https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/arts/television/game-of-thrones-season-8.html?partner=IFTTT via IFTTT

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

By Galen Druke

  More: Apple Podcasts | ESPN App | RSS

“Television is the nervous system of America and American democracy,” according to chief New York Times television critic James Poniewozik. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Poniewozik discusses how the evolution of television from three networks to today’s more scattered landscape helps explain our current politics. It’s the case he makes in his book, “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.”

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays.

Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

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The Best and Worst Moments of the 2019 Emmys

The 71st Primetime Emmy Awards began with awards for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and ended with a final big win for “Game of Thrones.” But between those expected results were plenty of genuine surprises and exciting outcomes.

“Fleabag,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s biting and moving Amazon series, dominated the comedy category, including beating out the longtime Emmy favorite “Veep” for top comedy. Unexpected but welcome acting awards went to Jodie Comer and Waller-Bridge. Billy Porter made history as the first openly gay winner for best actor in a drama. Michelle Williams and Patricia Arquette gave memorably heartfelt acceptance speeches.

Inevitably, some bits flopped hard: A misguided announcing gimmick tried people’s patience and Masked Singers infested the Microsoft Theater like gigantic, colorful vermin. Here are some of the highs and lows of Sunday’s Emmy extravaganza. — JEREMY EGNER

Homer and Friends Fill the Host Void

Much of the pre-ceremony coverage focused on the fact that the Emmys were going hostless this year, and sure enough the night opened with none other than Homer Simpson, who appeared to stroll across the stage (augmented-reality-style) before getting leveled by an animated piano.

The bit went on with Anthony Anderson, star of “Black-ish,” leaping from his seat. “We’re going to go without a host tonight!” he said, making it his mission to save the show. He found his savior in the multi-Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, who introduced a montage of clips by saying: “Television has never been this damn good.”

The opening was A-list enough that some viewers may not have even realized there wasn’t a ringleader. Or at least, didn’t care.

But some people did, or at least pretended to, which prompted plenty of laughs from the audience. In a bit later in the telecast, the late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel dragged the show’s format. “Well, well, well, how’s the old no-host thing going?” Colbert said.

“What a dumb idea,” Kimmel responded. “You know what has a host? Applebee’s has a host.”

We’re “the real victims,” Colbert said. “If we let this slide, the next thing you know, they’ll start using Alexa to present the nominees.” Which, of course, cued the voice of Amazon’s smart speaker assistant, Alexa: “O.K., here are the nominees for lead actress in a comedy series.” — MAYA SALAM

Thomas Lennon Sort of Agreed With His Critics

At least he was self-aware.CreditMatt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

In lieu of a host, the actor and comedian Thomas Lennon was on hand to offer commentary and jabs between segments. But the jokey announcing just did not work, which he himself seemed to admit at one point, saying “This is why people don’t do this, because it sucks.” Part of it was the material — I’m not sure Chernobyl jokes are the way to go — but a bigger issue was how tacked on it felt, too separate from the actual broadcast. Some comments felt like a mic was accidentally picking up snark, and the timing never seemed quite right, so it never developed a real rhythm. — MARGARET LYONS

Phoebe Waller-Bridge: The Pervy, Angry Belle of the Ball

“This is a love story.” The line introduced the staggering second season of “Fleabag,” and it fairly described the Emmys’ reception of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who won awards for writing and starring in the Amazon series, which beat out “Veep” for best comedy and also collected an award for comedy directing. And Waller-Bridge, with the casual, quick-witted charm she displayed in the series, was the insouciant queen of the awards. “It’s really wonderful to know, and reassuring,” she said, “that a dirty, pervy, angry, messed-up woman can make it to the Emmys.” And this year, she made the Emmys her own. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Billy Porter Makes History

Billy Porter, who stars in “Pose,” the FX drama set in the New York City ball scene during the 1980s and ’90s, broke ground on Sunday. The actor became the first openly gay winner for best actor in a drama, and true-to-form, his speech was soul-stirring and heartfelt. As Porter quoted James Baldwin and asserted that “We all have the right” to exist, the ceremony took on a new layer of significance. — AISHA HARRIS

Did you know there’s a show called “The Masked Singer”? If you watched this year’s Emmy ceremony, you certainly know now.

It’s to be expected, of course, that the network showcasing the awards will find opportunities to plug their own content. But the shilling for Fox’s bizarre-o competition show — in which celebrities of varying stature and relevance sing pop songs while hidden behind ridiculously elaborate costumes and masks — was next-level.

Before the ceremony began, the disguised contestants for the upcoming second season were trotted out on the purple carpet. During the show, they popped up onstage, as a logo in the corner of the screen and in multiple commercials. Perhaps worst of all was a too-long and very unfunny bit between the “Masked Singer” host Nick Cannon and one of the judges, Ken Jeong. It’s doubtful this overkill converted the once-blissfully oblivious into believers. — AISHA HARRIS

About That Bit …

Social media segments are common at awards shows these days, but they’re always a complete drag. No one quite seemed to get Jeong and Cannon’s tedious TikTok routine, which included making a video of the audience. It was also awkwardly sandwiched between Alex Borstein’s speech about her grandmother surviving the Holocaust and the award for best comedy writing, which went to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was a lousy bit unto itself, but the placement made it seem even worse. — MARGARET LYONS

Michelle Williams Brings the House Down

Michelle Williams, named outstanding lead actress in a limited series for “Fosse/Verdon,” had one of the most enthusiastically received speeches of the night. It was a rallying cry for giving women in Hollywood the same money and resources as those granted to male actors. “When you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value, and then where do they put that value?” she asked. “They put it into their work.”

Williams has drawn the salary short straw before: She was slated to earn less than 1 percent of what her co-star Mark Wahlberg was getting for the film “All the Money in the World.” — NANCY COLEMAN

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Bill Hader presenting the award for best actor in a limited series was bright, silly and short. “What’s a limited series, Bill?” “A limited series is a show that’s been canceled.” The show didn’t suffer from a lack of hosts per se, but if the Academy wanted to go a different way next year, consider these two for the gig. — MARGARET LYONS

A Poignant Moment for the Exonerated Five

Jharrel Jerome’s win as best actor in a limited series, for playing a wrongfully convicted youth in Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” was a welcome surprise enough. But the most striking moment of his acceptance speech came when he called attention to the Exonerated Five — the men whose story of injustice and racist stereotyping the series brought to life — who stood, free and vindicated, in the audience. The Emmys is always a celebration of entertainment and imagination, but for a moment it became something else: history. — JAMES PONIEWOZIK

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‘Game of Thrones’ Is Going Out Fighting. So Will Its Audience.

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK The arguments over HBO’s dark fantasy made it the signature show of an era when no one agrees on anything. Published: May 18, 2019 at 09:00AM from NYT Arts https://nyti.ms/2LTSqIC via IFTTT