Excerpts
FRANK, REUVEN
Reuven Frank was the NL's "On Television" columnist from June 1992 until his death at age 85 on February 5, 2006. He twice served as president of NBC News, won seven Emmys for documentaries he...
...January 11-25, 1999] It IS at least partly true that primaries have made the conventions meaningless...
...They are clearly a more democratic means of selecting the candidates for our highest offices...
...July/August, 2004] WHEN at summer's end the present network anchors appeared in the hurricane soaked streets of the Gulf Coast—no press officers, no embedding—they debated, contradicted and shamed the public officials they interviewed...
...No one would take in a nickel without them...
...What it sells, its product, is audiences...
...That way viewers would not be subjected to journalists dressed as big game hunters reporting from wind-swept hillsides every time a detachment of U.S...
...September Ó-20, 1993] Bosnia is real...
...Any impresario will tell you how unwise it is to show people what they do not want to see...
...For a fleeting moment, television journalism regained the trust of its audience...
...The discussion today concerns making the primary system more logical, or structured, or fair to the electorates in the states that go to the polls late in the schedule...
...Special Forces searched a cave in the Tohu Bohu mountains and found three computer disks, some tattered old clothing and a street map of downtown Albuquerque...
...November/December, 2005...
...J. Simpson in a Ford Bronco was not real...
...You know a major story when a Fellîniesque helicopter drops an anchor into it...
...July/August, 2000] In A BETTER world all-news cable TV channels would come on when there was news and stay dark when there wasn't...
...Several years into that struggle, we in television news started showing Americans what they did not want to see...
...It cannot be taken away, or waived—any more than one may waive the right to a fair trial and choose an unfair one...
...Even if viewers are not customers, though, they are as important as shoes are to shoe stores...
...Even reporters and editors may not understand that press freedom speaks less of their own prerogatives than of the right of all Americans to a press untrammeled by government influence (just as freedom of religion is not the right of the clergy but of the congregation...
...But for some years the function of the anchor has been less to give the news than to validate it...
...Matt Drudge started on the Internet...
...It hardly matters, so long as it enhances shareholder value...
...Its customers, those who pay gobs of money for the audiences, are the advertisers...
...the trade gap is real...
...I believe this phenomenon did indeed begin with Vietnam...
...They told America about dehumanization, ineptitude and failure...
...But what all these discussions are really about is how to sustain interest, how to keep the result from revealing itself too early, how to keep reporters on the buses and the politicians on television...
...This is not a criticism of them...
...Nor would they, in turn, be followed by a studio piece, ostentatiously labeled "LIVE," featuring a retired general with a pointer animadverting on just how rugged rugged terrain can be—something he learned not during his years of command, but in Army courses teaching outgoing generals how to supplement their pensions...
...June 2-1Ó, 1997] When ADVERTISERS figure out how to make their messages effective on the Internet, it will become the principal news medium...
...Moreover, programs are not its product, nor viewers its customers...
...There will be no editing, none of what sociologists call "mediation...
...It used to be said that by his presence Walter Cronkite reassured America things were not as bad as the news he reported would indicate, that David Brinkley put some fizz in the Eisenhower years, that in the eye of the beholder the anchor was the news...
...It is, moreover, a right...
...He twice served as president of NBC News, won seven Emmys for documentaries he produced, and was the author of Oui of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News...
...Following are some excerpts from his columns: Commercial network television is not a sport, it is a competitive manufacturing business...
...September 21, 1992] WHAT an ANCHOR does, the role he/she plays will vastly puzzle some social archeologist digging up our shards 2,000 years hence...
...It was television...
...What will tomorrow bring...
...July 4-18, 1994] A FREE PRESS does not belong to the journalists, it belongs to the public...
...tribal massacres are real...
...Even more than in our battle coverage, that was the case in our approach to protests and other antiwar activities, climaxing in the riots and police beatings outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago...
...Compared to Matt Drudge, Geraldo Rivera is Walter Lippmann...
...March/April, 2002] JOURNALISTS and people who study journalism are reporting, in both research and anecdote, an unprecedented level of distrust of the Fourth Estate in this country...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
