LETTERS
LETTERS Do leave home without it Just read your story about your experience with Amex card ["Tilting at Windmills," September], and— for your records—I can add one not from last week, last...
...The value of pets Had Malcolm Gladwell ["Fumbling on Reform," September] dug just a bit deeper he would have found that the recently arrived president of the University of Oklahoma was merely reiterating a joke first used by a predecessor some 35 years ago...
...Its original form was "We must build a school the football team can be proud of...
...The whole country seems preoccupied with "brains over brawn"—egged on by fad preachers heralding the "Information Society," as if overpriced newsletters will keep our planes in the air and our cars on the road...
...after that, they started demanding that I return my card...
...I am no athlete—they used to toss me around the locker room—but why this elite attitude...
...And while it may sound cruel to thrust an athlete into the real world after four years of make-believe classes, is it really...
...DAVID ROSS Bellevue, Washington...
...Yet Chicago and New York TV are not really fair representatives of the commercial local news you'll see on many smaller-market stations, which often do constitute at least a partial alternative to a monopoly newspaper...
...While less than 1 percent of the athletes who complete a college football program make the pros, is the percentage of Juilliard graduates who make Broadway or the Met much higher...
...Yes, I'd say it was attempted bribery...
...An envelope bearing the company's name goes automatically to the machine...
...It's here that a_reporter does most of his own producing and research—by necessity if not choice...
...It is not worth the considerable time and the emotional turmoil of dealing with computers in a company where the human factor has long been zero...
...Here is one line from the letter I wrote at the time: "I no longer wish to be a cardholder in American Express...
...I write to that person or to the credit department of whomever I am dealing with...
...Dreams die hard in any field...
...TOM ACKERMAN Washington, D.C...
...You've Ruined Our Foreign Policy" [Marci McDonald, September]: "...a hockey game with Edmonton Oilers' superstar Wayne Gretsky (sic), to which the ambassador—who had to be briefed on Gretsky's (sic) identity...
...RORY FORAN Glen Burnie, Maryland Vanna White's wheel Nolo contendere to most of the observations about big-market local TV news in John Eisendrath's September piece, "Producer Kidnaps Councilman...
...And if he ends up delivering the chef's salad instead of iambic pentameter, perhaps some of the insight of the MFA waiting the next table will rub off...
...I cut up my card six years ago...
...EVELYN UMPHREY Cranston, Rhode Island Wayne who...
...I wonder how many tens of thousands of people have risked ulcers trying to penetrate American Express's computer nightmare...
...Public TV proves that daily...
...Give him a Bachelor of Athletics and don't make him pretend he's a Renaissance man...
...An athlete can always get an academic education if he wants it...
...But big league sports is for the young...
...One of my complaints of this marvelous Modern World is that we have lost the human touch...
...Heartiest congrats on your resistance to the temptation of sleaze...
...Walter Jacobson to the contrary, the medium can tolerate subtleties of facts and issues...
...Instead of cruising downtown, he'll have spent four years learning discipline, conditioning, how to perform under pressure, how it feels to excel, and how it feels to fail—lessons most of us take some trouble to avoid in our search for a life free of pain or jeopardy...
...Gotlieb knew who Gretzky was, he probably also knew how to spell his name _correctly...
...McDonald's hatchet job is bad enough (it reads, incidentally, like it was lifted directly from the pages of The Washington Post's "Style" section—that's not a compliment) without accusing the ambassador of that inexcusable faux pas...
...LETTERS Do leave home without it Just read your story about your experience with Amex card ["Tilting at Windmills," September], and— for your records—I can add one not from last week, last month, or last year, but from 1967...
...The biggest problem facing sports today is media overcoverage that raises impossible expectations, and a double standard which tolerates and even expects a certain amount of decadence from most celebrities but vilifies an athlete at the first hint of human weakness...
...And don't cut the programs back...
...But I believe the observant would note a difference in the style and even substance of the product once he focused beyond the Big-8 megamarkets...
...My solution has been to find a name on the first dunning letter...
...JOHN GEORGE Edmond, Oklahoma Malcolm Gladwell, referring to college football players, writes "that their brains are, in the long run, more important than their brawn," and argues that for a school to allow an athlete to pursue sports full-time is wrong...
...From "Damn You, Connie...
...I got so frustrated that I turned in my card to them...
...What outrageous conduct on their part...
...where a management more closely attuned, if not seriously committed, to that community, deals with substance as a given (to wit: KING TV's three-hour prime time special last year on the economy of Washington state, which won my company's second DuPont award in as many years...
...If anything, there are too few opportunities for young people who don't care for academia...
...RICHARD H. HUTZLER Falmouth, Maine Three cheers for your article about American Express...
...America needs carpenters, mechanics, truck drivers, and garbage collectors just as surely as it needs great thinkers...
...Deliver me...
...Let him play 49 hours a week if he wants to...
...Eisendrath's most depressing observation, however, is an industry-wide fact of life: nothing a commercial news executive does or doesn't do can defeat a competing programmer who slots "Wheel of Fortune" or any of its escapist variants against his edition of real life (more or less...
...BRENT ASHABRANNER Alexandria, Virginia I learned long ago that computers do not answer letters and that mechanical letter-openers discard everything but checks...
...Not only is it very probable that Mr...
...The problem is ratings-driven management that writes off any category of news deemed to distract from its overriding aim of delivering advertisers the biggest possible . bulk of audience...
...whether sentient or otherwise...
...News directors in cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago are on record as consciously targeting their news to demographic levels even lower than the low common denominators sought by the New York Post, People magazine, and the like...
...I haven't had an Amex card since '67, and never will...
...No one is forcing him to suit up...
...Even given the extent of divorcement from reality of most politicians and diplomats, it is extremely unlikely that any Canadian would have to be told who Wayne Gretzky is...
Vol. 18 • November 1986 • No. 10
