The Looping Effect

From the Archives: Christmas in Korea 1953

Comic-Con 2010 Pictures (from Tested)

Thanks, Tested.com for hooking us up with 850 images from Comic-con 2010 in San Diego. You make us all want to embrace our inner-nerd. See all of the images on the Tested.com Blog.

Where have you gone Daniel Shorr?

Just days after the passing of Daniel Shorr, one of journalism's greatest sons, I am reminded what we will miss without Shorr as part of our daily news ritual: Standards. Empathy. Honor.

Okay. I'll admit, these are not just missing since the death of Mr. Shorr. These elements, the elements that made the journalist's profession worth aspiring to, have been waning for some time. It is also unfair to place this burden on the memory of Mr. Shorr. He could not have saved the profession on his own. But his work served as an example to those who listened to and watched him; every story a reminder that caring about your subject matter and reporting those stories with the courage of your convictions were acts of honor.

Last weekend a house fire took the lives of two women - mothers, sisters, friends. Police and fire officials ruled the fire suspicious and the names of the victims were withheld from local media until positive identifications could be made and next of kin contacted.

Most local media outlets conducted interviews with neighbors, police and, in some cases, friends of the families. Most local media continued to withhold the names of the victims. This practice protects the family who may not yet know about the loss of their loved ones and it preserves the integrity of police and fire department investigations. It is one of the last acts of courtesy extended by an increasingly vicious news media.

One young reporter, eager to get the scoop, violated this trust. He reported the story and then delivered the names of the victims to the viewing audience. His source: a Facebook page established as a memorial to the victims.

The reporter did two things wrong here. First, he shared the identity of the victims before public officials permitted him to do so. The reasons for withholding the names are listed above and his violation of this practice is clear.

His second mistake is somewhat less clear to the casual viewer. He sited Facebook as the source of his information. This citation was somewhat disingenuous because in all probability, the reporter already had the name of the victims, either from a source at the police or fire department or from his discussions with victims' neighbors and friends near the scene of the fire.

In the fast-paced world of modern journalism, it is easy to allow oneself to take shortcuts. Its easy to blur an ethical line to break a story, to get ahead, to be the first. But in this instance there was nothing gained by the reporters misdeed. The story was not contingent on the identity of these women. It was easier left unsaid.

Daniel Schorr - Dies at age 93 (from NPR)

Daniel Schorr passed away on Friday, July 23, 2010. Obituaries, a photo gallery and an archive of Schorr’s commentaries for NPR are available at NPR.org.

Veteran reporter Daniel Schorr, the last of Edward R. Murrow's legendary CBS team still fully active in journalism, currently interprets national and international events as senior news analyst for NPR.

Schorr's career of more than six decades has earned him many awards for journalistic excellence, including three Emmys, and decorations from European heads of state. He has also been honored by civil liberties groups and professional organizations for his defense of the First Amendment.

In 1996, he received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Golden Baton for "Exceptional Contributions to Radio and Television Reporting and Commentary." The Golden Baton is the most prestigious award in the field of broadcasting and is considered the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Other awards include a George Foster Peabody personal award for "a lifetime of uncompromising reporting of the highest integrity," the George Polk radio commentary award for "interpretations of national and international events," and the Distinguished Service Award of the American Society of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications. Schorr has also been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Society of Professional Journalists.

In 2002, Schorr was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also in 2002, Boston public radio station WBUR and Boston University instituted a Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize of $5,000 for an "individual news work of significance and quality by a young journalist in public radio."

His analysis of current issues is broadened by his firsthand perspective on recent history. At home, he has covered government controversies from Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings in 1953 to the Clinton impeachment hearings in 1998 and 1999. Abroad, he has observed superpower summits from the Eisenhower-Krushchev meeting in Geneva in 1955 to the Reagan-Gorbachev conference in Moscow in 1988.

Schorr's twenty-year career as a foreign correspondent began in 1946. Having served in US Army intelligence during World War II, he began writing from Western Europe for the Christian Science Monitor and later The New York Times, witnessing postwar reconstruction, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of the NATO alliance.

In 1953, his vivid coverage of a disastrous flood that broke the dikes of the Netherlands brought him to Murrow's attention. He was asked to join CBS News as its diplomatic correspondent in Washington, from where he also traveled on assignment to Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

In 1955, with the post-Stalin thaw in the Soviet Union, he received accreditation to open a CBS bureau in Moscow. His two-and-a-half-year stay culminated in the first-ever exclusive television interview with a Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, filmed in his Kremlin office in 1957 for CBS' Face the Nation. However, Schorr's repeated defiance of Soviet censorship eventually landed him in trouble with the KGB. After a brief arrest on trumped-up charges, he was barred from the Soviet Union at the end of 1957.

For the following two years, Schorr reported from Washington and the United Nations, covering the tumultuous Khrushchev tour of the United States in 1959, interviewing Fidel Castro in Havana, and traveling with President Eisenhower to South America, Asia, and Europe.

In 1960, Schorr was assigned to Bonn as CBS bureau chief for Germany and Eastern Europe. He covered the Berlin crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall, and reported from throughout the Soviet bloc.

Reassigned to Washington in 1966, Schorr hung up his foreign correspondent's trench coat and settled down to "become re-Americanized," as he puts it, by plunging into coverage of civil rights and urban and environmental problems. He also bought his first house and, at the age of 50, married the former Lisbeth Bamberger. Their son, Jonathan, and daughter, Lisa, are graduates of Yale and Harvard, respectively.

In 1972, the Watergate break-in brought Schorr a full-time assignment as CBS' chief Watergate correspondent. Schorr's exclusive reports and on-the-scene coverage at the Senate Watergate hearings earned him his three Emmys. He unexpectedly found himself a part of his own story when the hearings turned up a Nixon "enemies list" with his name on it and evidence that the President had ordered that he be investigated by the FBI. This "abuse of a Federal agency" figured as one count in the Bill of Impeachment on which Nixon would have been tried had he not resigned in August of 1974.

That autumn, Schorr moved to cover investigations of the CIA and FBI scandals-what he called "the son of Watergate." Once again, he became a part of his own story. When the House of Representatives, in February of 1976, voted to suppress the final report of its intelligence investigating committee, Schorr arranged for publication of the advance copy he had exclusively obtained. This led to his suspension by CBS and an investigation by the House Ethics Committee in which Schorr was threatened with jail for contempt of Congress if he did not disclose his source. At a public hearing, he refused on First Amendment grounds, saying that "to betray a source would mean to dry up many future sources for many future reporters... It would mean betraying myself, my career and my life."

In the end, the committee decided 6 to 5 against a contempt citation. Schorr was asked by CBS to return to broadcasting but chose to resign to write his account of his stormy experience in a book, Clearing the Air. He accepted an appointment as Regents Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and for two years wrote a syndicated newspaper column.

In 1979, Schorr was asked by Ted Turner to help create the Cable News Network, serving in Washington as its senior correspondent until 1985, when he left in a dispute over an effort to limit his editorial independence.

Since then, Schorr has worked primarily for NPR, contributing regularly to All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday, Weekend Edition Sunday, and NPR live coverage of breaking news.

He has told his exciting life story in his memoir, Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (Pocket Books, 2001). Judith Viorst says, "The stories are delicious, the recall is astounding, the insights are witty and shrewd - and the writing sings."

Is Glenn Beck Drinking Again?

Well, it's official: Glenn Beck is on the sauce...at least it seems that way. Beck is planning a conservative rally on August 28, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's 'I have a Dream Speech.' He claims to be ignorant to the anniversary of this historic event. Furthermore, Beck says, if this is the date that was chosen for him, it must be the work of God. As usual, Stephen Colbert sums up the situation with remarkable clarity:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Yahweh or No Way - The Blues Brothers & Glenn Beck
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

Anderson Cooper's Commencement Speech @ Tulane University

Below is the text of Anderson Cooper's commencement speech delivered in May 2010 at Tulane University. It is one of the best of this year. Watch it here.

________________

Thank you, does anyone else feel like you are at a harry potter convention? Either that or a renaissance fair?

Members of the class of 2010, parents, President Cowen or Professor Dumbeldore, I had to get him back for the modeling comment., trustees, honored guests, faculty, friends, Who Dats, thank you very much for inviting me here to speak on this very special day.

I must admit.. I was nervous about what I would say here today, and then I began to think back to my own graduation from college, 21 years ago. And I realized… I have absolutely no memory of actually graduating college. I mean, I know I did, because I’m constantly hounded by the alumni association, which starting tomorrow, you will be as well… but if you gave me free catfish poboys at Domelise's for the rest of my life, I couldn’t tell you what happened at my commencement. And it’s not just that I don’t remember what the speaker said, I don’t even remember who the speaker was. So I’m not nervous anymore.. cause you’re not going to remember a damn thing I say. you’re going to wake up tomorrow.. in your own bed, or someone else’s…if you’re lucky. Hey you’re not going to see most of these people ever again, so why not go for it? Your parents have to go to sleep at some point. Anyway, you’re going to wake up tomorrow, and today will be a blur. You’re parents will remember because lets face it, they’ve paid a lot of money to finally see this day, so they want to enjoy every second.

I do hope at some point this weekend, if you haven’t already, you’ll look your parents in the eyes, hold them close, and thank them for their sacrifices. As hard as you’ve worked to get here, they have worked even harder. So parents if your kids haven’t said it, let me just say it for them, thank you.

I must admit I always find it odd to hear myself introduced as a TV anchor.. I never set out to be one and am always suspicious when of anyone who tells me that’s what they want to be.. its like a kid who tells me they want to be a politician. I think you should be real person before you become a fake one.

How many liberal arts majors are here? I feel your pain. All the engineers here are smiling. I too was a liberal arts major.. so like you I have no actual skill. I majored in political science, I graduated in 1989, and I’d focused almost entirely on the Soviet Union and communism.. so when the Berlin wall fell I was, well, I was screwed. I mean I know it wasn’t about me, and I was happy.. for them.. but personally it was a blow.

I know many of you graduating today are worried about the economy, about your job prospects. I wish I could tell you not too, but of course you should be concerned. The one thing I can tell you however, is that this has happened before, and we have recovered. The currents of history only move in one direction- and that’s forward.

When I graduated there were hiring freezes at most TV news networks. I tried for months to get an entry-level job at ABC news, answering phones, xeroxing, whatever, but I couldn’t get hired. At the time it was crushing. But in retrospect, not getting that entry-level job, was the best thing that could have happened to me.

After months of waiting, I decided if no one would give me a chance as a reporter, I should take a chance. If no one would give me an opportunity, I would have to make my own opportunity.

I wanted to be a war correspondent, so I decided to just start going to wars. As you can imagine, my mom was thrilled about the plan. I had a friend make a fake press pass for me on a mac, and I borrowed a home video camera… and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government… then I moved onto Somalia in the early days of the famine and fighting there.

I figured if I went places that were dangerous, I wouldn’t have as much competition, and because I was willing to sleep on the roofs of buildings, and live on just a few dollars a day, I was able to charge very little for my stories. As ridiculous as it sounds, my plan worked, and after two years on my own shooting stories in war zones, I was hired by ABC news as a correspondent. I was the youngest correspondent they had hired in many years. Had I gotten the entry-level job I’d wanted, I would have never become a network correspondent so quickly, I probably would never have even become one at all. The things which seem like heartbreaking setbacks, sometimes turn out to be lucky breaks.

While I don’t remember commencement, I do remember my senior year of college feeling paralyzed, because I thought I had to figure out my future all at once. Pick a career, start down a path I’d be on for the rest of my life. I now know it doesn’t work that way. Everyone I know who is successful, and by successful I mean happy in their professional or personal life, every successful person I know could never have predicted when they graduated from college where they’d actually end up.

I’m not saying you should take it easy and just see what happens. You need to outwork everyone around you. You need to arrive early, stay late, you need to make yourself indispensable - you should also probably get rid of those facebook photos of you passed out on bourbon street.

But as you consider what to do now, you shouldn’t necessarily feel that your next step is the most important one you’ll ever take. It’s not. You will go down many paths that go nowhere. Especially you English majors. You will try things on and realize they don’t fit. And that’s how it should be. Learning what you don’t want to do, is the next best thing to figuring out what you do want to do.

In commencement speeches it’s common to give advice. I know this because for days now I’ve been online reading other people’s speeches, basically looking to steal ideas. Back when I was in college by the way, we didn’t have the internets..with the googles and the yahoos.. we had to steal ideas the old fashioned way, at the library.

Anyway, im not much for giving advice. Especially after reading some other people’s speeches. I’ve quoted this before, but I think it’s one worth repeating. This is what Goldie Hawn told graduates several years ago. “while you are continuing to walk down that sometimes-bumpy road of life, develop the art of laughter and joy. Keep in your backpack of treasures the whole you, the best you. The "you" that won't fear failure, because lessons learned are the only way to grow.” I know, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit too.

Yoko Ono reportedly screamed for ten seconds at the start of her address.. and then went on to declare. “I say you can't stand if you've got too much muck in your head. Let it go and dance through life.” She is so on the money about the muck problem.

Last night I ran into some undergraduates, and some medical students who are getting diplomas today, and after talking with them, and listening to them, I realized that I don’t need to give you advice, I don’t need to try to teach you a lesson… the truth is your class has taught me a lesson.

You are the class that came after Katrina, and I’m sure you’ve heard this often, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You saw this city on its knees in those weeks and months after the storm, and yet you still applied to Tulane. You could have gone elsewhere. A lot of folks probably said you were nuts to commit to New Orleans - some of your parents probably said the same thing.

But you came anyway. You took a chance. You made a tough choice, but look at you now, look at what you’ve accomplished, not just for yourselves, but for New Orleans. Your choice helped this city rebuild.. re-new…re-start.

It’s extraordinary when you think about what’s happened here.. in this city… in this very building…nearly five years ago in these seats and these hallways sat thousands of people.. scared.. confused… their homes destroyed.. their lives forever changed. Nearly five years ago, just blocks from here at the convention center thousands more waited for days in the hot sun…lied to, let down.

Anyone recognize the name Ethel Freeman? She was at the convention center..brought there by her son Herbert. She was 91 years old. She survived the storm, but she didn’t survive the convention center. She died quietly, sitting in her wheelchair, waiting. Waiting for help. Waiting for medical attention. Waiting for buses that finally came days too late. When she died, her son was told to put a blanket over her head and wheel her to the side of the building. And that’s what he did… that’s all he could do.

When you applied here, you knew this, you had seen this, you’d heard these stories…and yet you came.

In your time at Tulane in addition to studying, and working, and (all the other things you’ve done that I don’t need to mention in front of your parents), you’ve also built homes, you’ve worked in schools, manned clinics.. volunteered with church groups and charities…you’ve reached out to strangers, and you’ve helped change people’s lives.

Nearly five years after Katrina and New Orleans is back…yes, there is still much work to be done, wrongs to right, families that need healing, neighborhoods that need revival, but this city has risen, and its done so because you, and many others like you, did not give up. Local, state, federal governments, politicians, often failed in the wake of Katrina, but you and the people of this city did not.

In thinking about what I would say today, i wasn’t sure I was going to mention those dark days after Katrina. I didn’t want to do anything to dampen this extraordinary celebration, but then I realized this day is made all the more glorious, because all of us know what it took not just for you to get here, but for this city to get here. This day is made all the more beautiful… because we remember.

My father died when I was ten, but he loved New Orleans. His family moved here from Mississippi during world war two because there were jobs here. He used to bring me here all the time, and I remember him saying to me that New Orleans is a city of memory. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I do now.

In New York, where I live, they tear down the old, and build gleaming, gaudy monuments to the new. But New Orleans doesn’t try to erase its past. The Ritz Carlton hotel, used to be a department store, and the old name is still carved in the building’s façade. My grandmother used to sell ladies hats there. If you drive down Rampart you’ll pass a school, the Frederick Douglas academy.. but if you look closely you’ll see carved above the front door, the old name of the school: Frances T. Nicholls. That’s where my dad went to high school. It was segregated in those days, and Francis T. Nicholls was a confederate soldier, a governor of the state, a staunch defender of the old order. Any other city, would have chiseled his name off the building, but New Orleans does not rewrite history. Even that which is painful is not erased. A new layer is simply added upon the old. Walking the streets it’s like reading the rings on a tree.

New Orleans remembers and so should you members of the class of 2010. As you leave this school.. this city….as you face new choices... new challenges…new successes and setbacks you don’t need to remember my speech, but remember what you have learned in the streets of this city. The triumph … and the tragedy.. the richness.. and the poverty…and remember how you have made it better.. you chose to do that.. you chose to be here. I cannot wait to see what you choose to do next. Thank you, and congratulations class of 2010.