Frank Beacham's Journal

Christmas in the Middle Eastern desert with ABC News...

It was on this day 103 years ago that Anwar Sadat, the third president of Egypt, was born. I remember him well from a 1977 Christmas visit I made to Egypt for ABC News in the continuing effort to find peace in the Middle East.

I was recently cataloguing some old photos from that trip 44 years ago and ran across a few memorable images. We were at Ismailia on the western bank of the Suez Canal. Sadat invited some of the media, including myself, to his vacation house.

There we were offered very strong hashish and a special variety of Egyptian bottled beer. At first, we were nervous about the hashish since there was a death penalty sentence for possessing it in Egypt at the time. But since it came from the president himself, we became comfortable with it (especially after we got very high).

The beer was excellent, until one of Sadat’s aides told us they had finally perfected putting the caps on the bottles without creating broken glass in the beer. Earlier attempts at bottling had put drinkers of the beer in the hospital. That comment stopped us cold!

Sadat was completely charming and welcomed us to his country royally. But viewing the images from that time, I realized it was also a very different age.

We had come with huge amounts of gear — so much that it boggles the mind today. At the time, it was less than three years into the ENG (electronic news gathering) revolution. The networks mainly abandoned 16mm film for electronic video in 1975 and back then most were still renting crews and electronic gear from freelancers like myself.

In those days, a video equipment package for network use was huge and cost more than $100,000 per camera system. And because the gear was so unreliable, backups and sometimes triplicates were needed for essential components.

This trip began in late November, 1977 at the time when Sadat invited Israeli Premier Menachem Begin to Egypt in their continuing efforts to find peace in the Middle East. The meetings were not held in Cairo, but at Ismailia. It was the middle of the desert and the television networks had to scramble to find facilities to get on the air.

ABC News rented an old chicken truck from a farmer and painted it blue on the outside, covering the rest with ABC stickers and wrapping material. It was be turned into our mobile edit bay for the peace talks.

Inside, the editing equipment came from my company, Television Matrix, based in Miami at the time. The edit controller was the world’s first Sony RM-440, delivered only the day before myself and the other crew members left on the flight for Egypt. I remember reading the manual to learn how to use that controller on the flight over — praying it would work. (It did!)

Note in the image inside the “edit van,” there’s a Microtime Time Base Corrector. It was a huge piece of rack-mountable gear back then. All time base correctors were so unreliable at the time that several units were always brought along to protect against failure, since time base correction was essential for feeding video from remote locations.

In later years, I learned why time base correctors were so unreliable. Microtime had no shaker table to test their gear at the factory. They built it to sit in racks, not for rough and tumble air travel like we were doing.

When they finally got a shaker table, they confirmed what networks crews around the world already knew. The units would fail every time. It was an “ah-ha” moment for the engineers building the gear. Today, time base correctors are forgotten, now reduced to a single chip costing pennies inside a camera.

Modern “one-man-band” video crews also find it astounding how much gear was once necessary for even a simple network-level video shoot. We always traveled with at least twenty Anvil cases and usually more, depending on the trip. In one photo, our gear was being taken to the airport in Cairo after the Begin-Sadat talks for the flight home.

In those days, airlines took pity on news crews. Rarely were we charged excess baggage for all these cases.

Crews always flew First Class and the networks purchased a second First Class seat for tube-based television cameras. The reason was to keep the tubes in registration so the camera would be ready to use when we hit the ground.

How times have changed!

Edit system inside the chicken truck

Going Home

On this day in 1957 — 64 years ago — the U.S. Department of Defense launched a nuclear missile test in Nevada

On this day in 1957 — 64 years ago — the U.S. Department of Defense launched a nuclear missile test in Nevada.

Five volunteers and a cameraman were placed directly under the massive atomic explosion in a government-run PR stunt to show that nuclear war was “safe.” These guinea pigs illustrate the insanely surreal Atomic Age we lived through.

Here is the group on film as they watch an F-80 drop the bomb over their heads. Their voices are captured on audio tape.

As the bomb explodes the narrator shouts: "It's directly above our heads! Ah Ha Ha! Good, good! There is a huge fireball!" The men then shake hands and agree that the whole show was "such a thrill."

All of the men at the test were diagnosed with cancer at one time or another in their lives, CBS reported in later years.

George Yoshitake, the photographer working for the Department of Defense, recovered from his cancer after chemotherapy and surgery. He lived to age 84, dying in 2013.

Yoshitake had filmed other nuclear tests in the Pacific, but always from a distance, he said. So when he found out about this assignment the night before the test, which CBS News reports was the only test of its kind ever conducted, he asked what protective gear he'd be given.

"They said 'none,'" he recalled. "I had a baseball hat and I put that on just in case."

After the test, "they all congratulated each other that they were still alive," Yoshitake recalled. "I remember one of the guys even pulled out cigars and passed them out."

It wasn't until after the test that Yoshitake found out he was making a propaganda film meant to demonstrate the safety of nuclear explosions.

"It was a publicity stunt to show the American public how safe it was during an atomic bomb," Yoshitake told CBS, "and if there was a war or something, with atomic bombs going off, that it was going to be safe for the general public."

Yoshitake said he knew a lot of cameramen who filmed nuclear tests died of cancer in their later years.

Don Luttrell, left, with George Yoshitake in Dallas in April, 2012. The men were the last two survivors of the atomic blast in 1957.

Luttrell died at age 91 on Dec. 27, 2014 after a 30-year career in the Air Force. Yoshitake died on Oct. 17, 2013 at age 84 due to complications from a stroke.

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 104 years ago today

Katharine Graham — A Personal Remembrance

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 104 years ago today.

Publishers are normally not the creative people that I celebrate on these pages, but Graham was special and unique. In early 1974, I went to work as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek Television, which was owned by the Washington Post.

This was the period during the Watergate scandal, in which Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had an integral role in bringing about the resignation of President Richard Nixon that summer. Unlike newspapers and other news outlets today, Graham supported real, hard hitting reporting.

When Woodward and Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Post editor, Ben Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets would touch the story. As a result, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history.

It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." As an act of intimidation, the Nixon administration also set its Federal Communications Commission onto the Post’s broadcast properties. Graham was under severe pressure in those years and she rose to that pressure.

On my first day at work at the Post’s WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, I was surprised to get a personal phone call from Katherine Graham. She welcomed me and acknowledged the pressure we were under at the time.

But her real message was clear. “If you receive pressure from anyone — anyone at all — not to do your job, I want you to call me directly,” she said. “That’s very important.” She made me promise to call and gave me her direct number.

I never did call, though the next year at Post-Newsweek I was threatened, sued and publicly called every name in the book. The station defended every lawsuit and we won them all. We worked hard and got it right. It was the era of good, tough journalism — long gone today.

It was always comforting to know in those days that I was backed by the real iron lady, Katherine Graham.

In the above photo, Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post in 1973.

Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist who set a high standard for courage, integrity and accuracy, was born 113 years ago

Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist who set a high standard for courage, integrity and accuracy, was born 113 years ago.

Murrow first came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II, which were followed by millions of listeners in the United States.

A pioneer of television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of TV news reports that helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Perhaps Murrow’s greatest moment came when he criticized McCarthyism and the Red Scare, contributing if not leading to the political downfall of McCarthy.

On March 9, 1954, Murrow and his news team produced a half-hour special entitled, "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.” Murrow used excerpts from McCarthy's own speeches and proclamations to criticize the senator and point out episodes where he had contradicted himself.

Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly, paid for their own newspaper advertisement for the program. They were not allowed to use CBS's money for the publicity campaign or even use the CBS logo. Nevertheless, the broadcast contributed to a nationwide backlash against McCarthy and is seen as a turning point in the history of television.

It provoked tens of thousands of letters, telegrams and phone calls to CBS headquarters, running 15-to-1 in favor. Murrow's hard-hitting approach to the news, however, cost him influence in the world of television. He lost sponsors and Murrow's reporting brought him into repeated conflicts with CBS — especially its chairman, Bill Paley. Paley told Murrow that he did not want a constant stomach ache every time Murrow covered a controversial subject.

In October 15, 1958, in a speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago, Murrow blasted TV's emphasis on entertainment and commercialism at the expense of public interest in his “wires and lights” speech:

“During the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: Look now, pay later.”

A chain smoker throughout his life, Murrow was almost never seen without his trademark Camel cigarette. It was reported that he smoked between sixty and sixty-five cigarettes a day, equivalent to roughly three packs. See It Now was the first television program to have a report about the connection between smoking and cancer.

During the show, Murrow said that "I doubt I could spend a half hour without a cigarette with any comfort or ease." He developed lung cancer and lived for two years after an operation to remove his left lung.

Murrow died at his home in Pawling, New York, on April 27, 1965, two days after his 57th birthday. His colleague and friend, Eric Sevareid, said of him, "He was a shooting star; and we will live in his afterglow a very long time."

Murrow is pictured above with actress Marilyn Monroe in 1955

General Manuel Noriega: A Personal Story

General Manuel Noriega: A Personal Story

In 1979, on Contadora Island, a small Panamanian island on the Pearl Islands archipelago in the Gulf of Panama, I was on an assignment with NBC News to report on the medical recovery of the late Shah of Iran.

When I say “recovery,” I mean the Shah just had his spleen removed and we were on a stake out to keep an eye on him. It was a cushy assignment — one we nicknamed “Spleen Watch.”

One day — totally out of the blue — I was arrested by Manuel Noriega, who was then Panama’s chief of military intelligence. It was early morning, and I exited the shower in my hotel room to find Noriega pointing an Uzi submachine gun at me. Needless to say, it was one hell of a way to start the day.

He told me to get dressed and he drove me in a jeep to a government-owned house on the island. He said I was using a walkie-talkie that interfered with his own private frequency. The walkie-talkie, which I bought in the hotel gift shop on the island, was being used to communicate with the rest of my crew. Anyone could buy these walkie-talkies, but that didn’t matter to Noriega.

I apologized for interfering with his communications, but Noriega was having none of it. Soon, my other crew mates, who were also surprised and arrested that morning, all arrived at the house. He made us sit on a couch and look at his Panamanian porno magazines, while hysterically laughing at our discomfort. This was one sick dude!

Hours dragged by as we quietly waited, having no idea of our fate with this increasingly erratic madman. Our answer came later that day when he took us in his jeep to the island’s airstrip. Our bags and camera gear, packed by his forces and removed from our rooms, were waiting there for us. We were ordered to board the plane and were flown back to Miami.

After returning to NBC’s offices in Miami, the phone rang and it was a call from the military leader of Panama, Gen. Omar Torrijos. Torrijos profusely apologized for Noriega’s actions to Don Browne, the NBC bureau chief, and insisted that we come back to Contadora Island to complete coverage of the Shah’s recovery there.

He promised absolutely no more trouble. Anxious to make the extra money on this lucrative job and having zero common sense in my youthful days, I agreed to return with my crew. However, when we arrived back in Panama, we first visited Gen. Torrijos, who warmly welcomed us back. As a favor, he asked if I could deliver a box of Cuban cigars to his friend, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who enjoyed them.

Each cigar had a band that had the words “General Torrijos” printed on it — a personal gift from Fidel Castro. I promised to send the cigars — illegal in the United States — to Kennedy when we returned. (That was not without skimming the top row for myself!)

The rest of our trip on Contadora Island was without incident and we returned home a week and a half later when the Shah left the island. We never saw or heard from Noriega again.

As a footnote to this story, Gen. Torrijos died in a plane accident on July 31, 1981 after a two-year power struggle. Col. Roberto Díaz Herrera, a former associate of Noriega, claimed that the actual cause for the accident was a bomb and that Noriega was behind the incident. I was never surprised by this.

Noriega emerged as general of Panama's military forces. He became the country's de facto leader, fixing presidential elections so he could install his own puppet officials. Noriega's rule was marked by corruption and violence. He also became a double agent, selling American intelligence secrets to Cuba and Eastern European governments.

In 1987, when Panamanians organized protests against Noriega and demanded his ouster, he declared a national emergency, shut down radio stations and newspapers and forced his political enemies into exile.

That year the United States cut off aid to Panama and tried to get Noriega to resign. In 1988, the U.S. began considering the use of military action to put an end to his drug trafficking.

Noriega voided the May, 1989 presidential election, which included a U.S.-backed candidate, and in December of that year he declared his country to be in a state of war with the United States. This led to Noriega’s overthrow and arrest on this day in 1990 by the U.S. military.

He stayed prison until January 23, 2017, when he was released and placed under house arrest to prepare for surgery that would remove a benign brain tumor. On March 7, 2017, he suffered a brain hemorrhage during surgery which left him in a critical condition in the intensive care unit of Santo Tomas hospital in Panama City. He died on May 29, 2017, at the age of 83.

I got older, wised up and — sick of continuing wars and violence in Latin America — moved to Los Angeles in 1984 to start a new phase of my life.

(Thanks to History.com for parts of this story.)

A 1977 Christmas visit to Egypt in the continuing effort to find peace in the Middle East

All photos by Frank Beacham

It was on this day 102 years ago that Anwar Sadat, the third president of Egypt, was born. I remember him well from a 1977 Christmas visit I made to Egypt for ABC News in the continuing effort to find peace in the Middle East.

I was recently cataloguing some old photos from that trip 43 years ago and ran across a few memorable images. We were at Ismailia on the western bank of the Suez Canal. Sadat invited some of the media, including myself, to his vacation house.

There we were offered very strong hashish and a special variety of Egyptian bottled beer. At first, we were nervous about the hashish since there was a death penalty sentence for possessing it in Egypt at the time. But since it came from the president himself, we became comfortable with it (especially after we got very high).

The beer was excellent, until one of Sadat’s aides told us they had finally perfected putting the caps on the bottles without creating broken glass in the beer. Earlier attempts at bottling had put drinkers of the beer in the hospital. That comment stopped us cold!

Sadat was completely charming and welcomed us to his country royally. But viewing the images from that time, I realized it was also a very different age.

We had come with huge amounts of gear — so much that it boggles the mind today. At the time, it was less than three years into the ENG (electronic news gathering) revolution. The networks mainly abandoned 16mm film for electronic video in 1975 and back then most were still renting crews and electronic gear from freelancers like myself.

In those days, a video equipment package for network use was huge and cost more than $100,000. And because the gear was so unreliable, backups and sometimes triplicates were needed for essential components.

This trip began in late November, 1977 at the time when Sadat invited Israeli Premier Menachem Begin to Egypt in their continuing efforts to find peace in the Middle East. The meetings were not held in Cairo, but at Ismailia. It was the middle of the desert and the television networks had to scramble to find facilities to get on the air.

ABC News rented an old chicken truck from a farmer and painted it blue on the outside, covering the rest with ABC stickers and wrapping material. It was be turned into our mobile edit bay for the peace talks.

Inside, the editing equipment came from my company, Television Matrix, based in Miami at the time. The edit controller was the world’s first Sony RM-440, delivered only the day before myself and the other crew members left on the flight for Egypt. I remember reading the manual to learn how to use that controller on the flight over — praying it would work. (It did!)

Note in the image inside the “edit van,” there’s a Microtime Time Base Corrector. It was a huge piece of rack-mountable gear back then. All time base correctors were so unreliable at the time that several units were always brought along to protect against failure, since time base correction was essential for feeding video from remote locations.

In later years, I learned why time base correctors were so unreliable. Microtime had no shaker table to test their gear at the factory. They built it to sit in racks, not for rough and tumble air travel like we were doing.

When they finally got a shaker table, they confirmed what networks crews around the world already knew. The units would fail every time. It was an “ah-ha” moment for the engineers building the gear. Today, time base correctors are forgotten, now reduced to a single chip costing pennies inside a camera.

Modern “one-man-band” video crews also find it astounding how much gear was once necessary for even a simple network-level video shoot. We always traveled with at least twenty Anvil cases and usually more, depending on the trip. In one photo, our gear was being taken to the airport in Cairo after the Begin-Sadat talks for the flight home.

In those days, airlines took pity on news crews. Rarely were we charged excess baggage for all these cases.

Crews always flew First Class and the networks purchased a second First Class seat for tube-based television cameras. The reason was to keep the tubes in registration so the camera would be ready to use when we hit the ground.

How times have changed!

Inside the edit van

Going Home

Walter Cronkite was born 104 years ago today

Walter Cronkite was born 104 years ago today.

Cronkite was the anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years, from 1962 to 1981. During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America," after being so named in an opinion poll.

Cronkite reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King, Jr. and Beatle John Lennon.

He was also known for his extensive coverage of the U.S. space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle.

Cronkite is well known for his departing catchphrase "And that's the way it is," followed by the date on which the appearance aired.

Here, Cronkite works in New York City in 1959

Photo by Dennis Stock

Eating Sushi with Walter Cronkite

In my 20s, working as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek, I quickly wrote news copy of a breaking story that Walter Cronkite read word-for-word on the CBS Evening News.

For a young reporter, this was a very big deal. Cronkite re-wrote virtually everything, but didn’t touch a thing in my copy.

In later years, when I first met Cronkite, I told him about the thrill I had that day.

His tart answer, “I’m sure it was, young man.”

Later, I met Cronkite at the Sony Club in Manhattan, when we were invited to screenings of new films at Sony Pictures. I ate with him and got to know him a little better. He was a friendly and unassuming man, but only after he got comfortable with you.

The last time I saw him, we ate sushi together at the Sony Club sushi bar. He was in a joyful mood, loving every morsel and chatting it up with the chef. He died soon after that. By the end, I had cracked his shell and he turned out to be a very friendly guy.

Here, Cronkite conducts an interview in Huế, Vietnam, February, 1968

Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration

Possibility Junkie, a New Musical That Targets the Artistic Process

We live in an era of magnified perceptions. For many Americans not in the glorified, hyper-wealthy one percent, this is a time of diminished possibilities and loss of hope. David Ippolito and Gretchen Cryer precisely target those perceptions in a magnificent new play, Possibility Junkie. They hit a slam dunk home run!

Possibility Junkie is a timely look at how we frame our lives and our definition of success in a culture where corporate media and propaganda portrayed as “news” is bombarding us from every direction with constant lies—usually based on fear. It’s tough to create a fulfilling life in an environment where everyone around you worships money and judges every endeavor by how much of a profit it generates.

Yet, that’s what artists do, creating their work while at the same time reflecting a mirror on the foibles of the cultural condition around them. David Ippolito, the central character in this play, is an independent singer-songwriter who has gained a huge following as a troubadour in Central Park for the past 20 years. David is the real deal and this is his inspiring story. I have known David for a decade, watched his work develop and witnessed his struggles in trying to live an honest, artistic life.

There are two key lines in the play. The first is “Keep Hope Alive” and the second is the title, “Possibility Junkie.” Both came from the late Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles and many other bands to America in the 1960s. Bernstein found David singing in Central Park 15 years ago and they became friends. Sid died at age 95 last August 21. 

In the play, Bernstein’s character is “Burn,” an elderly wise man played beautifully by Rob Barnes, a veteran Broadway actor and singer. Barnes was in the original Broadway casts of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Having known Sid as well, I can attest that Barnes carries much of Bernstein in his character.

 

Rob Barnes and David Ippolito

The plot of Possibility Junkie centers around a right wing commentator on FAX News (loosely based on FOX, though it’s hard me to even call it “news.”) David does a song about him in Central Park and a fan records it on video. The video is put on YouTube and goes viral. The FAX commentator, Sean Kilroy (played by Joel H. Jones), gets angry and tries to do David in.

He uses his stunningly attractive assistant, Ainsley Louis (played by Jillian Louis), to spy on David and secretly video tape him, trying to get any kind dirt possible. David falls for Ainsley, a walking, singing bombshell, only to find himself and his friend, Burn, betrayed by her ambitions to get her own TV show.

Jillian Louis and Joel H. Jones

Possibility Junkie is an inspiring musical with songs not just written for this play, but written for over 20 years from the heart by David Ippolito. It all melds together in what I don’t lightly call Ippolito’s masterpiece. His “The Last Protest Song” toward the end brought tears to my eyes. With this play, David has now transitioned from being a talented singer and songwriter to being a creator of musical theatre. This is an ideal new format for him.

The expert hand of Gretchen Cryer is also evident in this production. An earlier theatrical presentation by David was too loose and talky, with David ad-libbing each night. That’s gone in this production, no doubt the work of Cryer in co-writing the book and directing the production. Cryer, the mother of television actor Jon Cryer, co-wrote the classic, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On The Road. She has David acting loose, but he’s far more precise in his presentation this time.

In fact, there wasn’t a weak player in this excellent cast of actors and singers—featuring in addition to Ippolito and Barnes—J.C. Hall (a terrific hip-hop artist), Joel H. Jones, Jillian Louis, Teresa Reynolds and Vanessa Theus. Music direction was by Mike Murray, with some musicians—especially mandolin player Chris Tedesco—joining the cast dancing on the main stage while playing.

Heather Wolensky’s set design was also unique, featuring actual moving image backdrops of where David plays in Central Park. The various video segments plugged into the play seamlessly. It was “virtual set” technology well used in the story. The choreography by David Eggers is also excellent.

A story that Sid Bernstein once told me came ringing back as I watched Possibility Junkie in a packed house on its opening night. Noting that he had found the Beatles in Liverpool in the 1960s, Sid said he hoped one day he could give Liverpool a gift from America. That gift, he told me, would be David Ippolito. “David’s got it,” Sid said, “and they would love him over there.”

Sid never got the chance to promote David in Liverpool, but the man—who also brought The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, The Moody Blues and The Kinks to the United States—had an insanely good eye for talent.

Possibility Junkie runs through Oct. 20 at the Theatre for the New City at 155 First Ave in New York City.

 

David Ippolito with the real Sid Bernstein

Photo by Frank Beacham

Telling the Truth Is No Longer the Top Priority in Journalism

I graduated debt-free from journalism school in 1968 at a time when there were plenty of jobs and some great opportunities in the news business. I was lucky enough to work at some prestigious news organizations, including United Press International, Post-Newsweek, Gannett and the Miami Herald.

In every one of those news jobs, accuracy in reporting was priority number one. At UPI, it was very simple. Make a major error in a story that’s released nationally and you were fired. There were no ifs, ands or buts. Rules like that kept you on your toes.

Yes, you also had to be quick. But not so fast that you made mistakes. You were judged on a combination of both speed and accuracy. But accuracy was always the most important part of the job.

It’s clear that’s no longer true. Just in the past week, the New York Post got the Boston Marathon bombing story so wrong on so many counts it was hard to believe. They reported that 12 people had died, when only three had. They reported that a Saudi man was a suspect being held “in custody” when that wasn’t true.

And, perhaps worst of all, they put pictures of two young men on the front page that turned out not to be the bombers. The newspaper admitted not knowing whether the men were even suspects. One of those young people was 17 years old and told other reporters that he was afraid to leave his home after the Post printed his picture.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the paper, should have been outraged—but he was not. He argued that the picture was “instantly” withdrawn when the mistake was known. He did not explain how one instantly withdraws a printed front page from the streets.

Television news networks are equally notorious for errors. When astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died, NBC incorrectly called him Neil Young, the musician. That’s what happens when networks rely on 20-something staffers who don’t know their history.

We are all aware that few journalism jobs are left and most pay very little. In fact, I was paid far more in the early 1970s than most journalists make today. Make no mistake, it’s that downsizing of jobs and salaries and journalistic standards that leads to the mistakes and errors we see so often today.

At least most news organizations try to be accurate. Others have a different agenda, which complicates the picture further. Networks like Murdoch’s Fox News present a clearly right-wing agenda—not one based on genuine attempts at truth and accuracy. Too many people believe this is actual news.

Yet, the politicization of journalism seems to be getting worse. Charles and David Koch, the notorious supporters of far right-wing causes, are said to be exploring the purchase of the Tribune Company, which owns 23 television stations and eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

These men, who finance favored political candidates, are not journalists or even interested in objective reporting. The New York Times reported a source saying the Koch brothers often say “they see the conservative voice as not being well represented” in the news media. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what these financiers are up to.

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told the New York Times.

Journalism is not just in a poor financial state these days. It is in a moral crisis as well. The old standards of truth and accuracy in news reporting have been thrown out the window. The Internet, which has empowered everyone as a citizen “journalist,” has not helped. The day is quickly coming when truly independent journalists will have to work on their own.

Just as members of Congress are under the control of money, now the same has happened to journalism. It’s a sad day indeed for accurate, truthful reporting.

Fox and CNN Get the Supreme Court Ruling Wrong

It is remarkable to me how people continue to watch, defend and put up with the sorry state of television news.

When I worked at United Press International in the 1970s, we had very difficult desegregation busing decisions that required quick, but thorough analysis. If I had gotten a decision wrong on the UPI wire, I would have been fired then and there. That’s no longer the case.

Both Fox News and CNN got the story flat wrong. In their rush to get the news out, coupled with their built-in bias as to what the decision would be, both networks initially reported that the Supreme Court had struck down the law’s individual mandate. Of course they were wrong, because the opposite actually happened.

“The mandate is gone,” Shannon Bream, a Fox News correspondent, announced at 10:08 a.m. as a graphic flashed on the screen that called it unconstitutional. A moment later, one of the Fox anchors, Megyn Kelly, cautioned that Bream might be wrong.

“We’re getting conflicting information,” Kelly said, while reading from Scotus blog, an a web site about the court. Citing the blog, she accurately told viewers that “the individual mandate is surviving as a tax.”

At the same time on CNN, relaying information from a producer, Bill Mears, on the phone inside the court building, a correspondent, Kate Bolduan, said, “It appears as if the Supreme Court justices have struck down the individual mandate.”

“Wow,” said Wolf Blitzer, the anchor, who immediately said that if the court had indeed done what she had said, it would be a setback for President Obama and the Democratic Party. Despite his qualified words, a banner on the screen read, “Supreme Ct. Kills Individual Mandate.” The mistake lingered for six minutes — well after other television networks and news outlets had reported that the opposite was true.

Editors and producers at several organizations said they would emphasize accuracy over speed in any coverage of the decision, lest they risk being wrong. But today news organizations hire amateur reporters at low pay scales and expect them to have the skill to report accurately. Fox was even taking information from a blog, not first-hand reporting. This was absolute proof of the low state of TV news.

“CNN regrets that it didn’t wait to report out the full and complete opinion regarding the mandate,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. “We made a correction within a few minutes and apologize for the error.”

Fox News did not issue an apology. In a statement, Michael Clemente, a Fox executive, said flatly, “Fox reported the facts as they came in.” Clemente should be fired for his arrogance, much less his incompetence.

Even the President of the United States, watching like much of the nation, was fooled by the bad reporting. He, of all people, should have known better.

That’s the difference in news today. It should be strong proof that television coverage is unreliable and amateur at best. Turn them off is my advice.