The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.
I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.
The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.
The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.
The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.
I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.
When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.
This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.
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April 22, 2013
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.
February 13, 2013
January 29, 2012
Beware! Much of Local TV News is Fake!
You probably didn’t know it, but much of the local television news you see is produced by corporations and not journalists. Stories are made to look like news, but they are actually disguised commercials trying to sell you something.
The practice is also perfectly legal, if the station buries the info about the fake reporting at the end of the newscast during the fast-moving credits. Otherwise, it could face a $10,000 fine.
This issue has been going on a long time. But don’t expect to hear about it on your local news.
A few years ago, several public interest groups complained to the Federal Communications Commission that television news operations were including commercial content in newscasts disguised as news. Now, the FCC is reacting, proposing a new regulation that would require all broadcast stations to disclose on the Internet all corporate interests behind their news content.
The FCC has determined that TV newscasts are increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news, though the news program is portrayed as the work of independent journalists. Increasingly, paying companies are shaping news coverage at broadcast stations.
The FCC would change the rule from disclosure in the closing credits to making television stations maintain a public file managed online by the FCC. This way it will be easier to track fake news.
A recent Washington Post article documented a live interview segment in which a seemingly neutral reviewer recommended a series of products that the “reviewer” had been paid by sponsors to mention.
The newspaper also said television stations across the country have brokered “exclusive” relationships with local hospitals in which the hospitals pay the station to be featured in health stories. Other stations, the Post reported, have aired “news” programs that feature interviews with sponsors who’ve paid for the privilege.
The FCC said many television stations use “video news releases,” which is lookalike news footage produced by a sponsor or corporate interest that appears to be shot and edited by the station.
We have always said it is best not to watch or pay attention to local news at all. There has never been real “news” there to start with. But, if you watch, beware that you may be watching corporate commercials. Nothing in our culture is as it appears to be. So turn off the damn box.
January 18, 2012
Stop SOPA and PIPA Before It Destroys the Internet!
Most of us know that our Congress is corrupt. Money from corporate interests has infiltrated the entire body, making even the "best" members often use very bad judgement. The large media companies are pushing SOPA and PIPA, two bills that will allow private corporations to shut down web sites they suspect of stealing their content. Passage would be the end of a free Internet.
Today, many web sites are on strike. Go here and register your complaint with Congress. We live in dangerous times and this one of them.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
November 30, 2011
Dan Rather: Money Owns News Today
On November 22, Dan Rather received the Committee to Protect Journalists' Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for 2011 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. What follows is the speech he gave upon accepting the prestigious award. It is well worth reading by anyone who consumes today's news.
One of Bud Benjamin's dreams was to expand the CBS Evening News to a full hour. And Bud wasn't thinking of filling it with helicopter shots, celebrity gossip and punditry. He imagined an entire hour brimming with investigative reporting, exposés and dispatches from around the world.
It was a different time in journalism. A time when professional duty was patriotic, and the freedom of the press motivated and inspired newsrooms. I know it is hard to believe - but it's true - newsrooms were not supposed to turn a profit. Frankly, news was considered an acceptable loss on the balance sheet.
To keep our FCC license and the public trust, we had to use the public's airwaves in the public interest. Yes, that's a whole lot of "public." But that's the way it was. It's the way it should be again.
Today, how we look and how we "present" information has become far more important than how we gather it. It's upside down and backwards. And, the worst part is ... we have gotten used to it.
The caretakers of the Fourth Estate have, at times, left the building unattended. Public interest be damned.
It was Thomas Jefferson who noted in 1799 that, "Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."
Jefferson trusted the press - not to stir up heat, but to deliver insight.
Of course freedom of the press and of speech both come with pitfalls. People can peddle opinions as if they were facts. Those armed with the big, expensive megaphones drown out those blowing whistles.
But now, we see our fellow citizens taking to the streets. And, that my friends, is our cue to get back to work. As the People of our nation begin rising up, they expect the business of news to be about inquiry and accountability.
And, luckily for us, we can still do that ... but it may not be within the confines of big corporate media. As you know, we are living in an age when big money owns everything ... including the news.
That cash bought a lot of silence for a long time. Enough time for unchecked power to get this country tangled into messes all around the world. We all know that money talks. But, so do the people. They tire of conflicts at home and abroad ... conflicts that avert our eyes from the corruption and callowness that does little more than spill our blood and misspend our treasure.
"We had fed the heart on fantasies," wrote William Butler Yeats, "the heart's grown brutal from the fare."
In other words, we have gotten used to it.
What happens to a country when the press helps divide people into Us and Them? When it fans the flames of conflict and calls it reporting?
We need to restore, at some point, the teaching of the craft of journalism. The best way to protect journalists is to teach them how to do journalism and, therefore, protect themselves from becoming irrelevant.
I am reminded of the finest speech I ever heard on the subject of television journalism. It was given by Ed Murrow in 1958.
Murrow said, "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But, it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends ... otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box."
Dear friends, we must untangle the wires from the lights. We must halt the steady decline of broadcast journalism and the endless compromises to the boardroom.
Some say it is too late. That Congress wrote our epitaph in 1996 when they all came together and passed the Telecommunications Deregulation Act. Since then, the lights in a box have gotten brighter and flashier ... but the truth dimmer and dimmer.
And ... we have gotten used to it.
The late, great Molly Ivins used to tell a story about what happens when fear grips a country. Molly liked to tell the story about her late friend, the celebrated Texas civil libertarian John Henry Faulk, who, as a boy of six, went with his seven-year-old friend, Boots Cooper, to rid the family henhouse of a harmless chicken snake. From its high perch, the boys found themselves eyeball to eyeball with the snake.
Growing up in Texas, it's not uncommon to see a chicken snake ... but being close enough to spit in the snake's eye must have been quite disconcerting.
As Molly would tell the story, the two boys ran out of the henhouse so fast they nearly tore off the henhouse door ... not to mention doing damage to themselves in the process. When Faulk's mother reminded the boys that chicken snakes are not dangerous, Boots Cooper responded, "Yes, ma'am, but some things will scare you so bad, you'll hurt yourself."
That is what we have been subject to as a country. We have been so afraid; so hell bent on destroying enemies ... both foreign and domestic ... we have hurt ourselves and our democracy.
You are probably asking yourself now what you should do.
Well, it may take courage.
There are so many wrongs to make right, it is going to get messier before it gets better.
• We have to begin asking the hard questions once again.
• We have to demand and earn back the respect that gave us the right to ask them.
• We must protect whistleblowers by using our megaphones to make their risky admissions even louder.
• We must demand access to all those risking their lives to challenge power.
• We must refuse to simply read press releases and rely on official sources.
• And we must begin to enforce our own professional code of ethics. Refuse to compromise. Going along to get along is getting us nowhere.
Tonight, if I can convince you of anything, it is to buck the current system. Remember anew that you are a public servant and your business is protecting the public from harm. Even if those doing harm also pay your salary.
To once again quote Ed Murrow, "There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference ... this weapon of television could be useful."
And wouldn't it be great if our country could get used to that.
November 18, 2011
Some Thoughts on “What’s Next” for Occupy Wall Street
The past week has been an exciting time in New York City. We have seen a popular uprising grow and expand—aided by a tin-eared billionaire mayor and a violent and over-zealous police department dedicated to protecting the wealthy. As with many of the dictators that have fallen around the world recently, these New York officials are as lost and isolated as Gadhafi was in Lybia or Mubarak in Egypt.
There is a global trend at work and it’s in reaction to the huge and growing disparities in wealth and political power throughout the world. Today’s government leaders have hit bottom—enabling and supporting a culture of shallow commercialism, intellectual bankruptcy, corporate corruption and phoniness in everyday life that is crushing ordinary people.
Honest, objective news media has evaporated, entertainment is becoming no more than corporate-created fluff and public education has come down to brainwashing a generation that the best life offers are financial deals that make money.
Art, music and the creating of anything that enhances human life is minimized in today’s over-commercialized culture. All that matters in the short term is a soul-killing chase for bucks and the drudge work that usually goes with it.
Today, the rich actually “make” very little. Manufacture of goods is done offshore at poverty wages. The wealthy today essentially create shady schemes to shift money around and charge the masses for their efforts. Those that aren’t devious enough to find success at that—and that is most of us—are left out.
I, for one, am sick of it. I want a different life. I want different values. I want out of a system that has created fiendish values and meaningless work that pays little and does nothing but enhance the lies perpetrated by the wealthy drones and the two political parties.
So what’s next? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. It is clear that both the Democrats and Republicans offer zero for the future. Both parties are bankrupt of ideas and controlled by lobbyists for the wealthy or right-wing whackos that are now self-destructing.
Before this election cycle, I would have said that third parties had little chance of getting elected in the United States. But times change and I think the day has arrived that a third-party candidate could be elected president. I also believe that most Americans side with Occupy Wall Street, despite what fraudulent institutions like “Fox News” or its pundits say.
The problem is who would run? It would be need to a strong, Ralph Nader-like progressive. Elizabeth Warren comes to mind, though she is already running for the Senate in Massachusetts.
I came out of the 1960s and realize the major fight ahead is for a younger generation. For so long I worried they didn’t care or weren’t energized. Now that has changed and the corrupt power structure has done all the right things to magnify their efforts throughout the world. This now must be translated to political action that can have a lasting effect in the world. The street protests are fine, but the movement needs to grow.
What’s needed is a presidential candidate with all the charisma of a Barack Obama, but this time with the spine to carry the things out that need to be done and not collapse to the interests of the wealthy and special interests. We also need progressive members of Congress to support this new president. That's a big order, but the time is certainly right.
October 18, 2011
Edgar Villchur Built the First Women-Friendly High Fidelity Home Speakers
I have a woman friend in New York City with the most exquisite sounding music system. The wall-hanging speakers are old and have been painted over many times—but the audio is sweet and clear. When I asked one day about it, she told me the speakers are original Acoustic Research AR-1s, first built in 1954.
The man who designed those speakers, Edgar M. Villchur, has died at age 94. He was considered one of the great names in American audio and those speakers on my friend’s wall are very special.
They are small—yet produce deep, rich sounds like no others their size. In the days when they were built, good speakers came in huge cabinets. By reducing the size in his acoustic suspension design, Villchur revolutionized home audio. Many women would allow speakers into their home for the first time due to their tolerable size.
Villchur and a student, Henry Kloss, who died in 2002, formed Acoustic Research to market the speakers. By 1966, the company sold more speakers than any other manufacturer in the world—with a 32 percent share of the market. Villchur’s speaker design is on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
Villchur went on to design other Hi-Fi breakthroughs, including building the much-improved dome tweeter and technologies that reduced rumble in turntables.
He and Kloss were an amazing team with long, productive careers. In the early 1960s, while at KLH, Kloss built the first high selectivity FM radio, the Model 8, and the first successful audio product to use transistors, the Model 11 portable phonograph. Later, at Advent and Kloss Video, he became a pioneer in home theater with a successful line of two-piece video projection systems.
While at Advent, Kloss also transformed the compact audio cassette from a dictation to a music medium by introducing the Model 200, the very first cassette tape deck to employ Dolby B noise reduction.
In 1994, at a party celebrating the invention of the AR-1 at Grand Central Terminal in New York City, I was privileged to meet both Villchur and Kloss. It was at this very same location in the early 1960s that Villchur sponsored “live versus recorded” concerts around the country, including one in the great terminal.
At the concerts, a string quartet would play a piece of music, then mime it as parts of a recording by the same quartet played through a pair of AR-3 speakers. The listeners were rarely able to detect the switchovers.
Inventors like Villchur and Kloss are rare these days in an era of cheap corporate manufacturing. Their well-designed products have stood the test of time. Whenever I hear my friend’s AR-1 speakers, I’m reminded of real quality rather than the latest thing.
October 06, 2011
The Death of Steve Jobs Ends a Spectacular Era of American Creativity
It was in the early 1980s, at the Day in the Life of Hawaii photographic project in Honolulu, that I first used an Apple Lisa computer. The Lisa, named after the daughter of Steve Jobs, was the first computer that I could actually work with without having to pay a computer programmer a recurring fee to make the damn machine useable.
In January, 1984, when the Apple Macintosh was introduced during a commercial in the Super Bowl, I vowed to buy one. I purchased the first 128K Macintosh and never looked back. I have remained a loyal Mac user ever since, buying new models every couple of years. The Macintosh has been responsible for allowing me to work for myself on my own terms.
That was 27 years ago. It is a testament to the genius of Steve Jobs that I, as well as millions of others, learned of his death last night on a machine that he invented.
There is no question in my mind that he was the singular force in developing the best technology in my lifetime. No one else was in his league. I’ve seen Apple with and without him— and there’s no question which was better.
I’ve attended his Apple keynotes as a writer and was honored to even interview him once. He was a remarkable (and often difficult) figure that I suspect will be remembered as the Thomas Edison of our time. Sadly though, Apple—as a company—will never be the same again. Now it’s just another big corporation.
When the products that Steve designed have dried up, I’m afraid that we are resigned to return to a world of technical mediocrity for a period. Great genius like his is a real rarity. It can’t be bought. It just happens—out of the blue.
I feel very lucky today to have lived during the same era as Steve Jobs. He made my life better. What more can be said of anyone. RIP, Steve.
September 17, 2011
Information Without Knowledge
Information everywhere. We are drowning in it. We are assured that information is wealth. To succeed in the new economy, we are told, we must be connected.
Why then—with so much information—are we in an age of such unenlightenment? Why is virtually any idea of substance "dumbed down" for public consumption? Why is instant gratification so important to so many of us?
Easy access to information, it would seem on the surface, should be leading to a better educated, more knowledgeable population. So why is it that as information technology improves, most people move down, not up, the knowledge chain?
Some answers to these questions emerged from a symposium where a group of major American artists tried to grapple with creative issues facing them in the age of digital media. The session, called "Digital Expression," was held at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Peter Sellars, a director of theater, opera and film, offered some insight on modern information overload.
Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information easily available, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful to the recipient.
"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something.
"Now we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it," Sellars continued. "Where there is no pilgrimage the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered today. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips but we don't value anything."
Unlike some others attending the symposium, Sellars embraced the "untamed quality" of the current Internet structure because it allows the user to wander and discover information through his or her own personal experience.
"To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," Sellars said. "To have the user making wrong turns through the information is exactly the point. That's where the juice is."
Today's mass media, said Sellars, reflects only a single voice, not the broad range of human experience. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized. A very narrow group of people are creating this insane (communications) gridlock," he said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."
Artists, he said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address.
"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience," said Sellars. "As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"
The issue of experience was also addressed by the actress Jane Alexander. She embraced information technology as an important artist's tool but was clearly troubled by those who would use it as a substitute for experiencing reality.
"Seeing the Mona Lisa on a compact disc is not the same as seeing the real thing," she said. "Hearing 'If I Had A Hammer' on your computer speakers is not the same as hearing Pete Seeger singing it. There is no way to actually create live theater in a box or a game.
"The whole point about virtual reality is that it is virtually real, not really real," Alexander continued. "Technology cannot replace the seeing, the hearing and the experiencing of art. It doesn't replicate the doing of art. There's a big difference between a paint brush and a canvas and a mouse and a screen."
Perhaps one of the significant lessons we'll one day learn from this computer era is that information should never be confused with knowledge. Having instant access to all the world's databanks has little to do with genuine cultural progress.
Despite all the information age hype, the real information—the information that matters in life—comes only when we as human beings are ready to open ourselves to accept it. For most of us, this comes through living life, acquiring personal experience and searching for knowledge out of genuine curiosity.
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(I wrote this column in October of 1994. I was reminded of it last night in a discussion about younger people who often use the Internet to substitute information (say from Wikipedia) for genuine knowledge. When I re-read it, it seemed as timely as ever. When it was written, Jane Alexander was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts.)
Charlie's Place: Photo Essay
- The true story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues. E-book in all platforms.
Mill Town Murder: Photo Essay
- On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, S.C., friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded. The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. E-book available on all platforms.
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