When television was young and black and white, I remember Howdy Doody, Clarabell and Buffalo Bob. I can still remember the little jingle that accompanied the show. Buffalo Bob would say to the forty or so kids in the Peanut Gallery: “Say Kids, what time is it?” and the Kids would yell: “It’s Howdy Doody Time.” And then the music would begin. Remember the tune? Sing along with me.

It’s Howdy Doody Time.
It’s Howdy Doody Time.
Bob Smith and Howdy Do
Say Howdy Do to you.
Let’s give a rousing cheer,
Cause Howdy Doody’s here,
It’s time to start the show,
So kids let’s go!

At the end of World War II there were only 5,000 television sets in America. Largely due to the popularity of such shows as Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, Texaco Star Theater, the Ed Sullivan Show, and the Howdy Doody Show, people began to purchase television sets. By 1951, 17 million sets had been sold.

        I wonder if the Howdy Doody Show, first aired in 1947, was a way to get children to blot out memories of previous air raid drills at home and at school, and pictures of Auschwitz and Hiroshima they may have seen in papers delivered to their homes. Maybe the Ed Sullivan’s “really great shew” was what adults needed to put all that behind them and get ready for what was right around the corner, the Cold War.

It is uncertain whether Howdy Doody diverted young minds from the horrors of a war that left casualties. What is certain is that television transported their tiny cerebellums into the land of consumer consciousness.

Humorist, Dave Barry, in his book, Dave Barry Turns 50, writes: “We sang the Howdy Doody song and we nagged our parents incessantly to buy the many items of Howdy Doody merchandise advertised on it. They could have advertised the official Howdy Doody edition of all sixteen volumes of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust in the original French, and we would have begged our parents for it.”

In those days, the country had a Republican controlled Congress, the first since the Hoover administration, and Joseph Stalin in Russia was rejecting the Marshall Plan, thus kicking off the Cold War.

Political events in Europe confused and troubled most Americans, and polls indicated that official U.S. foreign policy was at odds with folks here. Because of this, President Truman, looked upon by many as soft on Communism, especially domestic Communism, decided to get tough. A series of anti-Communist loyalty acts were put into effect.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy slithered out from under a Wisconsin rock to direct and star in Capitol Hill’s grand opening of the House Committee on Un-America Activities (HUAC).

What you may have forgotten, however, is that Howdy Doody ran for president of the United States. No kidding. Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, Strom Thurmond, Henry Wallace and Howdy Doody.

It only took eleven episodes of the show for Howdy to announce his candidacy. He even had buttons that a kid could get by writing the show which read, “I’m for Howdy Doody.”

L. Wayne Hicks, a writer from Colorado who studies popular culture writes this about the Doody campaign, a campaign in which kids sent their votes into the show: “If Pinocchio could dream of being a real boy, then why couldn’t another wooden boy aspire to become president of the United States?…Like any good politician, Howdy told the children what they wanted to hear, promising two Christmas holidays but just one school day a year and more pictures in history books. Time magazine even took note of the campaign, reporting that Howdy was pushing for free admission to the circus and rodeo.”

Harry Truman won the White House over a surprised Tom Dewey and a horrified Chicago Tribune that called Dewey the winner with a premature headline. Howdy Doody won the election as president of the kids and was inaugurated on Jan. 14, 1949, as “President of all the Kids in the United States.” He was sworn in by Ben Grauer, announcer for the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

Television has come a long way since then—all the way to the election of November 2004. Howdy is gone to the rest home and Buffalo Bob has departed this life. Clarabell is nowhere in sight, although I think I saw her on television recently standing behind our president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld at a White House press conference.

The Cold War is over, replaced by a new one against “terrorists.”

Ed Sullivan and Ted Mack are history; survivor games and The Sopranos are prime time.

Joe Stalin has departed this life; Osama bin Ladin and suicide bombers are now on stage.

The Marshall Plan is over; preemptive military strikes against our enemies have begun.

Joe McCarthy and HUAC have disappeared; John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act are in place.

The “buck-stops-here” president, Harry Truman, has gone to join his beloved Bess; the wooden boy in the White House desirous of being the once and future king is out to convince us that his opponent is nothing more than a flip-flop puppet on a string and that people who would vote for him must have sawdust in their heads.

Walter Winchell and Edward R. Murrow no longer speak to us from our radios and television sets; now we have Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reily, Michael Savage, Don Imus and a host of look-alikes who smile, sneer, scream and yell at us over the airwaves. (Want a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tidbit about this hot dog, Michael Savage. His real name is Michael Weiner.)

We are even told that a presidential candidate can’t be elected to the White House if he or she isn’t a hit on the Letterman, Leno or the Live With Regis and Kelly show.

Which brings me to the subject of the marketplace media and politics as entertainment. 

The Media, Punditry And Political Advertisements
I remember Cornell West back in the 1980s when he was a little-known professor of American studies at Yale Divinity School, back when he wrote esoteric theological books and participated in union organizing efforts for workers at Yale. But this grandson of a preacher and graduate of a seminary has come a long way since then.

Cornel has weaved his way through professorships at Union Theological Seminary and back and forth between Yale, Harvard and Princeton. After his book, Race Matters, bounced onto the bestseller list in 1993, he suddenly became a hot item on television and at conferences talking about everything from metaphysical matters to hip-hop, jazz and the Matrix movies. And lest I forget, back in the 80’s you could have had him speak to your church for his mileage, a bed and breakfast in the preacher’s home, and a free-will offering. Today his fee for a talk requires a mortgage on the parsonage.

Cornel West’s latest book, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism is well worth reading. A brief 218 pages, it does, within reasonable limits, what the book jacket advertises. The book, it says, is a “bold and hard-hitting critique of the troubling deterioration of democracy in America in this threatening post-9/11 age.” It is a prophetic cry to Americans, whether they are faith-based or not, to wake up to what’s going on in this nation of ours.

The media get Cornel’s attention, as they should ours, because it is the media, with its punditry, polls and political advertisements that seem to be the deciding factor in who will be our next president.

West writes: “While an essential mission of the news organizations in a democracy should be to expose the lies and manipulations of our political and economic leaders—and surely many media watchdogs devote themselves to that task—too much of what passes for news today is really a form of entertainment. So many shows follow a crude formula for providing titillating coverage that masks itself as news. Those who are purveyors of this bastardized form of reporting are sentimental nihilists, willing to sidestep or even bludgeon the truth or unpleasant and unpopular facts and stories, in order to provide an emotionally satisfying show.”

He then cuts to the hardcore truth about greenbacks: “This is the dominance of sentiment over truth telling in order to build up market share…Hence we have witnessed the breakdown in media ethics—going after ‘good’ stories even if the truth has to be stretched or outright fabrications are condoned. The overwhelming dominance of market-driven pressures has also led to the outbursts of blatantly partisan punditry. And even the supposed do-gooders in the media often limit the depth of their analysis and the range of their truth telling so as not to offend advertisers and mainstream opinion.”

Let’s start with the pundits and the prey they latch onto for interviews and conversation. Three observations regarding their tendencies are worth consideration.

First: They love to suck up to political power. Less concerned with digging down deep to mine and unearth the truth from their guests, they fawn and favor and grow feeble when confronted with an opportunity to extract important information from the politically powerful. The master of this is Larry King, America’s favorite interviewer, who feeds the sentimental narcissism West talks about. His sycophantic posture hardly ever allows for penetrating questions. He’s a lapdog not a bloodhound.

Second: They fixate on surface style rather than structural substance. The way the media has framed the discussion around Bush and Kerry, with the help of both Democrat and Republican spinmeisters, presidential strength will be gauged in this election on whether Bush riding a mountain bike on his ranch and swaggering about with his sleeves rolled up is stronger than Kerry windsurfing in Nantucket or shooting two pheasants in Iowa. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if Bush knows how to tend to his ranch. I want to know what he hasn’t done and what he intends to do when it comes to the plight of small farmers. And as to Mr. Kerry, I don’t give a hill of beans about him waving a gun over his head to show West Virginia union members he’s not going to take their guns away from them. What I want to know is what he’s done in the Senate to keep people employed and small businesses alive and what he intends to do about corporations taking jobs out of the country and reaping tax benefits by doing it.

Third: They don’t seem to have learned what their mommas taught them, that is, listen to people rather than screaming at them and interrupting them. Check out Hannity and Colmes on Fox, or Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, or Crossfire on CNN and you will find out what I’m talking about. Hyperactive hosts heaving and hyperventilating over a panel of people all talking at the same time and working against the clock so that the network can get its advertising budget covered. Frankly, sometimes I am glad for the ads. They offer me medical products for heartburn, headaches, pain, and diarrhea—conditions frequently brought on by the commentators and pundits.

A brief word on the political advertisements paid for by both parties, and the newly-created, non-profit, “527” who have flooded the campaigns with lots of money because of the huge hole in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill.

That brief word is this: I won’t pay any attention at all to the political ads. I may study them but I won’t cast my ballot based on what some public relations and advertising agency offers me. I’ll listen to candidates speak, probe the web for information, watch the debates, listen to friends and strangers talk about the election, read books, watch and listen to and through the radio and television news (I say through in the sense of seeing through what I hear and see). But I won’t buy the snake sold on both sides of the political aisle.

A final word on pundits and political interviews: Learn to look through the mascara. I saw Katie Couric on the Today Show this morning. She was interviewing Mary Matalin, advisor to Dick Cheney. It was a classic Cover Girl Makeup interview with lots of mascara to hide some pretty ugly blemishes. Matalin bloviated (a word I learned for, of all people, Bill O’Reily) about how well we are doing in Iraq. Why, everything is coming up roses according to her. Judy, watching with me, said, “How can she say that?” My response: “Better ask how she can get away with it.

How CBS, Dan Rather And Sixty Minutes Got In Such A Mess

Now that CBS, Sixty Minutes and Dan Rather have been raked over the coals it’s time to revisit my own encounter with CBS and Sixty Minutes in order to observe how the media shapes stories and our lives.  

The public is right to ask how CBS and Dan Rather fell for phony documents and did themselves in. Here are a few brief observations based on my experiences back in 1999 when Sixty Minutes featured me and my work with poultry workers, farmers and environmentalist, and a coalition attempting to bring changes to the poultry industry.

It all began when Steven Greenhouse, the New York Times labor reporter came to spend a couple of days traveling with me to see the work being done. What caught his eye was the fact that it was a minister doing this kind of organizing-for-justice work. Out of that came a picture and a fine article that appeared in the Times.

The day the article appeared, Scott Bronstein, producer for Mike Wallace at Sixty Minutes, called me and said that they would like to do the story. Put briefly: I met Scott and agreed to let them do the story. In October they filmed and it was aired in December.

There are lots of fascinating stories I could tell but let me cut to the quick for an analysis of how CBS, Sixty Minutes and Dan Rather could have gotten into such a mess.

To begin with, Dan Rather does little more than show up to do the filming, read the copy, and ask the questions prepared for him by his team of producers.

Mike Wallace blew into town, had supper with Judy and me and the producers, and filmed the next day. Scott Bronstein, a marvelous producer and investigative journalist (the author of a major series in the Atlanta Constitution on poultry) did the real work. Wallace read the script and brought his charisma to the piece. Media stars like Rather, Brokaw and Jennings, once fine reporters, are now entertainers.

One must understand the enormous competitive pressure Sixty Minutes, and other news shows, operate under. Case in point, Sixty Minutes Two (Rather’s unit) is a competitor. When they called to see if they could do the piece, promising that Rather or Charlie Rose would do it, I told the producer that I had already committed to Bronstein and Wallace. She tried to talk me out of it. When I said no, I thought that was the end of it. Not so. The very next day there was a knock on my door; it was the producer, who had flown in from New York, and was there to twist my arm some more.

The competition for stories between networks and shows is ridiculously frantic. Producers and network executives rise each morning to vie with one another over interesting stories, and the competition is cutthroat as they seek market share and ratings. The desire to outdo one another is exceeded only by their desire to get stories out in a hurry so as to get a jump-the-gun on the competition and beat them to the punch. In the course of working with Scott Bronstein, who became a friend, I came to understand, but not to appreciate, this rush to produce.

Before working with Wallace, Scott had worked in Europe with Christine Amanpour, a first-rate reporter who did pieces with Sixty Minutes. Scott described how the pace of producing quality work on stories in Europe was slower, more precise and responsible. Back in New York, working on national stories, the pace was rush-rush. In our piece, that meant that he had to totally leave out the environmental aspect of poultry production because rain kept us off the Chesapeake Bay, and the money and the time weren’t there which would allow us to reschedule.

In terms of the Bush National Guard story that discredited CBS, I feel certain that speed drove this shoddy piece.

Right wing news shows have engaged in a feeding-frenzy over the CBS/Rather piece. They blame the liberal media. If you buy into such analysis, I remind you that Fox Network, who loves to beat that drum, is owned by Rupert Murdock, and CBS is owned by Viacom—two giant corporate interests that are anything but liberal.

One final story. The week that Mike Wallace came to the Delmarva Peninsula, Scott called me and jokingly said that I might have to do some counseling with Wallace because the movie, The Insider, had just been released.

The Insider, in case you’ve forgotten, was the story of the whistle-blower from Brown and Williamson who went to Sixty Minutes with the story of big-tobacco’s role in smokers’ addiction to nicotine. It’s also the inside story of how Sixty Minutes blinked, fudged and finally pulled the episode because of CBS’s corporate interests—a classic tale of market connections being even more powerful than the sharp investigative reporting that gave Sixty Minutes it’s valued reputation.  

  
Nations will hammer swords into plows, their spears into sickles, there shall be no more training for war. Each person will sit under his or her fig tree in peace.
Micah 4:3 -4