Mis-Information on the Middle East on TV News
CBS Sunday Morning (a show I used to work on, and maybe the best news show on TV) ran a piece this morning in which CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward endeavored to explain the differences between Shia and...
Read moreHow ABC News Could Save Itself… and Journalism
David Westin, former President ABC News In 1989, at the height of the AIDS crisis, I went off to Uganda with a video camera in search of the ‘Index Case’ – the source of the worldwide AIDS pandemic. I...
Read moreThe Awful Power of Technology
Maybe you should think about computer programming… In 1911, Britainia ruled the waves and Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. It was the apex of the British Empire. The sun never set on the Empire and Britain’s...
Read moreOne Man Bands v. VJs
Henri Cartier Bresson Howard Kurtz reports in The Washington Post today that ABC News is moving toward One-Man Bands. OK. Not exactly a breaking news story, but what we don’t like is the term “One Man Band”. There are...
Read moreAnd Now It’s Official
Do you think they have enough cameras on that boat? In 1988 we introduced the concept of VJ Newsgathering in Norway at TV Bergen. In 1990 we did it with NY1 in New York for Time/Warner. In 1993 we...
Read moreMore on ABC’s VJ Flip
Dutch Public TV in 2004 is now ABC News in 2010….eventually all things come ABC News’ decision to embrace the VJ model is apparently going to go much deeper than we first thought. What appeared to be a mere...
Read moreABC News Goes VJ
finally… ABC News today announced major layoffs. 300-400 positions are going to be eliminated. Most interesting in the announcement today is the decision by David Westin that the network news organization is going to move toward VJ based newsgathering....
Read moreMy First Job in TV
No God but The God I got an email this morning from Rosemary Stanfield-Johnson, Professor of Safavid history at The University of Minnesota. Let’s hear it for the web. I have not seen Rosemary Stanfield since 1980, when I...
Read moreIt really IS the end of the world….
And the winner is……. “Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse? -From...
Read moreKRON goes on the Block
Young Broadcasting announced today that is putting KRON, its San Francisco station up for sale. KRON was one of three stations we took into the full-blown VJ model in 2004/5. The people at KRON undertook an enormous amount of...
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