Running for Your Life: Ratings Extremists

Consider this as a path to the undoing of America.

The unfettered primacy of TV audience ratings.

With no viable public control of the airwaves – the BBC and CBC being time-tested good-government examples of non-ratings-based national news systems – America, instead, relies on these ratings for its news (entertainment?). If the ratings are high, then that program (currently all things Trump) will receive outsize attention. Why? Because it’s “damn good” business.

The veil on what is being presented as responsible news and analysis is rarely lifted. But during the recent presidential campaign, CBS boss Les Moonves did so when he said:

“It (a Trump presidency) may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Ratings worked to keep Trump in the public eye for days, hours on end, last winter, spring, summer and fall.

Hillary’s ratings were not so high, in contrast. In fact, she seemed to think the less she saw the red light of the camera the better: that her critics would savage her (often unfairly, at times less so) and eat into her national poll lead.

Those historically high ratings – drawing millions more “eyeballs” than any other modern presidential candidate – helped create a wave of populist fervor (not just “support,” Trumpists are in a fever over their guy) and a swing to extreme politics the likes of which we living Americans have never seen.

Trump, in keeping his pledge to these followers, is tending to his base. Heretofore, we thought of “a base” as an aggregation of moderate, level-headed citizenry. The change that this national vote wrought is to replace that temperate base with an awakened and galvanized fringe that creates an unstable equation of national affairs that is both unfamiliar and untested.

Do the major US news networks race ahead to dissect this disturbing, emerging reality? Perhaps, if the idea can be sold to the news bosses. That is, if real resource dollars are spent on real news programming.

Alas, though, what we’re more likely to get are bosses who chase the easy bucks dictated by our Extremist Ratings System.

No presidential candidate theater, no problem. Cover the stagecraft of the White House news conferences, pony up time to the Kellyanne Conways.

Or, better yet, satirize Trump and his inner circle.

SNL ratings have hit a six-year high. Yippeeee! And do the comedian celebs’ increasingly Trump-bashing skits move the needle toward a more recognizable America, the one we wonder if it has been lost forever?

I would hazard to say no.

I’m not advocating the muzzling of SNL. Far from it. But it’s a cheap ratings play.

What’s needed instead is a view of the bigger picture that comes from a news media that is not reduced to the business imperative of extreme ratings.

Next: Run for Your Life: New Leader of the Free World

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Seriously, I had planned to write an “If the Greats” blogpost about Frederick Douglass, in recognition of Black History Month.

In part because I recently read Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic http://nyti.ms/2loGWP6, a literary achievement that if tour de force weren’t overused to the point of meaninglessness, I would hasten to call a tour de force. Truly a great book of imagined historical fiction, whose central figure, the fictional Frederick Douglass, I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I read the novel last year.

McCann’s choice of Douglass, whose travels to Ireland are little-known in this country, to imagine in his novel is genius. Who better to seal the deal, that color of skin is zero barrier to achievement, grace and honor in the annals of the human spirit?

Then, this, from the President of the United States, in his recent Black History shout-out:

Douglass is “an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

Too bad, isn’t it, that Frederick Douglass weren’t around to run for president? If only this great were with us (no, don’t spill the beans to the president, who’s under the impression that the famous abolitionist is still alive. There’s no point in riling him about this).

Next: Run for Your Life: New Leader of the Free World

Running for Your Life: Race Ahead

You can’t teach an old dog. Here’s the proof:

I’m thisclose to training again for the big one – a marathon. 

First choice: The New York City Marathon in November. I have registered and will know if I’m in on March 7. (You have to win a lottery position; at least that’s the only way I see myself as getting a race slot.)

Second choice: Marine Corp in Washington, DC, in October. Its lottery occurs on March 22.

Third choice: Toronto, same day as Marine Corp.

One of these will happen. Or at least that’s my goal. I had thought, at one time, my last marathon would be in Nova Scotia, now three years ago. Since that time I’ve suffered two injury setbacks – knee before Brooklyn Marathon in 2015, and faceplant, before Bay Ridge Half Marathon, last year.

I have every intention of continuing to run for my life. But I have missed doing the big race. So, this old dog is excited to soon be back in training mode. Oh, yeah, I might be a lot wiser to be sticking with the shorter stuff. At times, though, this blog is less about wisdom than childlike passion.

Next: Run for Your Life: New Leader of the Free World

Running for Your Life: Reverse Aging Surprise

Yes, I’ve have that second cup of coffee! Or maybe a third.

I admit that given the direction of our current regime the idea of a longer life may seem counterfactual. But, in the event that we do manage to dodge Doomsday during the next four years (Yes, we are now 2-½ minutes to the end, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Note to skeptics, not fact news) I’d like to propose that you race out to your favorite coffee bar (no, not Starbucks. Puh-leese.)

Because the good brains at Stanford have come up with this study that shows coffee actually has reverse aging properties. Don’t just take my word for it. Read the report:

http://stan.md/2kMNliR

Oh, and dark chocolate and black tea lovers? Join the reverse aging club! It’s all in there.

Next: Run for Your Life: Race Ahead

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

One hundred years ago my hometown hero died mysteriously in Algonquin Park, Ontario.

His name: Tom Thomson.

In less time than a one-term American president, Tom Thomson painted his way into the Canadian canon of fine art. And, then, suddenly in July 1917, he drowned in Canoe Lake.

No, he is not van Gogh, Picasso or Whistler. Even in Canada, he is not known simply as “Thomson.” Like so many Canadian treasures, he is not a household name beyond his native land.

And yet. He lived and painted the land in three-plus years before his death like no one before him or since. He risked much on long fishing trips, bringing with him a low-tech artist’s box to hold oil sketches that took as long as two months to dry. An expert canoeist and skilled outdoorsman, I imagine him alone in the dark woods, smoking Hudson Bay tobacco from his ever-present pipe, reading “The Compleat Angler” by moonlight.  It is a quiet search for serenity that shuts out the noise of ideas, the march to war during those years. He painted like a man possessed. But not like the ambitious, manic genius of a van Gogh. Rather of a simple, just man captivated by nature’s grace.

He painted, I like to believe, until his work was done. And then he was gone.

A great like this, if he were alive today, would teach us pretty much all we would need to know.

Next: Running for Your Life: Race Ahead