GELFAND’S WORLD-I've never been in a war zone. I've had guns pointed at me a couple or three times (one was at a range and fairly unintentional -- the others not), but I've never taken a ride in a helicopter or had enemy troops shooting at me. Still, I know what it's like to have shots fired in my direction, to see the dead and wounded, and to experience something of the emotional aftermath. And that was just one evening in Los Angeles. So what do we make of the Brian Williams story and its first cousin, the developing scandal over what Bill O'Reilly (photo) claimed he was doing during the Falkland Islands war?
Was all of this just a little exaggeration, the journalistic equivalent of a fish story? "That was a three foot bass I caught, and the RPG was fired at the helicopter I was riding in."
And O'Reilly covered some kind of street riot during the Falklands war, even if he was 1400 miles away from the real action, and actually staying in a hotel in the big city.
I wonder if the story is actually fairly simple, at least in the case of O'Reilly . He is in a profession that is about as competitive and cutthroat as they come. You have to blow your own horn. O'Reilly was a not-terribly successful television journalist at the time of the Falklands crisis. He didn't really have a lot to build a reputation on, based on that service. So years later, he has developed his own persona, and bluster is a major part of it.
The one thing that is most difficult for O'Reilly and his followers is that now, caught with his arm in the cookie jar up to the shoulder, he is digging in, blustering, and doing ad hominems against the guys who are talking about his claims. We're not seeing a lot of apology or even a little bit of a confession.
Brian Williams did things differently, complete with apologies and mea culpa's.
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So now Williams is out of work, and Bill O'Reilly is still behind the microphone. Perhaps that's the difference between NBC and Fox. If so, we know which is the fair and balanced news source. Still, we've been hearing since the Watergate days that the coverup is what gets you in the end. Let's see whether the national news media (other than Fox) persevere on this story.
And a little more about Williams. The television show Bluebloods considered the question of memory lapses resulting from stressful situations. It was in an episode shown a few months ago. The storyline involved a rookie police officer who remembered one critical detail differently from what showed up on somebody's cellphone video. Tom Selleck, as the police commissioner, understands that people sometimes misremember things following the heat of battle, and manages to demonstrate this adequately enough to protect his patrol officer.
In the Bluebloods episode, the mistake was understandable and of minimal importance. It's hard to figure out whether Brian Williams' experience and resulting statements fit that description. Maybe yes, maybe no.
What struck me in reading about the Williams story is that he was a passenger in the rear compartment of a helicopter rather than a combat soldier. It's hard to know what, if anything, he saw. Williams would be better off today if he had described his experience as the passive ride that it was, his own actions as an outside observer at most, and that what he actually saw of bullets and rockets was probably minimal. The real story that Williams could have told was that he took a ride that would have frightened any sane person, and that the soldiers and fliers were doing this same thing several times a day, day after day.
Ovaltime
There are still more than a dozen NFL teams that have not tried to extort a new stadium out of their hometowns by threatening to move to Los Angeles. The rest of them have. Right now, the latest cities being played are San Diego and Oakland, with maybe St. Louis also feeling the squeeze. Here's a thought. Wouldn't it be fun if San Diego and Oakland called the bluff, and told their respective teams, "Sorry, but times are tough and we aren't going to saddle our taxpayers with another half billion dollars in stadium costs. We're sorry to see you go, but we notice that Los Angeles is doing pretty well without an NFL team. Maybe we will too. So go with our blessing or stay, but under defensible terms."
Well, we can dream.
One other thought. What is really necessary in order to hold a football game? Pretty much all that's necessary is about 350 feet of sod and some bleachers for people to sit on . When I played college rugby, we didn't even have the bleachers. All the rest, including the luxury suites and the four star restaurants, are special favors to the rich and the ultra-rich.
So suppose we were to offer to host football games in a modern version of a Roman style arena sufficient to seat upwards of 80,000 people, complete with running water and situated in our excellent open air climate? What's wrong with that?
Apparently that isn't good enough to satisfy the 31 billionaires who run the league (we won't include Green Bay), because we've already watched two NFL teams quit the Coliseum.
So let's see a show of hands. How many of you out there really think that the Chargers and the Raiders are going to relocate to a shared facility in Carson to the tune of $1,700.000,000? How many of you think that this amount of financing will become available, taking into consideration the financial willingness of the taxpayers of Carson to pony up some of that amount? How much more will the teams have to set aside to cover future costs for chronic brain injuries? While we're at it, let's do the same show of hands for the City of Los Angeles solving its long term pension costs sometime during this decade.
There was a public celebration in Carson the other day about the proposal. You could hear it over the radio, as elected officials tried to take credit in advance. The one thing we can conclude based on that event is that Congresswoman Janice Hahn is really running for County Supervisor, and not for the soon to be vacant U.S. Senate seat. When you hear an office holder speak glowingly about taking professional football away from two vote-rich areas in other parts of the state, you understand that she has decided that the L.A. Board of Supervisors building is a lot better place to live than Sacramento or D.C.
Sleezemeistering
The hardest part about writing about Rudy Giuliani is having to look up the spelling of his name. Everything else -- the now not so thinly veiled racism and crudeness of manner -- is easy. Rudy gave a speech casting doubt on whether the president actually loves his country. Aside from the fact that this is a serious non sequitur, it's an insult to the country that Giuliani is claiming to love. It's an insult to the clear majority of people who voted in the last two presidential elections, including a lot of you who may chance to read this. And how about if we admit that this is a resort to racism. Whether Giuliani is himself a racist or is just making use of racism for his own selfish ends, the evil is the same. We should recognize the same mean streak in Donald Trump, who was still flogging the birth certificate scam well after it had become unfashionable.
That awards show that was supposedly about the movies
The Academy does some good things, including film preservation and history. It puts on some good presentations at its theater over on Wilshire. All of this takes money, and that big television show we just saw is its main source of funding. As to the winners, it's all a matter of taste, and sometimes the voters miss things. Perhaps it's understandable (if not defensible) that Tokyo Story didn't win, but what about High Noon or Citizen Kane?
What's missing in the show is any sense of depth. The kind of routine coverage that we used to get from Siskel and Ebert is not what the awards show is about.
I lasted about 45 minutes, from the dreary opening number to a couple of awards, before I turned off the set. I mean, it was boring, boring, boring. I came back for the last 45 minutes, which seemed to pick up. That's because the stakes were higher. People sometimes remember who won best actress or best picture. The speeches seemed to get better, although I don't think the national audience really cares who the assistant script editor was.
The one thing that the awards show can deliver is unscripted schmaltz, and that's what the last 45 minutes is for. It's like an NBA game -- wait till the closing minutes, and you haven't missed much.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue
