Last Friday (Apr. 24), I wrote about ESPN reporter Britt McHenry’s verbal abuse against a clerk at a towing company. While the Disney/Hearst cable network took immediate action, the penalty amounted to a one-week suspension. I also pointed out that McHenry’s own apology, via Twitter, was far from appropriate or complete. I then offered a long list of actions McHenry...

Nothing is uglier than someone who feels she’s special and others aren’t. Following a one week suspension for verbally abusing a towing company employee, ESPN Sports reporter Brittany “Britt” McHenry has returned to work. In a video that’s been widely circulated, the 28-year-old can be heard heartlessly disparaging a female clerk, clearly pointing out the “class” distinction between the two,...

Since a bystander’s video uncovered the brutal shooting of a fifty-year-old black man by a North Charleston, South Carolina police officer, the graphic video has been played and replayed by broadcast media too many times to count. Every time an expert, analyst, relative or the witness/videographer himself, have been interviewed, we see the same horrific images with sound repeated. When...

Since the death of New York radio personality and TV talk show host, Joe Franklin last Saturday in Manhattan at 88 years of age, everyone’s been telling their own Joe Franklin story. This is mine. It’s 1996, I’m on a book tour for my first book, The Lone Ranger’s Code of the West (An Action-Packed Adventure in Values and Ethics...

There’s an expression in Hollywood that says that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. However, in the case of the massive cyber attack of Sony Pictures (Nov. 24), where thousands of documents including private e-mails, budget numbers, executive salaries, social security numbers, home addresses, as well as employee health records were stolen… somehow, I don’t think Sony is keyed...

There’s a moment in the long and distinguished career of Walter Cronkite that remains indelible in the minds of Baby Boomers. On November 22, 1963, in the midst of newsroom chaos, the CBS News anchor had interrupted a daytime soap opera with a special bulletin that shots had been fired at President John Kennedy in a downtown Dallas motorcade. In...

How do you make sense of the senseless? As soon as I logged-on to The Washington Post Saturday morning, I stared in disbelief at a headline reporting that the latest school shooting had occurred just twenty minutes from where I live. From late Friday night to Monday morning, our small community continues to be shaken by the fact that we have joined...

In search of ratings gold, television networks always seem willing to go to most any length to degrade the state of the medium; (I still can’t get past NBC’s cable-owned Bravo’s Real Housewives series); but television news shows are supposed to be different, right? Just when you think bad programming cannot get any worse, MSNBC jumps the shark … big time! On Monday,...

On Monday, Columbia University announced the 2014 recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s most prestigious honor. Chris Hamby of The Center for Public Integrity – a Washington, DC-based non-profit – was awarded a Pulitzer for his report, Breathless and Burdened, on “how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting...

On Monday April 14, it was announced that the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspapers shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest award, in the area of public service for their reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program. However, the documents supplied to both the Post and Guardian were leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last June,...