By now, presidential candidate Donald Trump’s principal success has been in branding his behavior as relentlessly rude, crude and uncurbed, believing he can bully and badger his way to the White House. And when it comes to the facts, he doesn’t just play fast and loose, he just plain ignores them. Trump likes to use the word “fabulous” in describing...

Should we forgive Brian Williams? After four months, we now know what will happen to former NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams after being suspended for lying about his “war time” experience: He will not be returning to the anchor desk. The very able Lester Holt, who’s been filling in for Williams, will become the permanent anchor, a position well...

On the first day of class, Professor William Hundert stands before his high school boys in the film The Emperor’s Club and succinctly explains the purpose he is reaching for with his students. “Great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance. What will your contribution be? How will history remember you?” June is a time of graduation and having...

Religion is always a touchy subject. So is politics, but that hasn’t stopped Pamela Geller, who specializes in provoking religious groups, to continue to inflame under the guise of free speech. Welcome to the new American zeitgeist where the Second Amendment is now used as an umbrella ideology to justify all manner of rationalizations. Geller has been waging a one-woman...

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...