My Pal Dizzy Dean

Jerome Herman Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is there because of his pitching, but also because of his career. They didn’t call him Dizzy for nothing.

He preceded Yogi Berra in being a public figure (i.e., baseball star) in part for his sayings. And for what people said about him.

St. Louis Cardinals teammate Pepper Martin once said: “When ol’ Diz was out there pitching, it was more than just another ball game. It was a regular three-ring circus and everybody was wide awake and enjoying being alive.”

Others get some credit for this remark, but I heard it first from Dizzy: “It ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.”

In one Cardinals game, he told the fielders to sit down on the field, he was going to strike out the side. He did. He was the last National League pitcher to win 30 games in one season.

You will note that this article began with Dizzy’s several names. Some say his legal name was Jerome Herman Dean, others said Jay Hanna Dean. One story about Diz’s legal name is that he gave conflicting information to three different sportswriters in quick succession. A teammate asked him about it and he replied: “I wanted to give each of them fellas an exclusive story.”

Ol’ Diz once said: “It puzzles me how they know what corners are good for filling stations. Just how did they know gas and oil was under there?”

If you have some time on your hands, Google DIZZY DEAN QUOTES for laughs similar to those that ensued when Yogi said things like: “Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore. It’s too crowded.”

This is a story about Dizzy Dean after his last days on the baseball diamond. But before I get to my friend (this is a stretch, of course, as you will see), let’s review some of the things that earned him entry into Cooperstown.

He was born January 16, 1910, in Lucas, Arkansas. He was just 64 when he died (July 17,1974, in Reno, Nevada). When he died, I was 40 and really felt I had lost a good friend. Actually, I hardly knew him. I knew him mostly as thousands did. But that’s for later.

He pitched for the Cardinals (1930-1937), the Chicago Cubs (1938-1941) and briefly for the St. Louis Browns (1947). I saw that game. I was 13 years old. But again, I am getting ahead of myself.

Dizzy was best known for leading the 1934 “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals to win the World Series in seven games over the Detroit Tigers. He had a 30-7 record, a 2.66 ERA in the regular season. His brother, Paul (they called him “Daffy”; that’s a fact), also pitched for the Cardinals. They both won two World Series games that year. Dizzy won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award that year, and he was runner-up in the voting the next two years.

While pitching for the National League in the 1937 All-Star game, he faced Earl Averill of the American League Cleveland Indians. Averill hit a line drive back at the mound, hitting Dizzy on the foot. Told that his big toe was fractured, he replied: “Fractured, hell!! The damn thing’s broken!”

It was said he came back to pitching too soon from the injury, which caused him to change his pitching motion to avoid landing so hard on his sore left big toe. As a result, the story went, he hurt his arm and he lost his fast ball. By the next year, when he was with the Cubs, his arm was just about shot, but he kept at it for three more years. That year, 1938, he pitched well enough to help the Cubs win the pennant and he pitched gamely in the second World Series game before losing to the Yankees in what became known as “Ol’ Diz’s Last Stand”.

It was said that between ages 23 and 27, Dizzy was the best pitcher in baseball. By 28, he was just another pitcher, and at 31, it was all over. Except for that time in 1947 when I saw him pitch for real.

My Dad worked for Western Union and occasionally he would be assigned to Sportsmans Park for the baseball game. Using his telegrapher’s “bug”, he would transmit baseball results to other cities, and receive them for local consumption. Sometimes he would take me along, and I would be able to walk the bridge into the press box where my Dad worked along with sportswriters, the official scorer, and so forth, and Dizzy Dean and Johnny O’Hara in the radio booth.

Need I tell you? There was no security. I could walk all through the pressbox, including the radio booth. I was 10 years old. The year was 1944, and both the Cardinals and the Browns were in first place, and ultimately played each other in the World Series that year. It was a heady time for me, of course.

One night, I was standing behind Johnny and Dizzy, listening to them. Occasionally, they would look back at me, smile but not shooosh me away.

From my vantage point, I could not see all of the field, and a batter lofted a high fly to right field. It looked like it was going over the Mississippi River. I could not help myself. I was a kid. I started hollering WOWWWWWWWW!

The right fielder caught the ball.

Johnny was doing the play-by-play. He turned around and so did Dizzy. They said nothing. I have thanked them quietly ever since. I got into no trouble that I know of, and I never told my Dad. And I guess that was the start of my radio career, as that was the first word I ever said on the radio.

It was quite a while before I had the courage to return to that position in the pressbox.

And actually, it was because of my familiarity with my new-found friends in the pressbox that I had the courage to go to the radio booth one Sunday afternoon after a thunderstorm had caused a rain delay. This day, the Browns were scheduled to play a double-header, and before the first game, they had a “Long Ball Hitting Contest”, involving star players from both the Browns and the Detroit Tigers. I remember Chet Laabs was one of the Brownies’ stars and pitcher Dizzy Trout was one of the Tigers hitters.

The first game was interrupted early. While I had been sitting in the grandstand behind third base, when the rain stopped play, I went up to the pressbox, worldly as I was, of course, at age 10. And, of course, already fascinated with radio work, I headed for the radio booth.

Johnny O’Hara and Dizzy were just sitting there with the radio engineer, not on the air. Their broadcast had been returned to the studio during the rain delay. I think Johnny and Dizzy wanted to remind me about hollering about a high fly to right, but they didn’t bring it up. They started talking with me as though I was an adult.

Dizzy started really talking about the long-ball hitting contest. He asked me if I had seen it. I had. He asked me who I thought should have won. I think I said Chet Laabs. I remember, however, vividly what Dizzy came back with: “Dizzy Trout hit the HARDEST home run. That line drive would have gone through a mule!” I agreed. Dizzy wasn’t through. “He’s a pitcher, you know!!!” I said yes, I know he is a pitcher. Dizzy always told his radio audience what a great hitter he was.

The story is not finished. I had no place to go, doncha know, so I stayed right there as we waited out the rain delay. But the rain never stopped. Eventually, the umpires called off both games. And here came the bad part. The stadium announcer said all fans could get refunds at the streetside ticket windows WITH THEIR STUB for today’s admission.

I reached in my pocket to find my ticket stub. I pulled out four stubs. Obviously, I wore the same pants to several games, and never threw my stubs away. My mother always had clean clothes for me, but most likely I wore and wore the same pants to ballgames.

I held the stubs in my hand to show Dizzy. I asked: “How can I tell which stub is for today?”

As you know, they didn’t call him Dizzy for no reason. He replied, to his 10-year-old friend, “Turn all of ‘em in. You’ll get alot more money! They won’t be able to tell.”

It sounded good to me. I went downstairs to the ticket windows, and stood among the throng in front of the windows. There were no lines; it was just fight-your-way-up-there.

When I finally made it to the window, I turned in the four stubs. The woman ticketseller took my four stubs, and for the next two or three minutes, panic was starting to set in. She showed the stubs to another ticketseller, and then came back to the window, and in a tone similar to a school teacher, she asked, no, she demanded to know: WHERE DID YOU GET THESE?

As God is my witness, I broke into tears and replied rather frantically: DIZZY DEAN TOLD ME I COULD TURN THEM IN!

DIZZY DEAN TOLD YOU!!! she hollered as all fans within earshot roared with laughter.

I realized it was too farfetched a story to continue. So I just kept crying. She actually identified the one good ticket for the day, and gave me a refund. God Bless Her for not having me arrested for fraud. I know she never believed my answer. Nor did the nearby fans. Sneaky kid. Got caught.

Actually, Dizzy was pretty famous as a baseball broadcaster. He first started with the Cardinals and Browns in 1941 right after his playing days were over. In those days, the broadcasters did not travel with the teams but Ol’ Diz had a good deal for the season, as, when one team left town, the other team came home. Dizzy was both funny and colorful, partly for butchering the English language, much to the chagrin of St. Louis English teachers.

When Al “Zeke” Zarilla tripled, he described how Zarilla “slud into third”. When the English teachers complained, Dizzy simply enjoyed more opportunities to say “slud”.

An English teacher once wrote to him that he shouldn’t use the word “ain’t” on the air, as it was a bad example to children. He responded to the teacher on the air, not so elegantly: “A lotta folks who ain’t sayin’ ‘ain’t’ ain’t eatin’. So Teach you learn ‘em English, and I’ll learn ‘em baseball.”

Dizzy advanced to join Pee Wee Reese on the CBS-TV Game of the Week each Saturday, which he did from 1955 to 1965.

And yes, I enjoyed actually seeing Dizzy Dean pitch in an official baseball game. His last, so to speak. It was September 28, 1947. He was 37 years old.

By this time, Dizzy was well-known for his broadcasting. The story has been that he had been doing the St. Louis Browns’ games, enduring several poor pitching performances in a row, and he got so frustrated, he blurted out on the air: “Doggone it, I can pitch better than nine out of the ten guys on the staff!!!” The wives of the Browns pitchers complained, and team management, needing to sell tickets any way they could, took him up on his offer and had him pitch the last game of the season.

I thought Sportsman Park would be filled and got there soon after the gates opened. Sad to say, it was far from a sellout. But Dizzy did not disappoint. He pitched four innings, allowed no runs and got a single in his only at-bat. Rounding first base, he pulled his hamstring, ending his experiment.

Returning to the broadcast booth later on, he told his radio audience: “I said I can pitch better than nine of the ten guys on the staff, and I can. But I’m done. Talkings my game now. I’m just glad that muscle I pulled wasn’t in my throat.”

So that’s my story about my pal Diz. Now don’t forget to Google QUOTES BY DIZZY DEAN. Here are two that clearly identify him:

“I won 28 games in 1935 and I couldn’t believe my eyes when the Cards sent me a new contract with a cut in salary. Mr. Rickey said I deserved a cut because I didn’t win 30 games.”

And….. “Anybody whosoever had the privilege of seeing me play knows I am the greatest pitcher in the world.”

Tiger in Philadelphia

It has been my pleasure to have watched the play of many of the world’s top golfers. This past week, I hit the jackpot when, for the first time, I saw Tiger Woods “live” (i.e., not on the telly).

Tiger did not have an especially good tournament, finishing four over par in the AT&T National at the Aronimink Golf Club in suburban Newtown Square, PA. He finished in a tie for 46th, and won $16,581. Many Tiger followers will call that “chump change” for the likes of Tiger.

I agree with most golf fans of today “in the know” that Tiger is the best golfer of all time.

Before Tiger, I once put Ben Hogan in that slot, then Jack Nicklaus.

I never was able to watch Sam Snead in person (nor another great Byron Nelson). Snead won more golf tournaments than anybody. Now, Tiger is on a mission to surpass Slammin’ Sammy. Of course, at this writing, the Tiger question most golf fans want answered is WHEN is Tiger going to return to better than $16,581 form?

My first golf tournament was the 1963 Western Open in Chicago. I don’t remember much about it, except Bob Goalby and Bob Charles and Jack Rule were in the field. Arnold Palmer won the tournament, but I don’t remember much about my visit to the Beverly Country Club. The most noteworthy thing I remember is that I was in Philadelphia on the Friday of the tournament for a job interview with WRCV Radio-TV, owned by NBC. The news director and assistant news director, during the interview, seemed favorably impressed, and said they would contact me the next day back in my home city in Iowa. I had to cough up that I wouldn’t be home, but rather at a golf tournament. At the time, I didn’t think that might be a good thing for my resume, but Saturday night, after all day at Beverly, the call came through: you have the job.

Although I have watched Arnold Palmer in person since the early 1960’s, I could not adopt him as Number One of all time. But I well recognized he has been called “The King”. While working for WHO-TV in Des Moines, I was doing the half-hour Sunday night TV newscasts and one Sunday, Arnie was playing an exhibition at Waveland Golf Course in Des Moines. With a noisy camera of the era, I followed him around all 18 holes, recording virtually every shot. I had asked him prior to the exhibition if it would bother him; I said my camera was anything but noiseless. He said it would be no problem if I started the camera at least 15 seconds before he hit the ball. On one occasion, I was asleep at the switch, discovering he was about to hit an approacb shot to the fourth green, turned on the camera amidst the deafening silence and practically on his backswing, Arnie stopped. Everybody laughed but me. I was terribly embarrassed and suffice it to say I did not resume the coverage until the next hole. A little post-script to that faux pas: Arnie started once again to hit the ball, and then actually topped it up the fairway, so I felt further hurt. But he put his third shot on the par five hole on the green, and walked off with a birdie anyway. I have thanked him for that ever since. That night, after our film editor had put the whole three-minute package together, I used my local knowledge of Waveland (which I had played a hundred times) to ad-lib his entire round. It brought many nice compliments from people who did not trudge 18 with Arnie.

I still felt Ben Hogan was the best ever.

When I heard that Bantam Ben was coming to Philadelphia for the IVB Championship, in 1966 at Whitemarsh Country Club, I asked our Channel 3 sportscaster Jim Leaming if I could use his media pass if he wasn’t. No problem. My goal was to watch Ben Hogan.

To my surprise I was pretty much alone in my admiration for Ben Hogan. He was joined by the Hebert brothers, Lionel and Jay, and somebody else I do not recall, and me. Four players and me. No other gallery for Ben that day. Are the people in this city crazy???? It was not Ben’s first visit to Philadelphia. Perhaps you remember his famous one-iron to the 18th green at Merion to win the 1950 U-S Open? This was just more than one year after his horrific auto crash with a Greyhound bus in February, 1949. He was nearly killed; a broken collarbone was only one of his injuries that had doctors unsure whether he ever would pick up a golf club again. Glenn Ford played Ben in a movie about his life called “FOLLOW THE SUN”.

I wish I would remember more about his round of Wednesday practice golf at Whitemarsh. There were no Arnold Palmer-topped-fairway-wood moments. In fact, he was rather jovial all around the course, enjoying some, for him, casual banter with the Hebert brothers. Even in those days (he was now 53), Ben was pretty much a robot on the golf course. I am pretty sure Ben did not make the cut for weekend play in that tournament. I also watched him all around the course on one of the regular tournament days. I thought I was watching the best ever.

In those Whitemarsh days, Arnold won the championship in 1963, the same year I saw him win in Chicago. But Jack Nicklaus ultimately won three times at Whitemarsh, and I must be candid: Jack was the better golfer. I interviewed both of them during my TV years and found Jack to be the far more congenial, frank and cooperative. I think I caught Arnie on bad days, I’m not sure. For some time, Arnie had a tough time realizing that Jack was surpassing him. Now, they are pals, and I like that.

Jack has won 18 major tournaments. That is more than anybody, ever. And up until the last decade, I had changed the “best ever” from Ben to Jack. I saw Jack do more incredible things on the golf course than anybody else.

Until this past weekend. Tiger is the best ever. There is no question about that. Of course, I am talking golf here, not incorporating his off-course behavior into that analogy.

More than a year ago, it was revealed that the Congressional golf course in Washington, DC was to be renovated and re-shaped for a future U-S Open. It was the site of the 2009 tournament that was Tiger’s personal signature. For the next two years, however, the Tiger AT&T National needed another home. So 20 months ago, Tiger and his Foundation looked for a substitute home course for two years while Congressional is getting its major fixup. And his Foundation would continue to receive parts of the profits from the tournament.

Then, November happened. Tiger and his girl friends hit the front pages of newspapers and all the sports and celebrity TV shows all over the world. It was a horrific crash. Anybody, as I did, who already had bought a weeklong ticket for Aronimink wondered what it meant insofar as Tiger finally playing Philadelphia.

They sell “season” tickets for golf tournaments the same as NFL football teams. You have to buy the whole package: Tuesday through Sunday. In the NFL, you have to pay for the “pre-season” games when the regulars hardly even play. In golf, Tuesday is a practice day, Wednesday the pro-am.

Aronimink probably was one of the first events in which many people were happy to buy the “pre-season”. I watched Tiger play nine holes (he only played nine) on Tuesday, and 18 Wednesday. But actually, nobody saw him play all nine, or all 18. Oh, sure, some healthy blokes might have seem him walking or putting on every hole, but hardly in the fashion of being able to say you SAW HIM.

If you were lucky enough to get a spot where you could see him drive, you likely did not see him finish the hole. There were just too many people. So, after you had seen one laser drive (he was hitting the ball just about farther than anybody in the field, with the ball resembling an Astronaut in a Cape Canaveral rocket), you realized you had to concentrate on your position on the green, most likely the next green, not the one you just saw him where he hit the laser.

For the first day of competition, I had decided to forego watching his drive, and went directly to the Number One green. It was a 12:56 p.m. tee time so just about all the Tiger Fans already were on Aronimink real estate. I was fortunate to get a standing spot just behind a guy not any taller, and I was able to see Tiger’s Thursday drive off #1 alight in the fairway. His short approach to the green was dead-on, and Tiger drained the putt for a birdie. The pros say you can’t birdie ‘em all if you don’t birdie the first hole. Tiger had birdied the first hole.

But, alas, when he played the second hole, I already had headed for #3 green in the hope that I would find another vantage point almost as good as at #1. I did not see the play on the second hole. And Tiger bogeyed #2, and he no longer was one under par with just 71 more holes to go.

While earlier this year, Tiger has been spraying drives off the fairways, in this tournament he was impressively accurate. And long. He hit the ball so long off the tee. He said afterward he used his driver almost every par four and par five hole. He sounded as though that was alot of fun for him.

On his first day, Tiger birdied the first par three hole (fifth hole) to once again get a red number on the portable scoreboard. He finished the first nine at one under par, and his huge gallary already was figuring this was just Thursday, heck, this tournament is in the bag. (He was the defending champion for the AT&T National, having won last year at Congressional.)

But, of course, Tiger having proved his mortality in the November revelations, he bogeyed the 14th, a par three, to fall back to even.

He then did the un-Tiger-like: he bogeyed the par five 16th (Tiger bogeyed a par five??? C’mon!!!). Now, he was over par. And he never again for the four days would see a red number.

In fact, the very next hole, the par three 17th, Tiger double-bogeyed. His par on the 18th gave him a three-over-par 73 for the first day.

Most of the Aronimink gallery was there to see Tiger. Last November did not interfere except perhaps between Tiger’s ears. Then again, at the British Open in less than two weeks, Tiger may erase his recent negative golfing past.

The attendance at Aronimink was 36,685 Thursday, 45,366 Friday, 45,231 Saturday and 35,872 Sunday. While the blue sky weather moved into the 90’s for the weekend, I think the Sunday decline was as much due to Tiger’s far-back standing as it was perspiration. At the start of the day Sunday, Tiger was 13 strokes behind the eventual winner Justin Rose, who won by the narrowest of margins.

Tiger had even par rounds of 70 Friday and Saturday, but this kept him three over par and far behind. There was no charge. And Sunday, he finished with a one over par 71. In Round 2, he did birdie two holes in a row, #3 and #4, both par fours. Tiger had 13 birdies in all. I saw about half of them. I am happy about that. As the song says in “FIDDLER”, ON THE OTHER HAND, he had 15 bogeys and one double-bogey, mostly from faulty strokes with the flat stick. From tee to green, I would say: WATCH FOR A TIGER IN THE SHORT GRASS AT ST. ANDREWS, the British Open July 15-18.

I have seen Ben, though not in his prime, and I know his terrific record. I saw Jack and Arnie in their prime. And now Tiger.

Tiger is the best ever.

Robin Roberts

Hall of Fame workhorse pitcher Robin Roberts of the Philadelphia Phillies died today (Thursday, May 6, 2010) at his home in Temple Terrace, 10 miles northeast of Tampa. He was 83.

Mr. Roberts started three games on the final five days of the 1950 season and was the winning pitcher in a victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers that gave the Phillies their first pennant in 35 years. That year, he became the Phillies’ first 20-game winner since Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1917.

I report on Robin Roberts because I had the rather unique pleasure of meeting and talking with him over a period of months in the mid-1970’s. I had personal experience in meeting a man whom many today have called “a very nice man”.

At the time I was Executive Director of the Philadelphia Civic Center. After the demise of the Philadelphia Blazers in 1973 in the World Hockey Association, the owner of Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, Ed Piszek, formed a minor league hockey team in the North American Hockey League and they played their games at the Civic Center. Mr. Piszek was a friend of Robin Roberts’ and invited him to be the team’s General Manager. I am not sure but a comment left on the philly.com website today said Robin Roberts was part-owner of the Firebirds. I just do not recall that distinction.

However, he did seem to enjoy his role as the GM of the Firebirds. Once or twice a week, he would call me from the Firebirds second floor offices to see if I was available for a meeting. While I believe I was “available” for all callers, I always was “available” for Robin Roberts.

He usually would ask for some kind of cooperation from “the building” for something the Firebirds wanted to do. I served as his enabler, so to speak, and was honored to do so. His requests always were reasonable.

Our meetings were maybe 30% business and 70% baseball. Once he found out I was an ardent baseball fan, he knew he had a major audience of one with someone seven years younger than he.

I told him that as a young resident of St. Louis, I had been weaned on Stan Musial of the Cardinals. Robin Roberts spoke with great admiration for Stan the Man, whom he faced numerous times.

Mr. Roberts was amusing and blessed with philosophy. He said even then (I think he was 46 or 47 at the time), old-timers with the Phillies all still greeted him the same way: “How’s the arm, Robbie??”

He said he always would reply: “The arm’s fine, thank you.”

He said he enjoyed his position with the Firebirds and enjoyed working with the young hockey players. But I never will forget what he added: “You know, John, I made a big mistake when I retired.”

If you know of his way of talking, and visualize his sitting there in the chair in almost a confidential tone, he told me: “I made a big mistake….because I should have been smart enough to get a bunch of business cards printed. Just my name and phone number, and under that, just one word: CONSULTANT.

“The guys who make all the money these days are consultants. And, y’see, you don’t say what kind of consultant you are. You’re just a consultant. And when they call you up and ask you whether you can consult on something, of course you can do that!”

He laughed.

Albert V. Gaudiosi

Albert V. Gaudiosi was described in an obituary in the Philadelphia Daily News as “the quintessential tough, hard-boiled newspaper reporter who later became a tough, hard-boiled city official under Mayor Frank L. Rizzo”.

Al was my boss during the Rizzo for Mayor Campaign in 1971, and when he was (briefly) City Representative and Director of Commerce in the mid 1970’s. He died April 7, 2010, in Houston at age 86 of complications of lymphoma.

The Daily News obituary writer, John F. Morrison, suggested Al “might have been abrupt, impetuous, pushy and annoying, but, as those who knew him agreed, was also a fine administrator with a keen intelligence and quick wit”.

During the 1971 Rizzo Campaign, I recall going to Al’s office to ask him about the new poll he had just received. To hear the newspapers tell it, the race was going to be very close between Police Commissioner Rizzo and Repulbican candidate Thacher Longstreth.

“John,” Al said. “Don’t worry! We’re winners. We’re winners.”

He said it with such confidence, I stopped the worrying!

In 1963, Gaudiosi and fellow Philadelphia Bulletin reporter Jim Magee along with photographer Frederick Meyer shared a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series on a numbers racket with police collusion. Myers photographed gambling transactions from a room they had rented in South Philadelphia. Gaudiosi took the photos to Rizzo, then a Chief Inspector, who identified the policemen or had them identified.

That was the beginning of his relationship with Rizzo.

The Daily News had a bit of the Gaudiosi scenario a bit incorrect. It said that when Commissioner Rizzo decided to run for Mayor in 1971, Gaudiosi was in the Philadelphia Bulletin newsroom taking a story from a reporter when city editor Sam Boyle came up and pulled off Al’s headset.

“You’re out of here,” Boyle declared.

“What do you mean?” Gaudiosi asked.

“Rizzo just named you his campaign director.”

You would think, by the Daily News obituary, that this came as a surprise to Al Gaudiosi. On the contrary, Al was prepared for this for many months. My source for this? Myself.

One day, back in the spring of 1969, I got a call from the Commissioner’s office. “The Commissioner would like for you to stop in his office this afternoon.”

At the time, I was a reporter/newscaster for KYW-TV.

When I arrived, Frank Rizzo sat down at his conference table and said he had two things he wanted to say to me “off the record”. He said he had just decided to run for Mayor, having received the private assurance from Mayor James H. J. Tate that he would have the Mayor’s endorsement some day in the future.

And, he said, I want you to work for me. He told me I was “the second newsman” to know about his decision. I soon realized that reporters who go into politics don’t necessarily do it overnight. This was 2 1/2 years before Election Day.

The first newsman? Al Gaudiosi.

Journalism, a Disgrace

Journalism is corrupt. It is not getting there. It is there. It has been there more than 100 years. But it now is worse and more immoral than ever.

It swoons. It slobbers. It exaggerates. It evades. It lies. It embellishes. It omits. It enables. It amplifies biases.

It informs. It educates. It amuses. It entertains. It investigates.

But, it is not deteriorating. It already has deteriorated. And because of the many, many media outlets spewing the filth, it is, more than ever, clearly corrupt and in need of a super transplant.

This is no cheap shot: it is liberalism. It masks itself in biased news.

Liberals cannot stand to hear themselves criticized. Until liberals realize what has happened, and what they have done to this society through journalism, deterioration will continue, although already it doesn’t have far to go to reach the dungeon.

Perhaps the easy targets are the liberals in the classrooms. The problem did not start in the classrooms, but it explodes there.

Liberals in the classrooms at all levels of education (elementary school through graduate school, both teachers and students) have perpetuated the distortions first offered through various forms of journalism.

The non-liberals of this society are left with hoping liberals someday will see the light. Some think this never will happen. This is not because liberals outnumber non-liberals . . . because they don’t. But liberals are not charitable. They will not give up their reign easily.

Bringing the issue to light is one task. Working on it looms as a far greater problem.

Corrupt journalism knifes into fairness. It knifes into objectivity. It knifes into the truth. It knifes into everyday life.

It is a national disgrace. It is ripping away at our society. It is ripping away at our republic. It is tearing apart our democracy.

And this is laughed at by the controlling (or “mainstream”) media.

Reform is necessary and urgent.

Conservatives cannot lead the changes that are necessary, at least not alone. It will take journalism professors who admit the fact of the national scandal.

While journalists the world over wring their hands over the future of newspapers, for example, the underlying issue is largely ignored. Many of those newspapers have been publishing political garbage masquerading as journalism.

Dean Walter Williams, University of Missouri School of Journalism’s first Dean, a century ago wrote the Journalist’s Creed that says in part: the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its PUBLIC SERVICE.

We must reevaluate: just what is that public service? The school’s own professors need to reevaluate.

Many books have been written on the subject of corrupt, biased journalism. Most of these have been dead-on, but often ignored by powerful people in journalism.

It is time for journalism schools to admit these tomes into the curriculum. It is important that journalism schools return to teaching objectivity and exposing biased reporting. Journalism schools must start teaching students who are NOT out to change the world, but are interested in a good story and, and this may be hard for you, the truth.

Journalism professors know about this. Most are on the liberal side.

In Philadelphia, both the Inquirer and the Daily News are liberal organs. Nearly all of their local columnists are liberal. The national columnists the two papers use are overwhelmingly liberal. This nation is NOT overwhelmingly liberal. These papers, just as all the others, need to balance their opinion columns. And they need to get opinions out of their news columns.

When Congress Sunday (March 21st, 2010) passed the health care bill, the so-called “mainstream” media explained little about the many negatives in the legislation. There was no examination of the huge cost to the taxpayers of the nation.

The Philadelphia Daily News sometimes uses its “cover” page for a biased headline, an editorial of sorts. Take, for example, the day after the passage of the health care bill. Said the Daily News on its cover: “Health-care reform: PASSED AT LAST!”

The Journalist’s Creed says in part: “I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism.”

That Daily News headline did not suggest fairness. Nor was it accurate; it was an opinion. Nor was it a clear statement … because health-care reform, in the fashion it cleared Congress Sunday, is opposed by a majority of Americans.

If newspapers (and other liberal media) are to regain their standing as organs of GOOD JOURNALISM, they must return to good old investigative journalism.

Dig. Dig into illegal immigration, which poises to be the Obama administration’s next cause.

Dig into the TARP bill and how its money is being spent.

Dig into the czars. Do you know about them? Do you know who they are, and how they got their jobs?

Dig into cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over, although Senator John Kerry recently said it is the next cause. So, which is next, immigration or cap and trade.

Dig into the related crisis: increasing governmental controls on our lives.

Dig into what President Obama has in mind for his “redistribution of wealth”.

Dig into the corporate bailouts. It is bizarre to even think that two major auto manufacturers are now controlled both by Obama and the auto workers union.

Expain to the American public just how much the nation is in debt. Do not blame it on the Republicans under President Bush, although that was part of it. The problem has been mushrooming because Congress is totally out of control. The nation’s media are assumed to be the watchdog of the Congress, but I submit to you that most reporters are going to more cocktail parties in Washington than they are devoting themselves to investigative reporting.

On this blog at some point in the near future, I hope, I am going to talk at greater length about the INSANITY now going at full speed in Washington, DC. As an example, earlier this year, President Obama submitted to Congress a huge, huge, huge $3.8 trillion national budget. Not long after that, somebody phoned into Rush Limbaugh’s show to try to put the national budget in perspective.

He pointed out that George Clooney’s Haitian telethon raised $66 million. That’s alot of money. The caller said George Clooney would have to have a $66 million telethon EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT 158 YEARS to match Obama’s spending in the 2010 budget.

Hey, you reporters: investigate the money situation in Washington. See what we are doing to this nation. See what we are doing to our grandchildren.

It is a disgrace.

A year ago, in mid-April, 2009, I attended the Centennial of Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism fraternity, at Depauw University in Indiana. Sigma Delta Chi was founded at Depauw in 1909.

Keynote speaker was Jane Pauley, NBC-TV anchor and TODAY SHOW host. Jane grew up in nearby Indianapolis. To a full auditorium, Jane gave a thumbnail sketch of her life and how she got into television, first in Indianapolis, then in Chicago, and soon to the Big Apple. She spoke about today’s journalism, and how some people in the industry consider “objective” political reporting “too passive”. It has been one of my complaints that today’s media, mostly newspapers and magazines, insert opinion into supposed news articles on the so-called news pages. Opinion belongs on the opinion page!

Jane Pauley said she thinks today’s news too often finds itself competing with entertainment programs. For this reason, she said, she regularly watches THE NEWS HOUR on PBS because she can count on getting news presented in as objective a fashion as possible.

Near the end of her talk, Jane said she thinks news today must eliminate its opinions in news reports. As she put it, in a rather off-handed way, “One way for the news media to get its niche back….. is to get straight.”

In a question-and-answer session after her main remarks, I went up to the microphone on the left side of the auditorium. She called on me for my question which was a bit long, it ran 90 seconds…but I said that I was attending my second journalism Centennial in less than a year, having attended the Centennial of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri in September, 2007.

I told Jane that I attended quite a few Centennial seminars in Columbia, Missouri, as well as several that day at Depauw University, and at no time did any of the professors or professionals address the great problem of biased journalism “until tonight”.

I went on: when a reporter is sent to cover a speech, he or she must seek to identify the “lead” story or comment by the speaker. I said I thought I heard my lead from Jane Pauley that night: did she say that “one way for the news media to get its niche back is to get straight”, in other words, report the news fairly and objectively?

It was a bit humorous as Jane seemed a bit nervous over what I was going to say about her speech, and then relieved when I finished with this conclusion: “In all of the Centennial seminars I attended, you’re the only speaker to address this very important subject.”

The crowd broke into a loud and prolonged applause. Jane Pauley thanked me for my comments, and said to the other person on stage, the man who introduced her, “I’m not gonna say anything else.” And she walked off the stage as the applause continued.

BOTTOM LINE: that audience was crying out for good journalism, objective, fair, accurate, truthful journalism.

Several people stopped me on the way out of the auditorium to thank me for my comments. There is no doubt in my mind that the general public is quite aware of the biases in journalism, and there also is strong evidence, therefore, that the poor journalism of today is causing problems for newspapers and magazines just as much, if not more, as the Internet.

So, my point is that the starting place for reform in journalism is in the classrooms of America, both for journalism and general education.

So, hey, you journalism professors. You are nice people. But get to work!! Get straight.

Harry Belinger

Harry R. Belinger, four-year Philadelphia City Representative and Director of Commerce, and my boss during that period, died Wednesday, September 23, 2009, of complications of heart surgery at Lankenau Hospital. He was 82.

While I met him after we both received job appointments by incoming Mayor Frank Rizzo (in 1972), Harry primarily was known for his prior posts as City Editor of both the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

For the most part, my contact with Harry came when he would come once a month to the Philadelphia Civic Center where I was Executive Director. He sometimes would attend the monthly Board meetings at the Civic Center.

As Director of Commerce, he spent far more time at the Philadelphia International Airport, where he was instrumental in finishing the $300 million modernization program there.

He quit the cabinet position with Mayor Rizzo four days after a dispute with the Mayor about union picketing outside the newspapers’ building on Broad Street. An estimated 250 labor union members were protesting what they considered unfair articles about the Mayor.

Harry subsequently became Vice President of Public Affairs for ARA (now known as Aramark).

Harry received a journalism degree from Temple University, and he was a teacher of sorts as newspaper editor. He was of the “old school” of journalists who knew and stressed proper grammar and word usage. Today’s papers are sprinkled with grammatical errors and the like and could benefit from a Harry Belinger-type editor.

I was on the receiving end of one example of his teaching, and I have appreciated what he did ever since. In speaking with him on the phone one day, I said that somebody (the subject of our conversation) “inferred” that he approved whatever we had decided.

I don’t remember the subject, but Harry quickly interjected: “No, he did not infer. He implied. You inferred.” He went on to explain the difference. I think Don Imus, radio star in New York, probably encountered a Harry Belinger somewhere along in his radio career, as Imus took pains on the air on more than a few occasions to outline somebody’s implication and his inference. I wish I would have heard Don Imus before that day on the phone with Harry! However, Harry, still wearing his editor’s eyeshade, so to speak, was both friendly and helpful with his correction. I am pleased to say it was the only time he corrected me!

His wife, Jean, died in 1998. He is survived by their daughter (Lizanne R. Hayes) and two grandchildren. His obituary also listed as survivor his loving companion Rosemary Vickers.

In his obituary writeup, which he prepared for the newspapers five years before his death, he wrote: “Three lives and thoroughly enjoyed the career changes because each change was like being born again.”

Lolly Pannella

Lolly Pannella, my business partner for 30 years, died in her sleep Friday evening, September 18, 2009. Members of her family were with her. Her published obituary is at the end of this post.

Lolly lived only 71 years and exactly seven months. But she poured an active life into this span, a multi-career woman. She was a hard worker throughout her careers, starting as a young woman as a cosmetologist. Those who knew her knew it: hard worker. She was active until lung cancer and liver cancer and their complications slowed her down, requiring several hospital stays, the last being three weeks before her death.

She and I met as a result of our separate contacts with Philadelphia Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo.

Commissioner Rizzo won the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor in May, 1971. At his invitation, I resigned my job as reporter at KYW-TV (now CBS3 in Philadelphia) and joined his campaign. He was elected Mayor in November.

Some people thought I got the greatest job in the campaign. It was my assignment to handle 32 women known as “Rizzo Girls”. Hold your excitement. It was not easy.

The Rizzo campaign manager (Al Gaudiosi) had initiated the efforts to get the Rizzo Girls by contacting a Philadelphia police detective, Frank Pacifico. Frank’s wife was among those selected. Lolly was her close friend and quickly agreed to be a Rizzo Girl, too.

I split the 32 women into eight crews of four each. Some assignments were cushy, but I tried to give each crew approximately the same number of each kind of event. Things went fairly well until a major Rizzo appearance at the Latin Casino. Gaudiosi felt it was appropriate to select Cass Pacifico’s crew as a reward for starting the whole project. Al told me that only four could be assigned because of the special occasion it was.

Other Rizzo Girls screamed in protest. Lolly phoned me after the event to let me know there was trouble brewing. Rizzo Girls were threatening to quit. I told her what was done on the Latin Casino outing, and why, and Lolly assured me she would try to resolve the issues with the other women. She made a few phone calls, and everybody was happy.

A bullet dodged.

After Frank Rizzo was elected Mayor of Philadelphia, I was appointed by him as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Civic Center.

Only months after starting the job in January, 1972, I was in the middle of negotiations to bring a major league hockey team (Philadelphia Blazers) to the Civic Center (Convention Hall). In May of that year, Vineland trucking company owner Bernard Brown and Attorney Jim Cooper of Atlantic City obtained a franchise to play in Philadelphia starting in October that year. It was a new major league hockey team competing across town against the Flyers.

One of Lolly’s friends and also a Rizzo Girl, Carol Mignogna, was a huge hockey fan, and was very familiar with Bernie Parent, John McKenzie and Derek Sanderson, stars of the Philadelphia Flyers and Boston Bruins, and now with the Blazers. Jim Cooper was the idea man for the startup of the hockey team. One of his ideas was to have young women as ushers, replacing the men who served at the various Civic Center events.

The ushers union protested to me, and after a short war, the men agreed to accept the Blazers demands. The Blazers paid for bright new uniforms for both the men and newly-hired women. Jim Cooper asked me to set up the new “union” (I found out they really had not paid dues nor conducted any union business; it was informal and managed by the union president just so they could handle the work for events such as the Philadelphia 76ers and Ice Follies.)

Jim Cooper wanted a new operation for the ushers, much more identifiable with the Blazers. Carol Mignogna was asked but did not want to manage it. She said she only wanted to watch the games, not work at them. But Lolly was interested.

She formed the Ushering Service of Philadelphia and was the instant boss of 40 ushers. She handled the hiring of the young women (in the old days, you could say “girls”; most were in their ’20’s).

It often is said that success requires being in the right place at the right time. About the same time the new uniforms were first being used, in October of that year, the road manager of Ice Follies asked whether the Blazers would allow their uniforms to be used for the ice show in December. The Blazers agreed.

The road manager (Jerry Walser) during that summer was going to dismiss the woman he had in Philadelphia handling group sales for the ice show. While talking about the ushering arrangements with Lolly, he asked her if she was interested in the group sales job. She was.

So Lolly went from being unemployed (and not job-hunting) in May to having two jobs in the fall. It all stemmed from Frank Rizzo a year before. For the rest of her life, she was a busy woman.

She handled the ushering service even after the Blazers left town (after one year), and during the two years of play of the Philadelphia Firebirds minor league team. (The Firebirds’ General Manager was Robin Roberts, Phillies star pitcher two decades before.) Lolly handled Ice Follies group sales until the show moved to the Spectrum in the late 1970’s.

Both Lolly and I found ourselves out of our jobs at the end of Mayor Rizzo’s second term.

We soon pooled our interests and formed a travel and tour company in 1980, buying what formerly was a Philadelphia boutique (store). We handled all forms of travel, specializing in motorcoach tours. We hired our first employee in 1981. Part of the operation was a travel agency, which made it possible for us to offer cruises and other forms of travel to our motorcoach customers.

In 1986, we bought the first of five motorcoaches we used in the business. We bought the second three years later.

In 1989, we bought the building next door and expanded our staff further.

One of our employees was Marie Bosak, who worked part-time for us and part-time for TWA Getaway group sales. Marie summed up Lolly in the mid-1980’s: “When people sit down in that chair,” she said, pointing to the chair next to Lolly’s desk, “they buy!” Lolly energetically spoke with her customers, who could sense her enthusiasm for the planned trip.

We sold our last three buses at the end of 2004 as part of our plan to retire. Anytime Lolly would hint to a customer that we planned to close up shop, she would hear the wails of a pleading customer: please don’t retire, we NEED you!

In the next two years, we downsized, as the saying goes. We agreed that we should prepare for our retirement. However, in 2007, I needed treatments for prostate cancer and surgery for liver cancer, and during the four-month period, Lolly handled the office alone. Retirement had to be put on hold.

The process on planning to retire resumed in late 2007 as the two of us handled a reduced amount of business, taking care of our best customers, some of whom had been with us for more than two decades, again a tribute to Lolly and her ability to sell and win friends. We each worked in the office three days a week, with Wednesday being the day when we both were on the scene.

On Thursday, November 13, 2008, Lolly left for the day the same as always, not knowing she never would return. Two days later, on Saturday, she was hospitalized. The next day, Sunday, she learned of her cancers.

Soon thereafter, she told me I should proceed with our plans to retire and close up. She said quietly, “You know I won’t be back.”

She waged a courageous 10-month battle.

She was a good lady.

LORETTA J. PANNELLA “LOLLY” (Tirendi)

PANNELLA
LORETTA J. “LOLLY” (nee Tirendi) on Sept. 18, 2009 of Langhorne, PA. Beloved wife of Louis R. Pannella, loving mother of Louis Pannella and Michael (Erica) Pannella, loving daughter of Mary (nee Ruane) Tirendi and the late Anthony Tirendi, dearest sister of Anthony Tirendi, Lewis Tirendi, and Ginger Lorman. She is also survived by her one granddaughter Julia Rose. Relatives and friends are invited to attend her viewing Thursday, from 9:30 A.M. until her Funeral Mass 11 A.M. at The Church of St. Andrew, 81 Swamp Rd. Newtown, PA 18940. Entombment will be in Sunset Memorial Park, Feasterville. In lieu of flowers, contributions in her memory may be made to St. Mary Holistic Center, 215-710-6948.
www.fluehr.com

Kevin is Missing

Last evening, Monday, August 24, 2009, my great grandson Kevin Pierron walked out the back door of my house and vanished. The terrible ordeal was over 3 1/2 hours later, and Kevin was safe. But, as I say, it was terrible, one of those situations you sometimes hear about, but of course hope never happen to you.

Kevin is five years old. I am happy to say that today he attended his first school day, his first of three days of orientation for kindergarten. It was all quite refreshing. In that short period, Kevin actively took part in answering questions about a story all the kids listened to. He was eager and happy to be there, having awakened 45 minutes ahead of the house alarm.

But last evening was not the least bit refreshing.

I was on the way home from the office at 5:15 p.m., made a stop at a pharmacy to pick up two medications, and arrived home at 5:45 p.m.

Kevin had heard my ring of the phone to put the phone on Call Forwarding from the office, so he knew his Pop Pop would be home in a few minutes. He already had been with Grandma (actually, Mom Mom is Great Grandma) to get KFC grilled chicken. He said with some emphasis that he was really hungry.

But at 5:45 p.m., he was outside somewhere. Grandma had twice looked for him in the back yard. No Kevin. However, he often had climbed the cyclone fence to meet up with other hombres of his age or maybe a little older. He almost always was no more than two houses away in the back.

It was puzzling this time because Kevin usually came home at the right time on his own, or others with dinner plans of their own had more or less sent him home.

Kevin’s Uncle, Tom, walked out of the house during this period to go to a band practice. He sometimes has taken Kevin with him, but not this time.

Shortly after 6:15 p.m., with no Kevin yet, I made a couple of searches in the back. I could see nobody in the back yards nor out on the next street over.

As it grew darker, surely he would know to come home, especially since he is so hungry.

But still no Kevin. I got into my car and drove around to the other street, and for the next 20 minutes or so, knocked on doors. I was struck with the hesitancy of people nowadays to open their doors. Maybe it was the time of day; it was just an hour before dark.

After driving up and down several side streets and finding Kevin’s Grandmother (not Mom Mom) visiting a friend two blocks away and telling her Kevin was missing, I returned home for maybe the fifth time and phoned 911.

By this time, two men whom I had contacted in the house visits were joining me in the search in their cars.

A policeman drove up about 7:30 p.m.

He asked for the scenario and soon started a search of the house. He was joined by other policemen, who were thorough in their room by room search. “Sometimes we find kids sleeping under a bed,” said one.

A police sergeant arrived to ask some more questions. The first officer on the scene had taken down most of the vital information, and we had provided him with two photos of Kevin. The sergeant was the friendliest of the contingent; that is, he seemed to be calming and compassionate.

As more police cars were parked outside, the search was expanded to include two playgrounds nearly one mile away and a small park less than one-half mile away.

Police wanted to know where Kevin’s Mother and Father were. Both share custody of Kevin. His Daddy was at work; his mother presumably at home in her apartment three miles away. I do not know whether they actually contacted her, but their questions indicated they were planning to.

For a policeman in such situations, every character in the caper is a suspect. Of course, that’s as it should be.

Later, detectives appeared to ask more questions.

In the meantime, I had finally been able to reach my son, Uncle Tom, to ask him to come home, and I also contacted my daughter-in-law, who was with her husband and their two children having a late dinner out.

Police were driving around the neighborhood from street to street. They were, of course, looking for a little boy. However, their activity attracted attention and that pretty much cracked the case.

Kevin had left our back yard and almost immediately went to a house another half-block away, on a side street that runs into Pearson. The adults there said they saw the police cars driving back and forth, but it did not dawn on them that they might be looking for the little boy who had come to their house.

He had brazenly knocked on their door because he knew a little boy lived there and Kevin wanted to know if he could come in and play. As it turned out, there were three children there so Kevin had new playmates suddenly.

A boy who lived in the house directly in back of us had been Kevin’s constant buddy for more than a year, but he had moved to Georgia in early July, and Kevin really missed having fun with his friend. What we know now is that Kevin spent a number of days looking for a replacement friend or two.

Last evening, he must have been happy as can be with three new friends. They were playing computer games. Kevin, like his Daddy, and his Grandfather, is a computer expert.

I don’t know exactly how Kevin’s presence in the house was revealed. But I was sitting in the living room with the nice police sergeant on a cell phone. He suddenly blurted out: “I think we found him!” I am not very good at controlling my emotions in crises, and I bawled. Sorry. But I didn’t know what “found” meant yet!!

In a minute, Kevin came in the back door, escorted, I think, by the first policeman to have arrived on the scene.

The word got around quickly to the searching policemen, and in a minute, the living room had about eight policemen all trying to listen to Kevin.

In the first place, Kevin seemed somewhat annoyed that they considered him “lost”. “I wasn’t lost.” Kevin protested. Several in his audience replied almost in unison: “But WE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE YOU WERE!!”

They asked him what phone numbers he knew, and although Kevin normally can recite several family phone numbers, he now was speechless as he seemed to start realizing this all was a pretty big deal. Finally, he remembered my office phone number, which seemed to satisfy the policemen.

One policeman, he might have been a Captain, said several neighbors on Pearson had told them Kevin was rather infamous for knocking on their door and asking for candy or kids to play with. This was not a good thing, the policeman concluded.

Obviously, this is something a five-year-old needs guidance on.

He wanted his supper, though three hours late. The grilled chicken was re-heated, but the once-hungry Kevin didn’t eat much.

Today, ironically, during kindergarten orientation, Kevin again met one of the boys he played with last night. The boy’s Mother, who was attending the orientation, told him he is welcome to come and play again, but only if his grandmother is with him to demonstrate that she knows where he is.

Radio Icon Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey, star network radio newscaster for decades, died Saturday, February 28, 2009, at 90. He was on the air within the past year; he was heard nationally for nearly 58 years, since 1951.

I met him six years later (1957).

It was during my year at the School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO. Every Spring, the Journalism School would sponsor “J-Week”, when classes were suspended in favor of students listening to a score or more of journalism professionals, experts in the field, pros who had “made” it. It was a terrific week.

One of my classes that spring was in radio news. I was an “intern” for the early morning newscasts on Radio Station KFRU. This was the same station I worked for each night from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m. It wasn’t fun getting up early but it helped me get through Journalism School in one year.

Among the guest speakers for J-Week was Paul Harvey.

I was told I would assist him in his preparation of his morning newscasts on ABC Radio coast-to-coast. I was told to be there (at the downtown newspaper newsroom from which the newscasts were aired) at 5:00 a.m., a bit tough for somebody who worked till 11:00 p.m. No way he was going to be there at 5:00 a.m., but I was a student. What could I say ??

I got there about 4:55 a.m. and Paul Harvey was waiting for me.

He was about 38 years old at the time, but like most “elders”, to a young guy he seemed like 60. As you might expect, he was all business. He wanted me to sort the copy from the news services, and all I had to do was watch him work. He had gobs of blank newsprint paper. He wrote his copy on this stuff.

To me, the irony was to see how this radio newscasting star prepared his copy. Every story was on a separate sheet of paper. Some of the stories were hardly more than one line long, but I realized this was the “style” his listeners easily tuned to.

He also wanted me to locate all the “kickers” I could find. Wire services often lumped kickers into a single dispatch. A kicker was a funny news story.

He would close his newscasts with a kicker. He always led it off ….. “For what it’s worth”…… Sometimes he would call it “our ‘for what it’s worth’ department”.

Knowing how unfunny the kickers were that morning, I thought he would start hollering at me for not finding at least one good kicker.

I soon got a liberal education in radio journalism, Paul Harvey Style. Paul Harvey took one of the unfunny stories and made it funny. And he always could get away with it, with that two-second pause after he uttered the punch line: “Paul Harvey…………… Good Day!!!”

I was so pleased and frankly honored that I had been selected to be his intern that morning.

His appearance in Columbia climaxed with his speech at the noon luncheon that day. He was one of the J-Week star pros.

Paul Harvey gave a great speech. He was already considered “conservative” and for some at the already liberally-tinged J-School, he was off his rocker. And because he was perceived as somewhat of a comic and cynic on his radio broadcasts, he surprised. He presented a clear description of the waste in government (yes, they even had it way back then) and the various hypocrisies in the news of the day. His audience discovered a conservative is not a whacko.

When he finished, he got a standing ovation.

Dean Earl English then came back to the microphone to thank Paul Harvey, and he brought down the luncheon when he said, rather sheepishly: “There were some of us who weren’t sure about inviting Mr. Harvey, but I must say, after listening to him today, I don’t know how we could have thought anything like that.”

Paul Harvey. Good Day!!!!

Why President-elect Obama won

Even more than a week after the election, nobody seems to be expressing the following points, so maybe the opinions are off the mark. I don’t think so, and I approve this message.

Barack Obama won for five main reasons. There might be 100 more but even the most significant of them only could come in at Number Six.

Here are the five main reasons, about which I will comment at length below: 1) The Media. Everybody can dance around that, but the media represent a highly powerful engine and serve to scare the daylights out of politicians while, with prejudice, sway the thinking of millions.

2) Bush hatred. Let us assume for the moment you don’t need an immediate further explanation for this.

3) The third reason Obama won was, no question about it, Senator John McCain.

4) For Reason Number Four, I copy Rush Limbaugh’s major point, the failure of the Republicans to be conservatives, and let the world know it. I am paraphrasing Rush but I think that’s close to what he said right after Election Day.

5) Reason Number Five is not overkill. It umbrellas a great deal. President-elect Obama knew how to deliver a manuscript speech from a Teleprompter. HIs first news conference after election last week confirms this point when Obama, at the brief news conference, demonstrated he is no master of the ad-lib.

As acknowledged above, there are other reasons that led to the Obama victory. But remember that more than 58,000,000 people voted for McCain, so the 7% difference in votes was anything but a landslide. It also bodes well for the opposition party four years from now if the GOP can wake up from its collective slumbers and blunders. In fact, it bodes well for the GOP in 2010 when the next House of Representatives races come up.

It is not my intention to try to list all the factors identifying victory and defeat. Blacks voted almost entirely for Obama. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin drew many voters to McCain who otherwise might have stayed home on Election Day. She was much more effective than the media are admitting, yet she likely turned away some so-called “moderates” due to the disgraceful trashing she suffered. And so on. Victory has many fathers; defeat is an orphan.

So, back to Reason Number One. Many people in and out of politics do not want to give credit to the ability of the media to control this society. Such people are fooling themselves, but they are falling for the media feints. The media collectively did not just favor Obama; they were in the bag for Obama. They shamelessly bulldozed their biased support. It is a national disgrace and will not be corrected unless or until the people in journalism call cop.

As a generalization, the people in journalism mostly are liberals. That goes double for the educators in college schools of journalism. Generally, they are quite comfortable in their skins. Yet much of their work is journalistic fraud, an abrupt rejection of the Journalist’s Creed, which says “the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service”.

If there was news favorable to Obama, it got front-page above-the-fold treatment. If there was a favorable McCain story, it was elsewhere in the paper. If there was a negative Obama story, you often only heard about it on the Fox News Channel. The so-called “Mainstream Media” ignored it, or countered it with bogus angles or otherwise “buried” it.

Deborah Howell in the Washington Post Sunday said stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the Obama candidacy more newsworthy and historic. For example, the op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32. The number of Obama stories during the past year, going back to last November, was 946, compared with McCain’s 786. After Obama eliminated Hillary Clinton, the tally was 626 stories on Obama, 584 on McCain. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain 144. This was just the Washington Post. While we have no comparable statistics, it is pretty safe to say that most newspapers’ coverages would reveal the same percentages of biases.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from June 9 to November 2, two-thirds of the campaign stories in the national media were about Obama, 53 per cent were about McCain. (Of course, some stories were about both candidates.)

You will find elsewhere on this blog that I do not admire Katie Couric. She has enjoyed a kind of rebirth for her interview in September with Sarah Palin. What a joke. Katie interviewed Palin for two hours and aired just six minutes. Anybody could interview Katie Couric for two hours and clobber her. Couric’s questions were described as fair by the Mainstream Media. Several of those CBS-TV aired were not fair. One was when she asked Palin to list several of the U-S Supreme Court rulings she disagreed with. When the question was aired, I did a double-take, trying to think of even one Supreme Court ruling besides Roe vs. Wade.

I would like to ask Katie to name the last three years’ winners of Movie of the Year. After all, she was star of the TODAY show and should have broad knowledge of news. I would like to ask Katie to name the new President of Russia. She may know now it is Dmitry Medvedev, but “I betcha” she couldn’t have told you three months after he became President. I would like to ask Katie to name the Prime Minister of Canada. Even today. It’s Stephen Harper, Katie. But believe me, in interviewing Katie for two hours, my training would enable me to “sandbag” her in the fashion of the Mainstream Media, including Katie. While it would not be good journalism, it would be revealing. For that matter, Katie interviewed Palin after the Alaskan Governor had been a national candidate for less than a month. Katie would have been easy prey to question a month after she switched to CBS-TV.

Below the radar in the subject of the media, consider the way certain stories become recycled to promote liberal causes. One day I recall USA Today running its top story on an upturn in homeless numbers (the numbers themselves were comparatively insignifcant and would have been ignored with a Democrat in the White House) and across the page was a story about a slump in car sales. Right now the Big Three automakers are in big financial trouble, but do you know the “stimulus package” Obama promoted at his first post-election news conference could be correctly identified as a UAW bailout. The auto workers’ unions exercised their extreme power to achieve wonderful union contracts that cost the Big Three $72 per hour. It takes a lot of dollars to buy a car built by $72 per hour workers. It also costs more than $1,500 in the price of a new car to pay the worker his or her hospitalization costs. Foreign cars have much less in the price for employee medical benefits. For example, Toyota cars have $110 for employee hospitalization.

So when we talk about the Big Three, there is a lot to the story you may not be told. There were similar omissions in the recent political campaign coverage. You were fed liberal viewpoints but rarely conservative ones. And the weight applied almost always leaned toward Obama.

The second reason for the Obama victory, Bush hatred, was an overwhelmingly successful effort by (Reason Number One) the liberal media. President Bush did not receive objective reporting out of the White House and he was not shown the respect the office calls for.

For example, in San Francisco, 12,000 people signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. Classless disrespect.

President Bush endured relentless attacks from the left while concurrently having to see conservatives abandon him.

I did not like everything Mr. Bush did during the past nearly eight years. I thought he should have responded to the opposition diatribes. He thought it would demean the office of the Presidency.

Unlike most Americans who opposed the war in Iraq, I support him. I have heard nobody on either side, really, observe that the Presidential campaign among Democrat Party candidates listed Iraq as the Number One issue. But that was more than a year ago. It hardly came up as an issue during the final two months of the campaign, thanks to the tanking economic news. The fact remains that Al Queda and similar enemies did not repeat the destruction of 9/11 because, frankly, they were afraid of George Bush.

But taken as a whole, no matter what Mr. Bush has done, he was blamed for everything. He remains despised by liberals while continuously disappointing the right, even though it should seem obvious that many of our nation’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush came to office, or are beyond his control.

Ironically, Obama will not suffer in the same disgraceful way. Attacks against Obama as President may sometimes be cruel and slanderous, similar to those against George Bush. But Obama will escape the same barrages because he will enjoy the fawning of a favorable liberally-biased media. Just as during the campaign, the media will serve to protect their chosen one.

Investigative reporter Jeffrey Scott Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal said our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world, he said, how disloyal we can be when our President needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House. It was juvenile; it was often virtually childish.

The media fed off Bush hatred and disseminated it, broadcast it regularly.

The third reason for the Obama victory waS Senator McCain himself. At times I wondered how he could be so unwise as to avoid obvious chances of scoring three-pointers against Obama. McCain could have clobbered Obama on many points, many issues. But he seemed more interested in getting Boy Scout merit badges for good behavior, which helped him not a whit. McCain could have campaigned on the immigraton issue, from a conservative viewpoint. Support legal immigration, oppose illegal immigration. Forget the fact that George Bush was weak on this. In fact, it would have demonstrated a key issue where he disagreed with the President. It would have challenged Obama’s campaign speech that with McCain, you get another George Bush.

McCain was politically less than astute to pull out of Michigan weeks before election day. What a terrible negative image that portrayed. It would have been much better had Sarah Palin not mentioned it, but it demonstrates how reckless the move was that Sarah Palin wanted to see the decision reversed. She just should not have said so pubicly. Obviously, McCain never discussed the move in advance with his running mate. (The only other Palin gaffe, by the way, was her reference to looking toward 2012.) She has to be careful when she speaks her mind. Comments like that do show inexperience, but Palin was one of McCain’s good decisions, and generally, conservatives thank McCain for selecting her. They won’t admit it but liberal media types feared Palin because she was so effective in defining liberalism.

And while we are beating up on John McCain, it is necessary to point out that his silence when there were negative stories did not make him look good. He needed to show some outrage when somebody asked him how many houses he owned. There were several ways he could have answered this that would have prevented the subject from showing up on the late night comedy shows.

And McCain was nothing short of stupid to alienate and ignore Rush Limbaugh.

Speaking of Rush, he described the fourth reason listed here for Obama’s victory. Rush put it at Number One. When you survey the American public, you find many people have more conservative viewpoints than THEY realize. Rush said the Republicans did not run on conservative issues, and this not only hurt them with conservatives but also denied them the opportunity to bring more voters into their camp. So Republicans need to recognize their conservative issues are far more powerful and universally appealing than they realize.

The fifth reason was the way Obama could appear impressive on the stump. He drew big crowds, thanks to extra efforts to attract audiences with rock shows, including that one in Berlin. He was especially effective in reading from a TelePrompter. He was not effective in ad lib situations, but even here, he is better than George Bush who became infamous for speech gaffes. The liberal media ignored Obama’s gaffes, such as when he made the reference to the nation’s 57 states, We don’t have 57 states, do we???

Jimmy Carter was a joke as President, and has continued to be the same as former President. It will be interesting to watch Obama to see if he can avoid becoming the remake of Jimmy Carter. Based on his liberal voting record in the U-S Senate and his leftist views and supporters, it will not be surprising if Obama mirrors Carter. Despite his fawning media, Obama will not have a cakewalk.

Ann Coulter put the status of Politics Twenty-First Century in focus by suggesting that Republicans show Obama the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that Democrats have shown “our recent Republican President”.