A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

NBCUniversal's new logo. © 2017 NBCUniversal, a Comcast company On Quora, Rich Madhok asks Can NBC News buy the Fox News Channel? No. NBC News  cannot  buy the Fox News Channel. Here’s why: NBC News is not now, and never was, an independent entity capable of purchasing any of its competitors. It started out as the news division of the National Broadcasting Company back in the days of radio. (Fun fact: Until 1943, NBC had two networks: NBC Blue and NBC Red. In 1943, RCA spun-off NBC Blue and sold it to Edward J. Noble’s American Broadcasting Service. which renamed the Blue Network as the American Broadcasting Company.) The National Broadcasting Company itself is not an independent company; it’s now part of NBCUniversal, which in turn is owned by Comcast. Comcast is not interested in acquiring another news channel; it already owns NBC News (over the air), MSNBC, and CNBC. It does not need Fox News Channel, nor does it desire to acquire Fox News Channel in order to “s

Photo Credit: Pixabay Why do some people say Mr. Trump instead of President Trump? In everyday usage, or in journalistic reporting/editorial writing? Since I studied journalism and mass communications in high school  and  college, I’ll start with how mass media refers to presidents and foreign leaders. Although newspaper and news magazines’ stylebooks allow for local variations when dealing with honorifics and titles (the  New York Times  usually places honorifics such as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. before a person’s last name upon second reference), the general style rule is: Use a government official’s title and complete name on first reference, e.g. “President Donald Trump.” After that, use the person’s last name only, e.g. “When Trump was asked about the issue, he said, ‘Fake news!’” In print media, page space is like real estate: a valuable commodity that is measured in column inches. Newspapers especially have only so much space on a page, and there is a limit on how many

Today is September 11, 2019. It is the 18th Anniversary of al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the United States of America in New York City, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, PA (the site where United 93 crashed when its passengers, aware of the other attacks by three hijacked airliners against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, fought back against the al Qaeda hijackers and forced the plane to crash before it reached its intended target, which was either the White House or the Capitol in Washington, DC.) Over 3,000 Americans, as well as the 19 hijackers, were killed in the worst terrorist incident in U.S. history. September 11 is a date that will, like 12/7/1941, live in infamy. The attacks were masterminded by Osama bin Laden and other radical adherents of Islam. They were carried out by young men who were radicalized into believing the tenets of a religion that some "imams" and "religious thinkers" have twisted into something that most Muslims do n

By AJ+ - AJ+ web, Public Domain Why do young people in the US read and watch AJ+ media and not realize it is propaganda for Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and other Qatar funded radical extremist groups? Let me ask you a question, with all due respect: Why do so many white males who identify as Christian and adhere to Republican/conservative political beliefs ask questions such as this one and use “Prager U” videos from YouTube as “proof’ of anything? First, I seriously doubt that great numbers of Americans (young, middle-aged, or old) watch or read Al-Jazeera English or any of its associated English language content, including AJ+, on cable TV or online. Some people might, after all, do so, either because (a) Al-Jazeera actually has more actual news-related content than its U.S.-based counterparts (including WarnerMedia’s CNN and “New Fox”-owned Fox News Channel) or (b) they are not narrow-minded and want a different perspective on the news and opinions that shape our lives. As even fo

Marvel Special Edition #3 Featuring Star Wars  collected issues 1-6 of the official Star Wars comics adaptation. Cover art by Ernie Chan. © 1977 Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation Is Star Wars part of the Marvel Universe? No. The  Star Wars  franchise (including films, animated and live-action TV series, and novels) properly belongs to Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company founded in 1971 by George Lucas, who ran it until October 2012. That’s when he sold Lucasfilm and all of its intellectual property to The Walt Disney Company for $2.2 billion in cash and $1.855 billion in stock. Marvel Comics, which itself is now also owned by The Walt Disney Company, has had a long relationship with  Star Wars,  starting as early as 1976. Back then, the comics publisher was one of the first companies to show interest in Lucas’s space-fantasy film set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Marvel artist Howard Chaykin created the very first  Star Wars  teaser poster

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 

On Quora, Eitan Krokowski asks: Why weren’t Auschwitz and the other concentration camps bombed by the Allies during WWII? My reply: There are several reasons why the Anglo-American Allies did not use the Eighth Army Air Force or British Bomber Command to bomb German extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka during World War II. First, there was a great deal of skepticism among military and political leaders in Washington and London when European Jews began reporting on what the Germans were doing in Poland and the Soviet Union. A few American publications, including LIFE magazine, had published several illustrated articles about the plight of Poland’s Jewish population under Nazi occupation, but most newspapers of the day (the  New York Times  included) tended to publish “atrocity” stories in the back pages. (Editors, reporters, and publishers of the day still remembered the often-false or wildly exaggerated stories of German atrocities in France and Belgium durin

© 1996, 2019 New Fox How will the Disney/Fox merger affect Fox News? The Walt Disney Company/21st Century Fox merger has not affected Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel or the over-the-air Fox Broadcasting Company. Before Murdoch and 21st Century Fox’s shareholders agreed to the deal, both of these assets were spun-off into a newly-created entity called “New Fox.” The Walt Disney Company already owns ABC, so it had no need to purchase the Fox TV network. Murdoch, on his part, is more interested in keeping Fox News Channel in his media empire, since being a mover and shaker in the conservative movement is far more important to him than being a provider of entertainment to the masses. (And considering how unpopular Fox News Channel is outside its conservative fanbase, I don’t think Disney's Alan Horn and Bob Iger wanted  that  hot potato anyway.) So, if you’re a regular watcher of Fox News Channel and were worried that its programming would morph into something that is no

Cover art: Early concept painting of Darth Vader facing off against "Deak Starkiller" by Ralph McQuarrie. © 2013 Henry N. Abrams (Abrams Books) and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On October 15, 2013, New York City-based Abrams Books (a subsidiary of France's La Martinière Groupe) published Star Wars Art: Concept, a 176-page hardcover volume dedicated to concept paintings created by Lucasfilm's artists for various Star Wars projects, including films, TV shows, and video games such as The Force Unleashed and the canceled Star Wars 1313.  In the tradition of Star Wars Art: Posters and Abrams ComicArts' Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series – Volume One, this coffee table art book is heavy on art (125 illustrations) that was used in the pre-production stage of many Lucasfilm Star Wars presentations, including the first six films, the animated segment of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special,  and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  Art for the Nelvana/Lucasf

Harrison Ford starred in two Jack Ryan films. © 1992 Paramount Pictures On Quora, member Maya Lachman asks: Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat? My reply: If you’re talking about Tom Clancy’s iconic character John Patrick Ryan, Sr., he is depicted in the novels as being Republican, especially in most of the books that follow 1991’s  The Sum of All Fears. In the early Jack Ryan novels ( The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Cardinal, Clear and Present Danger,  and  The Sum of All Fears ), Ryan works his way up the ranks in the Central Intelligence Agency, starting out as a recently-recruited analyst and rising all the way to Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI. During his time at CIA, Ryan doesn’t have much to say about politics (except in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations, in which case he is obviously a Cold War Republican), but his pre-CIA resume includes a stint as a Marine Corps lieutenant, a successful stockbroker who, despite