A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Chart Credit: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)  On the last week of March 2020, the United States of America reached a dark milestone in the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic: the number of confirmed cases in the country exceeded those in China for the first time. As of 7:57 AM on Friday, March 27, there were 85,996 reported cases in the U.S. and its territories (including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. 1,300 persons have died from COVID-19, including 365 in New York City alone, over the past three months. And as more cases get reported due to more testing and more people die due to the uncoordinated and even lethargic response by the inept and morally bankrupt Trump Administration, those numbers are likely to spike upward before they stabilize and then gradually slope down sometime in mid-spring. Clearly, the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, is not up to the task of guiding this nation in a major...

Originally asked on Quora as: Sarah Sanders was under a great level of scrutiny professionally by some in the mainstream media or personally (Red Hen refused to serve her). Do you think she did a good job? Do you sympathize with her now that she's leaving? My reply: Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not, in my opinion, do a good job as Donald Trump’s second, longest-serving Press Secretary. Yes, she served the President faithfully and to the best of her ability, but did nothing to either (a) reconcile the wide gap between real journalists (Fox News, Breitbart, and BlazeTV, being basically propaganda outlets for the right wing) and the Trump Administration, or (b) give the American people at least a modicum of honesty and decency. On the contrary, not since Ron Ziegler, President Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary throughout his two terms (1969–1974) have we had such an adversarial Assistant to the President charged with being a liaison between a Chief Executive and the press...

As someone who studied journalism in high school and college, I often wonder how professional journalists feel about Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel, the cable news outlet he founded 21 years ago to - in part, anyway - combat what he and many conservatives saw as the liberal domination of print and broadcast media. In a 2004 interview with the Australian Associated Press , Murdoch said that Fox is  "full of Democrats and Republicans, the others only have Democrats. We don't take any position there at all. " Murdoch's public position on Fox News' bias - or lack thereof- is reflected in the network's slogan, Fair and Balanced. However, given Murdoch's acknowledged support for former President George W. Bush's foreign and domestic policies and his reliance on the late Roger Ailes (who resigned in disgrace last summer as Fox News' chairman after several women at the network accused him of sexual harassment), many observers accuse Fox N...