Nbc Quotes

Come to think of it, that word (choice) shouldn't be applied to people's destinies. Ever. Choice should be relegated to TV and meals: You could choose NBC over CBS or steak instead of chicken. But take the concept any further than the stove or the remote control and the word just didn't apply. - V

When it comes to dreams, one may falter, but the only way to fail is to abandon them.

I will confess to you that, you know, one of the statements that’s been attributed to me that I’m sort of proud of is somebody said, you know, “What do we do about Osama bin Laden?” And they asked me, “Can we forgive him?” And I said, “Forgiveness is up to God. I just hope we hurry up the meeting.” And that’s the way I feel about him, really. [8 February 2003 show of Meet The Press, NBC News]

were in town. At dawn, NBC, along with the rest of the baseball world, awakened to the irresistible story of Joe Castle and his stunning debut in Philadelphia. Suddenly the biggest game of the day was

Leno said the rainy weather in California "couldn't have come at a worse possible time. Today was the day NBC was supposed to burn down the studio for the insurance money." Jan. 21, 2010

I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.

LYB NBC—which means “love ya, babe; nuts, back & critters”—the first half being pretty self-explanatory. Less obviously, “nuts, back, and critters” means watch out for crazy people, watch your back because you can’t trust anyone, and don’t run over any animals.

My favorite parody of this gesture was a skit on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, shortly after the Voyager launch, in which they showed a written reply from the aliens who recovered the spacecraft. The note simply requested, “Send more Chuck Berry.

Meghan did not—or could not—perceive the difference between the Queen’s personal aide and a contract stylist at NBC Universal

He used to watch NBC until he decided Brian Williams was a good-natured goof who’s too fond of YouTube videos.

Consider this: Every day in America more people get their evening news from Entertainment Tonight, an insipid syndicated television show covering celebrity news, than from CBS, NBC, and ABC combined.

Love and Trust God, It's a life time commitment!!!

Those are not my words. In fact, I had to look up the exact quote. Like everyone else, I only knew 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' We tend to romanticize good quotes, and I always imagined Oppenheimer uttering those words while staring at the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. In reality, he spoke those words during an interview for an NBC documentary in 1965. He had had twenty years to think about it.

Furthermore, a 2014 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans now refuse to identify as either Democrats or Republicans.29

I pull out my phone to write a reporting note to myself, typing “Katy sucks” into the subject line. Then I accidentally send it to the entire NBC News political e-mail list.

The president-elect approached the ten-week transition as a casting call for a new season of The Apprentice, the NBC reality show that had made him a household name.

For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur’s book about the campaign,

The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country’s television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day.

If all three major American TV networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had been broadcasting for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for sixty years, they wouldn’t have created the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in two weeks.

NBC News "Lead from gasoline blunted the IQ of about half the U.S. population, study says" by Elizabeth Chuck …on a population basis, shifting the average IQ down even a small amount could have large consequences, said Sung Kyun Park, an associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. The entire bell curve shifts, he explained, with more of the population at what was once the extreme low end of IQ scores.

And NBC is letting you walk away with all this?” Remnick asked. “Who is this person at NBC? Oppenheim?” “Oppenheim,” I confirmed. “And he’s a screenwriter, you say?” “He wrote Jackie,” I replied. “That,” Remnick said gravely, “was a bad movie.

But the NBC vice president whose job it was to formally approve this arrangement—a woman with children of her own—said a mother had to choose: You either worked ten to twelve hours a day, five days a week and on weekends, or you could go home and be a mommy.

Larry Speakes estimated that Baker spent as much as 50 percent of his time with reporters and editors, probably an exaggeration but a revealing one. The media, at least the part of it that really mattered, was still small enough that it could be managed; aside from ABC, CBS, and NBC, there were the wire services, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the weekly newsmagazines Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Baker, as chief of staff, became an expert in their care and feeding.

At age fifty-five, I left NBC News, fed up with the rat race, office politics, and the intense commercialization of the news. Farming was hard, but it was good for the soul and the ego. The cows didn’t care that I had been a big-time producer and had won three Emmys. They shit on me anyway.

Oppenheimer later said that at the sight of the unearthly mushroom cloud soaring into the heavens above Point Zero, he recalled lines from the Gita. In a 1965 NBC television documentary, he remembered: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

That did it. Mackenzie was seething. Someone suggested that mercenaries be sent over to the Howard barn to forcibly haul Smith into the office. Setting that popular idea aside, the stewards fired the leg-weary Greenberg back to the barn again, bearing yet another message. “Seabiscuit will either be a positive starter tomorrow, or we will refuse his entry entirely.” A few minutes later, Greenberg dragged himself back to the offices with Smith’s counterdemand: No one was to show up at his barn asking to examine the horse. The stewards complied, and Greenberg stumbled back to the Howard barn. In late morning, the administrative office door swung open. The officials looked up, expecting to see Greenberg. It was Smith. The stewards sat blinking at him. “All right,” Smith said. “Take the ‘doubtful starter’ off the blank. Seabiscuit will run all right.” Back at the barn, resting his sore legs, Greenberg saw Smith laughing. “The madder they got, the better he liked it,” Greenberg remembered. “He just done that for bein’ onery.” On July 16 a record sixty thousand people pressed into Hollywood Park to see Seabiscuit try for the Gold Cup, while millions more crowded around radio sets to hear NBC’s national

The NBC University Theater combined superb drama with college credit. Its productions were fully the equal of any commercial radio series and better than most, though it got stuck with the “education” stigma early in its run and never attained much more than its targeted academically motivated audience.

Cựu chủ tịch Hãng Truyền Hình NBC Lawrence Grossman tóm tắt gọn gàng quá trình dân chủ hóa công nghệ như thế này: "In ấn biến chúng ta thành độc giả. Photocopy biến chúng ta thành những nhà xuất bản. Truyền hình biến chúng ta thành khán giả. Và công nghệ số hóa cho phép chúng ta trở thành các hãng truyền thông.

One of the many real-life examples comes from Charlie Jones, a well-respected broadcaster for NBC-TV, who revealed that hearing the story of Who Moved My Cheese? saved his career. His job as a broadcaster is unique, but the principles he learned can be used by anyone. Here’s what happened: Charlie had worked hard and had done a great job of broadcasting Track and Field events at an earlier Olympic Games, so he was surprised and upset when his boss told him he’d been removed from these showcase events for the next Olympics and assigned to Swimming and Diving. Not knowing these sports as well, he was frustrated. He felt unappreciated and he became angry. He said he felt it wasn’t fair! His anger began to affect everything he did. Then, he heard the story of Who Moved My Cheese? After that he said he laughed at himself and changed his attitude. He realized his boss had just “moved his Cheese.” So he adapted. He learned the two new sports, and in the process, found that doing something new made him feel young. It wasn’t long before his boss recognized his new attitude and energy, and he soon got better assignments. He went on to enjoy more success than ever and was later inducted into Pro Football’s Hall of Fame—Broadcasters’ Alley. That’s

Most people don’t get (or want) to look at old news footage, but we looked at thirty years of stories relating to motherhood. In the 1970s, with the exception of various welfare reform proposals, there was almost nothing in the network news about motherhood, working mothers, or childcare. And when you go back and watch news footage from 1972, for example, all you see is John Chancellor at NBC in black and white reading the news with no illustrating graphics, or Walter Cronkite sitting in front of a map of the world that one of the Rugrats could have drawn–that’s it. But by the 1980s, the explosion in the number of working mothers, the desperate need for day care, sci-fi level reproductive technologies, the discovery of how widespread child abuse was–all this was newsworthy. At the same time, the network news shows were becoming more flashy and sensationalistic in their efforts to compete with tabloid TV offerings like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted. NBC, for example introduced a story about day care centers in 1984 with a beat-up Raggedy Ann doll lying limp next to a chair with the huge words Child Abuse scrawled next to her in what appeared to be Charles Manson’s handwriting. So stories that were titillating, that could be really tarted up, that were about children and sex, or children and violence–well, they just got more coverage than why Senator Rope-a-Dope refused to vote for decent day care. From the McMartin day-care scandal and missing children to Susan Smith and murdering nannies, the barrage of kids-in-jeopardy, ‘innocence corrupted’ stories made mothers feel they had to guard their kids with the same intensity as the secret service guys watching POTUS.

The one thought Conan had on the spot about the half hour at 11:35 was that it would likely exacerbate the problem he already had with Leno. 'So at least now, Jay does his show, but there's the break of the news, and that's kind of the reset button,' Conan said to Gaspin and Graboff. 'At 11:35 Jay's going to come out and do twenty jokes. And then what's he going to do?' When they replied that it seemed likely he would have only one guest, Conan said, 'OK. And then I come out and do what?' The NBC guys didn't really have an answer for that other than what Conan had already been doing: his own monologue. That this now seemed like a late-night pileup - three shows with monologues lined up end to end - was the implication no one had really addressed. Finally Conan did have something he really wanted to say, something that had almost burned a hole in his chest. 'What does Jay have on you?' Conan asked, his voice still low, his tone still even. 'What does this guy have on you people? What the hell is it about Jay?

Former federal prosecutor Doug Burns is convinced there were ample grounds to fire Comey, none of which amounted to obstruction of justice: Comey’s announcement of a no prosecution of Hillary Clinton was totally improper, as FBI officials or agents never make such prosecutorial decisions. Similarly, Comey’s factual condemnation of her was totally inappropriate. And last, his explanations of the law were both bizarre and incorrect. While the president did himself no favors in his interview with NBC’s Lest Holt, legally the Comey termination was not obstruction of justice.58 While no legitimate case can be made against Trump for obstruction, a case can be made that Comey committed crimes.

Good Enough isn't Really Very Good".

Those who suffered Belushi’s abuses and still loved him did so mainly because it was hard to take them personally. There wasn’t any real malice behind it, they felt—it was just John. His good side would come out soon enough. It was also very hard to resist the magnetic force of Belushi’s personality. It was exciting to be around him, worth whatever price he made you pay. Tom Davis tells of a day he and John were riding on an NBC elevator together. John, upset about something involving his mother, started crying. Soon Davis found himself crying along with him. By the time they reached the 17th floor, people all around them in the elevator were teary-eyed too. Belushi, Davis says, had an amazing power to pull people into whatever emotional state he was in at the moment.

None shall be too rich and none shall be too poor,' Long would tell his listening audience, occasionally a national audience on the NBC radio network. 'America will become a land sharing the fruits of the land, not for the favored few, not to satisfy greed, but that all may live in a land in which the Lord has provided an abundance sufficient for the luxury and convenience of the people in general.

What happened next is perhaps one of my favorite Angela stories ever. Still a little stung by our Ivy experience, Angela was determined to salvage a “star” moment for us. She coyly said to the photographer, “Do you know who she is? She’s Pam from The Office.” He looked at us blankly. Angela then motioned to the group. “We are the ladies of The Office.” Still nothing. Angela pushed harder. “On NBC. The Office. On NBC.” Finally, the guy’s face lit up. “Are you serious?!” But he didn’t raise his camera. Instead, he reached into his pocket and produced a business card. He said, “Here’s my card. If you ever want to tip me off on when celebrities will be out and about, I’ll give you a finder’s fee.” It took us a minute until we all collectively realized that he thought we worked IN AN OFFICE at NBC. OMG. We died.

Weinstein’s legal argument, in order of ascending absurdity and descending seriousness, was that anything negative about him was defamatory; that reporting on any company that used NDAs was impermissible; that he had cut a deal with NBC; that my sister was sexually assaulted; and that there was a child molester in my extended family. (Jonathan howled with laughter at it. “This letter is adorable,” he said. “I love this letter.”)

In 1952 NBC put on its early morning "Today Show" featuring Dave Garroway. Before then the networks had assumed that few people would tune in at an early hour of day: many channels had been blank. At first the show did not do well, but Garroway then brought on stage a chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs. The chimp excited children, then adults, and "The Today Show" became a popular fixture. Cartoons soon dominated morning TV on weekends.19

Broadcast just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, this episode provides ample evidence that everyone involved with Fibber McGee and Molly is behind the war effort, from Wilcox’s reading a telegram from Johnson’s Wax authorizing NBC to break in with any news bulletins to Harlow’s appeal to buy defense bonds at the close which leads into a stirring version of the first verse of a patriotic hymn sung by everyone in attendance.

We’re all in outer space, Jerry, and we’re in color. NBC claims to be the first full- color network, so let’s prove it for them. When you light the sets, throw wild colors in—magenta, red, green, any color you can find—especially behind the actors when they’re in a close shot. Be dramatic. In fact, go overboard. Backlight the women and make them more beautiful. Take some chances. No one can tell you that’s not the way the future will look.

May 11, Trump admitted to Lester Holt of NBC News that he was determined to fire Comey “regardless” of the recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in order to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing.” Trump isn’t the first president to attempt to obstruct justice. But he is the first to admit what he was doing on national TV, and his admissions led to the appointment of former FBI director Robert S. Mueller as a special counsel.

Kill a Mockingbird’s small-town setting is what stuck with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who grew up in small towns throughout South Dakota and knew “not just the pressures that [Atticus] was under, but the magnifying glass that he lived in. This all takes place in a very small environment. People who live in big cities don’t have any idea of what the pressures can be like in a small town when there’s something controversial going on.” When Allan Gurganus read To Kill a Mockingbird,

In 1991, the editors in The Scientific American were saying that environmental ecology was a MORAL issue. The same editors (with the editors of every major daily newspaper in America, plus CBS, NBC, and ABC) were treating premarital sex, use of drugs, pornography, sex perversion, and fornication as “LIFESTYLES” with no moral overtones. “Good and evil” could only be applied to people who opposed federal control of businesses and property. They were “good” if they submitted to control and “fines,” but they were “evil” if they had any freedom. “Good and evil” are not even talked about in any high school or college in America where they touch adultery, fornication, sex perversion, stealing, cursing, cheating, pornography, or lying. You can’t even post a standard for “good and evil” (the Ten Commandments) in the hallway of a public school. At the same time, you are being taught that it is “EVIL” to put your garbage in the wrong place. What has happened?

NBC had cleaned out its last two liberal commentators, John Vandercook and Bob St. John, the year before. CBS recently had edged Quincy Howe out of his 6 P.M. daily spot as soon as a sponsor had bought it and had given it to Eric Sevareid, the new head of the Washington bureau. The era of McCarthy lay just ahead, but already there were signs foreshadowing it. I had not taken the change of climate as seriously perhaps as I should. I had been through it all before—in my years in Nazi Germany.

Climate change is not a hot topic. As author Bill McKibben points out in a post on TomDispatch.com, in 2011, “ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming.” He documents that over the last three years, a mere ninety-eight minutes of prime-time television news was devoted to covering this global challenge. In fact, in 2011, the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of time on climate change— all of it given over to Republican politicians focused on denying it.

The Martin and Lewis Show was developed by NBC in the wake of the stinging CBS talent raids that lured Jack Benny and others to the younger network. NBC announced a talent hunt: the network was searching for rising young performers for radio and television. Soon thereafter a network executive caught the nightclub act of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who had been performing together for several years and had developed some name recognition within the industry while remaining largely unknown to the general public.

Milch had a bigger cast, a bigger set (on the Melody Ranch studio, where Gene Autry had filmed very different Westerns decades earlier), and more creative freedom than he’d ever had before. There were no advertisers to answer to, and HBO was far more hands-off than the executives at NBC or ABC had been. And as a result, there was even less pretense of planning than there had been on NYPD Blue, and more improvisation. There were scripts for the first four episodes of Season 1, and after that, most of the series was written on the fly, with the cast and crew often not learning what they would be doing until the day before (if that). As Jody Worth recalls, the Deadwood writers would gather each morning for a long conversation: “We would talk about where we were going in the episode, and a lot of talk that had nothing to do with anything, a lot of Professor Milch talk, all over the map talk, which I enjoyed.” Out of those daily conversations came the decisions on what scenes to write that day, to be filmed the day after. There was no system to it, no order, and the actors would be given scenes completely out of context from the rest of the episode.

Nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren” can dissuade me from voting for Trump, a woman told Ashley Parker of the New York Times. So imagine how you would feel if every time you turned on NBC, you saw my reporting on this figure you love—this figure you think will lift you up, save your job, make your country great again. Imagine how you’d feel if every night and all day this little blond-haired girl was shining a critical light on your beloved figure. Who is she to question his plans? Double-check his statements? Follow up on his promises? You would hate me. And people do.

Neither Trump nor his Russian backers spent very much money during the campaign. Television did the advertising for them free of charge. Even the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC mentioned Trump twice as often as they mentioned Clinton. When Russia began to release hacked emails, the networks and the media played along. Russia thus influenced the headlines and even the questions posed in the presidential debates. Content from hacked emails figured in two of the three debates; in the final one, the debate moderator accepted an erroneous Russian recasting of Clinton’s words in a speech, and made of it a central issue.

Kept on as head of NBC Entertainment by Fred Silverman’s successor, Grant Tinker, Tartikoff had more than justified Tinker’s faith in him by gradually putting together a string of hits such as Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Night Court, Miami Vice, The A Team, Family Ties, and The Cosby Show, hits that finally took NBC out of third place in the ratings. That most of those shows were of an unusual originality and quality was not an insignificant footnote, for it could be said that by succeeding with them Tartikoff and Tinker contributed more than anyone to a movement in network television away from the crassness of the programs that dominated the medium during the Fred Silverman era.

NBC News reporter Douglas Kiker observed, while covering the Wallace campaign, “It was as if somewhere, sometime a while back, George Wallace had been awakened by a white, blinding vision: they all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern! Anybody who travels with Wallace these days on his presidential campaign finds it hard to resist arriving at the same conclusion.” Wallace voters who agreed to be interviewed sounded like Trump voters in 2016. Most of them denied race had anything to do with their choice of candidate. They said they supported Wallace because he told it like it was and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

His first play, Burial Services, concerned the burial of a paralyzed girl who was still alive. It caused such a furor (more than 50,000 letters were written to NBC) that Oboler would never again write a story with such a personal theme that could adversely affect a vast audience.” Oboler remembered it this way: “I had taken a believable situation and underwritten it so completely that each listener filled the silences with the terrors of his own soul. When the coffin lid closed inexorably on the conscious yet cataleptically paralyzed young girl in my play, the reality of the moment, to thousands of listeners who had buried someone close, was the horrifying thought that perhaps sister, or brother, or mother, had also been buried … alive.

Charlie Wild was a product of the Red Scare, NBC’s hurry-up attempt to salvage something when congressional finger-pointing resulted in the loss of sponsorship for radio’s most popular detective, Sam Spade. Both Howard Duff (who played Spade) and author Dashiell Hammett had been “listed” in Red Channels, making Spade sponsor Wildroot Cream Oil increasingly unhappy. After weeks of indecision, Wildroot dropped Spade and shifted to a new detective hero, hopefully cut from the same cloth. The final Wildroot Spade show was Sept. 17, 1950. The following Sunday Charlie Wild premiered from the opposite coast (New York). Howard Duff appeared in character on the first broadcast with a vocal telegram, wishing the new hero well. It would be Duff’s last radio appearance for six years,

IN 1941, ITS BEST YEAR EVER, the partnership of Kavalier & Clay earned $59,832.27. Total revenues generated that year for Empire Comics, Inc.—from sales of all comic books featuring characters created either in whole or in part by Kavalier & Clay, sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman’s Big Little Books featuring the Escapist, sales of Keys of Freedom, of key rings, pocket flashlights, coin banks, board games, rubber figurines, windup toys, and diverse other items of Escapism, as well as the proceeds from the licensing of the Escapist’s dauntless puss to Chaffee Cereals for their Frosted Chaff-Os, and from the Escapist radio program that began broadcasting on NBC in April—though harder to calculate, came to something in the neighborhood of $12 to $15 million.

A shorthand quickly developed among them, almost their own language. Watching it happen thrilled Herb Sargent, who in all his years in the business had never seen anything like it. “It’s like musicians jamming,” he thought. “They can come from all over the country and immediately sit down and play together because the level of their art is in the same place.” Everyone always seemed to be laughing, and a rushing, manic sense of hilarity took over. There was a constant, competitive throwing out of lines, all of them showing what they had, looking for openings, and timing their licks. A giggling group from the show poured into a crowded NBC elevator one day, and as they rode down Chevy put his arm around a balding executive standing next to him, turned to the others, and asked, “Have you met my wife?

The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything. At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show: “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.” Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd. “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic. Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.

NBC’s Bob Costas—when he is not out praising Vladimir Putin at the Olympics—is railing against the dangerous gun culture of America, perpetuated by (cue low piano keys) the villainous NRA. When it was pointed out to Costas by Greg Gutfeld that he was protected by armed security, Costas blanched. Costas responded, “In truth, Greg was accurate if you consider 180 degrees from the truth accurate. I have never had a personal bodyguard a single day in my life. There are security people at NFL games that the NFL employs, and there is always massive security at an Olympics, and there…is NBC security.” But Gutfeld never said that Costas had hired a personal bodyguard. Just pointing out that Costas was benefiting from the gun culture he was simultaneously attacking. He doesn’t have to be armed, because the companies he works for have the power and money to make other carry arms for him.

Angered by his quick recovery, commentators sought to recast the triumphant scene of his return to the White House. When Trump appeared on the White House balcony after his return from Walter Reed, NBC News’s presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted, “In America, our Presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes—that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems.”61 While the tweet was amplified by Beschloss’s fellow Resistance members, Americans with better knowledge of presidential history responded with pictures of every other president pictured at the balcony, be it President Barack Obama (many, many times—once with communist dictator Xi Jinping, no less), President George W. Bush, President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, on back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.62

It seems strange that George Burns and Gracie Allen would be discovered, as radio properties, by the British. They were doing a vaudeville tour in England, playing to packed houses everywhere. The British just loved Gracie; her routines became so well known during the six-month trip that the audience would sometimes shout out the punchline in unison. They were aided in this by radio, using the infant medium to promote their stage shows, doing short bits from their act on various BBC stations as they traveled. From the beginning, Gracie had severe mike fright. She never really lost her fear of the microphone, Burns would say in interviews and in his books, but she always coped with it. Returning home, they auditioned for NBC and Grape Nuts in 1930. But the agency executive thought Gracie would be “too squeaky” on the air, and they lost the job. It was an irony: a few years later, the same product would be carrying their radio show, then one of the most successful in the nation.

I am against the mass media ‐ CBS, ABC, NBC, UPI and AP being used by Washington D.C. since WWI, and by the CIA wince WWII, as pure propaganda tools. My positive philosophy is very simple. I believe there is in each of us a potential for peace and harmony. A few power‐mad perverts dictate orders that must be challenged. They are going against the laws of nature. A family and society that does not care for its infants with love and affection will create and does produce mad bombers. The source of this peace and harmony is within the family unit, not government agents or law enforcement. Without love in the home there is never quiet in the community, cities or around the world. There are ways to counteract the evil being purposely planned. Study history. Separate fears and prejudices from facts. Recognize facts from propaganda. Invest energy in fighting for what you believe in. Analyze harder where we are going and what you are doing about it. What do you really believe in? How much do we care?

It seemed to numerous voters that, thanks to the growing power of the ACLU, criminals were beginning to have more rights than the victims. Preachers across the country were becoming alarmed about the young people’s apathy and lack of morals. Some blamed television. Or as Reverend W. W. Nails put it, “The devil has three initials: ABC, NBC, and CBS. They love Lucy more than they do the Lord and they would rather leave it to Beaver than to Jesus.” The average middle-class Americans who worked hard every day, who were not criminals, not on welfare, and had seldom complained, suddenly and collectively started showing signs of growing disillusionment, worried that with all the new social programs they were now going to have to carry the rich and the poor on their backs. They were tired of having to pay so much income and other taxes to support half the world while they struggled to make ends meet. They began to feel that no matter how hard they worked or how much they paid, it was never appreciated and it was never enough.

What was her desire? Quality time with Bill. She wanted his attention. She wanted him to focus on her, to give her time, to do things with her. By “quality time,” I mean giving someone your undivided attention. I don’t mean sitting on the couch watching television together. When you spend time that way, ABC or NBC has your attention— not your spouse. What I mean is sitting on the couch with the TV off, looking at each other and talking, giving each other your undivided attention. It means taking a walk, just the two of you, or going out to eat and looking at each other and talking. Have you ever noticed that in a restaurant, you can almost always tell the difference between a dating couple and a married couple? Dating couples look at each other and talk. Married couples sit there and gaze around the restaurant. You’d think they went there to eat! When I sit on the couch with my wife and give her twenty minutes of my undivided attention and she does the same for me, we are giving each other twenty minutes of life. We will never have those twenty minutes again; we are giving our lives to each other. It is a powerful emotional communicator of love.

Jane Curtin was probably the most direct of the three about going in and talking to Lorne, calmly and rationally, about the parts or lack of parts she was getting on the show, although she sometimes confronted Lorne in anger. One friend described her as a smooth lake that occasionally roiled but quickly settled back down again. She was a member of a group within the show—assistant costume designer Karen Roston and associate producer Jean Doumanian were others—that one of the men called “the Smart Women.” The Smart Women would sit in the ninth-floor green room or, when she got one, in Curtin’s dressing room, sipping tea or wine and commenting wryly on the weirdness surrounding them. Curtin was so clearly the most responsible, normal cast member that for the first two contract renegotiations the players had with NBC they chose her as the representative for all of them. After discussing objectives with the cast, Curtin sat down with program executive Aaron Cohen (who would already have discussed parameters with Lorne) to present the cast’s proposals and take Cohen’s offers back to the 17th floor. One observer privy to this process believes another reason Jane was designated the cast’s representative was that she was the most suspicious of Lorne’s role in the negotiations and therefore would be likely to get them the best possible deal.

that night she dreamed of employing an army of women cleaners who would set forth across the planet on a mission to clean up all the damage done to the environment they came from all over Africa and from North and South and South America, they came from India and China and all over Asia, they came from Europe and the Middle East, from Oceania, and from the Antarctic, too she imagined them all descending in their millions on the Niger Delta and driving out the oil companies with their mop and broom handles transformed into spears and poison-tipped swords and machine guns she imagined them demolishing al the equipment used for oil production, including the flare stacks that rose into the skies to burn the natural gas, her cleaners setting charges underneath each one, detonating from a safe distance and watching them being blown up she imagined the local people cheering and celebrating with dancing, drumming and roasted fish she imagined the international media filming it- CNN, BBC, NBC she imagined the government unable to mobilize the poorly paid local militia because they were terrified by the sheer numbers of her Worldwide Army of Women Cleaners who could vaporize them with their superhuman powers afterwards, she imagined legions of singing women sifting the rivers and creeks to remove the thick slicks of grease that had polluted them and digging up the land until they'd removed the toxic sublayers of soil she imagined the skies opening when the job was fone and the pouring of pure water from the now hygienic clouds for as long as it took for the region to be thoroughly cleansed and replenished

The fight spilled out into the press. Allen blasted the censors. “They are a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference. Their conferences are meetings of men who can do nothing but collectively agree that nothing can be done.” The thin-skinned network reacted again, cutting Allen off in the middle of a barb. Now other comics joined the fray. That week Red Skelton said on his show that he’d have to be careful not to ad-lib something that might wound the dignity of some NBC vice president. “Did you hear they cut Fred Allen off on Sunday?” That’s as far as he got—the network cut him off. But Skelton went right on talking, for the studio audience. “You know what NBC means, don’t you? Nothing but cuts. Nothing but confusion. Nobody certain.” When the network put him back on the air, Skelton said, “Well, we have now joined the parade of stars.” Bob Hope, on his program, was cut off the air for this joke: “Vegas is the only town in the world where you can get tanned and faded at the same time. Of course, Fred Allen can be faded anytime.” Allen told the press that NBC had a vice president who was in charge of “program ends.” When a show ran overtime, this individual wrote down the time he had saved by cutting it off: eventually he amassed enough time for a two-week vacation. Dennis Day took the last shot. “I’m listening to the radio,” he said to his girlfriend Mildred on his Wednesday night NBC sitcom. “I don’t hear anything,” said Mildred. “I know,” said Dennis: “Fred Allen’s on.” On that note, the network gave up the fight, announcing that its comedians were free to say whatever they wanted. It didn’t matter, said Radio Life: “They all were anyway.” Allen took a major ratings dive in 1948. Some

Questions surround nearly every aspect of the assassination. The chain of possession regarding each piece of evidence was tainted beyond repair. The presidential limousine, which represented the literal crime scene, was taken over by officials immediately after JFK’s body was carried into Parkland Hospital and tampered with. The Secret Service apparently cleaned up the limousine, washing away crucial evidence in the process. Obviously, whatever bullet fragments or other material that was purportedly found there became immediately suspect because of this. On November 26, the windshield on the presidential limo was replaced. The supposed murder weapon—a cheap, Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a defective scope, allegedly ordered by Oswald through a post office box registered to his purported alias, Alex Hidell—is similarly troublesome. The two Dallas officers who discovered the rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, Seymour Weitzman and Eugene Boone, both swore in separate affidavits that the weapon was a German Mauser. As was to become all too common in this case, they would later each claim to be “mistaken” in a curiously identical manner. In fact, as late as midnight on November 22, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade would refer to the rifle as a Mauser when speaking to the press. Local WFAA television reported the weapon found as both a German Mauser and an Argentine Mauser. NBC, meanwhile, described the weapon as a British Enfield. In an honest court, the Carcano would not even have been permitted into the record, because no reliable chain of possession for it existed. Legally speaking, the rifle found on the sixth floor was a German Mauser, and no one claimed Oswald owned a weapon of that kind.

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

When we left, we were told it would be another month before the winner was announced. Then I felt really discouraged. Friends were telling me that my injuries and my fitness level guaranteed me the cover. I felt the opposite. I didn’t feel I was as fit as the others and I felt like the war was too controversial a topic for the magazine to want to feature a wounded veteran. I had completely talked myself out of even the slightest possibility of winning by the time I was back on a plane to New York a month later to find out the results. My family didn’t believe that I didn’t know already. They thought I’d been told and kept asking me about it. But I really didn’t know. The winner was being announced live on NBC’s Today show. I had made my peace with not winning and Jamie and I were just excited to go to New York and be on Today. We had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and when we landed there I had a voice mail from my friend Billy. His message: “I thought we had to wait to see who won? It’s already out!” I clicked onto my Facebook app and saw that Billy had posted a picture of him and some of his buddies at a truck stop in Kentucky posing with a Men’s Health magazine--and I was on the cover! I was shocked. But even then I was convinced this wasn’t real. Maybe the editors had decided to give the cover to all three of us and we each had a different region of the country. It felt incredible to see myself on the cover of that magazine but I just wasn’t convinced I was the outright winner. Jamie and I got to our hotel room late. I called my contact at Men’s Health, Nora, and said, “I’ve already seen the magazine.” There was a beat on the other end of the line before she flatly said, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” So Jamie and I went to bed. The next morning we met up with Finny and Kavan and headed over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the Today show. I didn’t say a word about what I’d seen. When we arrived, Nora was at the door. I waited for the others to go in before I said to her, “So we’re not going to talk about what we’re not going to talk about?” I was smirking a little but quickly wiped the grin off my face when I saw the look on Nora’s. “You’re not the only person in this competition, Noah. Not everyone knows.” Roger that. I wouldn’t say another word.

NBC News reporter David Gregory was on a tear. Lecturing the NRA president—and the rest of the world—on the need for gun restrictions, the D.C. media darling and host of NBC’s boring Sunday morning gabfest, Meet the Press, Gregory displayed a thirty-round magazine during an interview. This was a violation of District of Columbia law, which specifically makes it illegal to own, transfer, or sell “high-capacity ammunition.” Conservatives demanded the Mr. Gregory, a proponent of strict gun control laws, be arrested and charged for his clear violation of the laws he supports. Instead the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Irv Nathan, gave Gregory a pass: Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, as it does in every case involving firearms-related offenses or any other potential violation of D.C. law within our criminal jurisdiction, OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast. What irked people even more was the attorney general admitted that NBC had willfully violated D.C. law. As he noted: No specific intent is required for this violation, and ignorance of the law or even confusion about it is no defense. We therefore did not rely in making our judgment on the feeble and unsatisfactory efforts that NBC made to determine whether or not it was lawful to possess, display and broadcast this large capacity magazine as a means of fostering the public policy debate. Although there appears to have been some misinformation provided initially, NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity-magazine would violate D.C. law. David Gregory gets a pass, but not Mark Witaschek. Witaschek was the subject of not one but two raids on his home by D.C. police. The second time that police raided Witaschek’s home, they did so with a SWAT team and even pulled his terrified teenage son out of the shower. They found inoperable muzzleloader bullets (replicas, not live ammunition, no primer) and an inoperable shotgun shell, a tchotchke from a hunting trip. Witaschek, in compliance with D.C. laws, kept his guns out of D.C. and at a family member’s home in Virginia. It wasn’t good enough for the courts, who tangled him up in a two-year court battle that he fought on principle but eventually lost. As punishment, the court forced him to register as a gun offender, even though he never had a firearm in the city. Witaschek is listed as a “gun offender”—not to be confused with “sex offender,” though that’s exactly the intent: to draw some sort of correlation, to make possession of a common firearm seem as perverse as sexual offenses. If only Mark Witaschek got the break that David Gregory received.

During the report of Fred’s death on the Nightly News program on NBC, the network where Fred got his start in television, reporter Bob Faw said, “The real Mister Rogers never preached, [never] even mentioned God [on his show].” And then Faw added, “He never had to.

The hourly anti-media shtick was best understood this way: Fox was a 24/7 ad for Fox. Every insult hurled at CNN and NBC doubled as a reminder not to change the channel. Every segment about some other news outlet’s screwup doubled as a declaration to only trust Fox. It was as effective as it was cynical, and Trump helped by battering Fox’s competition every step of the way.

The Apprentice conditioned Americans to accept fraud as entertainment, to expect the reputational rehab of ruined celebrities, and to not consider that behind the fakeness of the show lay something very dark and real. In 2015, after Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, NBC canceled The Apprentice on moral grounds. Freed from his contract, Trump continued his reality show through cable news, which lacked the fleeting fortitude of NBC. In the end, The Apprentice canceled America.

14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it.​​ Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. @realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? @realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice @realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! @realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming! @realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. @realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines! @realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014

Shortly after Trump’s media event, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer published a parody. Watch excerpts from the original and then Schumer’s satire, which begins at minute 1:01 of this NBC News report.

Lori Toye founded a small publishing company in August of 1989. Lori Toye's husband joined the team to form I AM America Publishing and Distributing. I AM America Publishing and Distributing has many accomplishments. I AM America publications have been featured on NBC, FOX, UPN, London’s Carlton Television, Art Bell’s Dreamland, George Noory’s Coast to Coast, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Somehow (and I am not sure the full story of how it happened ever became public) the three networks—CBS, ABC and NBC—wound up donating their weekly half-hour public affairs interview programs to the two candidates. "Meet the Press", "Face the Nation", and "Issues and Answers" were all stretched to an hour and rescheduled to provide, in effect, three one-hour debates between Humphrey and McGovern during the last full week before the California primary. Tom Asher filed a protest on my behalf with the Federal Communications Commission, citing section 315 of the Federal Communication Act, which says that if any broadcasting station permits itself to be used by any legally qualified candidate for an office, it must permit equal opportunities to all other candidates. The networks claimed that the three programs were regular interview shows, and exempt from the rule. The Federal Communications Commission upheld the networks, and Asher went to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Within hours after the FCC ruling, the court issued an order reversing the commission and ordering ABC and CBS each to provide me with one half-hour of prime air time. NBC had conceded earlier and scheduled me on one half-hour of its morning program, "Today.

To CBS boss Bill Paley, who had come of age building his radio network to rival NBC, the simple formula to keep up was to transfer his radio stars to TV. The transition worked for America’s most famous newscaster, Edward R. Murrow, who had become famous for broadcasting from London during the Battle of Britain. But two far bigger stars would emerge in a different genre. In the late forties, Lucille Ball had been a star of a CBS radio program known as My Favorite Husband, a situation comedy that chronicled the domestic life and squabbles of an all-American couple.

As recently reported by NBC News, “Two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine offer almost no protection against coronavirus infection in kids ages 5 to 11, according to new data posted online—a finding that may have consequences for parents and their vaccinated children.” Also,

AnyVision is shy about admitting its true role in the West Bank, but digging by NBC News uncovered a project, called Google Ayosh, targeting all Palestinians with the use of big data. AnyVision continues to use the occupation as a vital source to train its systems in the mass surveillance of Palestinians, focusing, it says, on attempts to stop any Palestinian attackers.43 AnyVision is a global company that operates in over forty countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US, and in countless locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers. The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021, and raised US$235 million that year to further develop its AI-enabled surveillance tools. The former head of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, is an advisor and it is staffed by Israel’s intelligence Unit 8200 veterans. It promotes itself as building a world “safer through visual intelligence.

Lori Toye, a renowned New Age author and educator with over 30 years of experience, brings profound spiritual teachings to seekers worldwide. Her best-selling I AM America Maps, published over three decades ago, were ahead of their time in addressing environmental concerns. Lori's work has been featured on NBC, FOX, and in the pages of the New York Times, leaving an indelible mark on the spiritual landscape.

. . . the [NBC] network bosses called her into a meeting. 'Ricki,' they said, 'you're Black. And you're the only woman. We're going to be sending you around the world, and you don't know what you're going to run into.' Ricki laughed. She knew exactly what she was going to run into. 'Having lived in Saudi Arabia,' she told me, 'and having gone to all these different places, I knew that I was treated really special in other countries, far better than the treatment I got in the United States. And that's what happened working for them: The only time I ever had challenges would be in America. But traveling all over the world? Never a problem. NEVER a problem.

In promoting Sunnyside on other networks, NBC spent $250,000; in promoting Perfect Harmony that number increased by 580 percent to $1.7 million. In promoting Sunnyside on its own stations NBC ran forty-three promotional spots; in promoting Perfect Harmony, 1,368 spots—an increase of 3,081 percent. 1,368 ads for Perfect Harmony. Forty-three for Sunnyside.

MAY 7, 1989, brought a quiet milestone for Stan: the first of his many onscreen cameos. That evening saw the airing of a TV-movie sequel to the old NBC live-action series The Incredible Hulk, entitled The Trial of the Incredible Hulk.

By this point, Solo was hardly a stranger to controversy within the national team. The world had seen how she’d criticized Greg Ryan’s decision at the 2007 World Cup and was kicked off the team. During the 2012 Olympics, she’d called out Brandi Chastain, who was a commentator for NBC, tweeting: “Lay off commentating about defending and goalkeeping until you get more educated @brandichastain. The game has changed from a decade ago.” Now, her arrest and assault charges were front-page news. But there was a history within the team of things involving Solo that needed to be dealt with, even if they were never made public. Pia Sundhage admits she had to deal with a couple of issues while she coached Solo, but she didn’t let it become the focus of what she was doing. “There were one or two things, but you have to be respectful, you have to be smart, and you have to just talk to people,” Sundhage says. “We worked it out. We wanted to train. We wanted to improve the game.

But it wasn’t just Fox. On March 23, just after we’d gone to war in Libya, he surfaced on ABC’s The View, saying, “I want him to show his birth certificate. There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On NBC, the same network that aired Trump’s reality show The Celebrity Apprentice in prime time and that clearly didn’t mind the extra publicity its star was generating, Trump told a Today show host that he’d sent investigators to Hawaii to look into my birth certificate. “I have people that have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” Later, he’d tell CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “I’ve been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing. I’ve been told that it’s not there and it doesn’t exist.” Outside the Fox universe, I couldn’t say that any mainstream journalists explicitly gave credence to these bizarre charges. They all made a point of expressing polite incredulity, asking Trump, for example, why he thought George Bush and Bill Clinton had never been asked to produce their birth certificates. (He’d usually reply with something along the lines of “Well, we know they were born in this country.” ) But at no point did they simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist. Certainly, they made little to no effort to categorize his theories as beyond the pale—like alien abduction or the anti-Semitic conspiracies in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And the more oxygen the media gave them, the more newsworthy they appeared.

Cronkite was nothing if not rivalrous. Years later, he shamelessly bragged about CBS’s scoop over NBC and ABC, a boast that, if written by anybody else, would have seemed ghoulish. (“We beat NBC onto the air by almost a minute,” he proudly recalled in his memoir.)

Woods Hole had arranged interviews for me with one reporter after another, using Knorr’s ship-to-shore hookup. Just as I started talking to Tom Brokaw, the NBC News anchor, I looked out and saw that we were actually sailing away from the Titanic site. Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, I thought. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I had started this quest for its own sake, focused mainly on the challenge. But now I had a deep emotional connection to Titanic. Its resting place is one of those places that speaks to you, like Gettysburg or Normandy.

companies like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which pioneered commercial broadcasting, always reinvested a large portion of their profits in the creation of content. Google, YouTube, and Facebook, by contrast, invest nothing in the creation of content—it’s all “user-generated,” even though much of it is professionally produced and appropriated by users.

I mentioned that AT&T owns CNN. Comcast owns NBC. A partial list of others can be found at Investopedia.com

You might think of Trader Joe’s as one of the more esoteric cable channels; the supermarkets as NBC-CBS-ABC.

Aykroyd was happy to let Belushi take the public heat: John loved it; Danny hated it. Danny had a talent for projecting an aura of anonymity that deflected the glances of passers-by, and as a result he was the only cast member who continued regularly to ride the subways and walk the streets unrecognized at the height of his fame. He kept a shield around himself that was all but impenetrable. When a production assistant put his address and phone number on a staff list once, he angrily confronted her and forced her to redo it, leaving his whereabouts blank. He alone among the performers never let publicist Les Slater interview him for an official NBC bio. He’d promise to do it but would always beg off, saying he was too busy. He was articulate with the press, but he talked to reporters only a few times in the four years he spent on Saturday Night.

Meanwhile, privatization of the occupation is gathering speed. AnyVision is an Israeli start-up that secretly monitors Palestinians across the West Bank with a range of cameras, the locations of which are not acknowledged by the company or Israel. Artificial intelligence thus merges with biometrics and facial recognition at dozens of Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank. AnyVision claims that its technology does not discriminate on the basis of race or gender and that it creates only “ethical” products. When asked by NBC News in 2019 about its work in the West Bank, CEO Eylon Etshtein initially threatened to sue them, denied there even was an occupation, and accused the NBC reporter of being paid by Palestinian activists.42 He later apologized for the outburst.

AnyVision is shy about admitting its true role in the West Bank, but digging by NBC News uncovered a project, called Google Ayosh, targeting all Palestinians with the use of big data. AnyVision continues to use the occupation as a vital source to train its systems in the mass surveillance of Palestinians, focusing, it says, on attempts to stop any Palestinian attackers.43 AnyVision is a global company that operates in over forty countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US, and in countless locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers. The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021, and raised US$235 million that year to further develop its AI-enabled surveillance tools. The former head of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, is an advisor and it is staffed by Israel’s intelligence Unit 8200 veterans. It promotes itself as building a world “safer through visual intelligence.” AnyVision so impressed Microsoft that the Seattle software giant briefly invested US$74 million in the company in 2019 before facing a massive backlash. It cut its ties with AnyVision in 2020 due to pressure from the “Palestinian lobby on the Democratic Party,” according to the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, though it continues to develop its own facial recognition technology.44 The former Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki worked for AnyVision as a “crisis communications consultant” and earned at least US$5,000 at some point between leaving the Obama administration in 2017 and starting in the Biden White House.

If peak centralization was around 1950, with one telephone company (AT&T) and two superpowers (US, USSR) and three television stations (ABC, CBS, NBC), we grow more decentralized as we move in either direction from that point.

NBC, for example, announced that it was limiting broadcasts ‘contrary to the policies of the United States government.’ CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that ‘no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.’ He elaborated ‘that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval.’ Local station owners and network executives alike took it for granted, as Editor and Publisher observed, that each station had ‘to dance to Government tunes because it is under Government license.’ ”52

Then in March 1993, everything changed. My one-year-old son, Charlie, had his first seizure. There’s absolutely nothing funny about being the parent of a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. Nothing. After a year of daily seizures, drugs, and a brain surgery, I learned that the cure for Charlie’s epilepsy, the ketogenic diet—a high fat, no sugar, limited protein diet—had been hiding in plain sight for, by then, over seventy years. And despite the diet’s being well documented in medical texts, none of the half-dozen pediatric neurologists we had taken Charlie to see had mentioned a word about it. I found out on my own at a medical library. It was life altering—not just for Charlie and my family, but for tens of thousands like us. Turns out there are powerful forces at work within our health care system that don’t necessarily prioritize good health. For decades, physicians have barely been taught diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school. The pharmaceutical, medical device, and sugar industries make hundreds of billions every year on anti-epileptic drugs and processed foods—but not a nickel if we change what we eat. The cardiology community and American Heart Association demonize fat based on flawed science. Hospitals profit from tests and procedures, but again no money from diet therapy. There is a world epilepsy population of over sixty million people. Most of those people begin having their seizures as children, and only a minuscule percentage ever find out about ketogenic diet therapies. When I realized that 99 percent of what had happened to Charlie and my family was unnecessary, and that there were millions of families worldwide in the same situation, I needed to try to do something. Nancy and I began the Charlie Foundation (charliefoundation.org) in 1994 in order to facilitate research and get the word directly to those who would benefit. Among the high points were countless articles, a couple appearances of Charlie’s story on Dateline NBC, and a movie I produced and directed about another family whose child’s epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet starring Meryl Streep titled First Do No Harm (1997). Today, of course, the diet permeates social media. When we started, there was one hospital in the world offering ketogenic diet therapy. Today, there are 250. Equally important, word about the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy spread within the scientific community. In 1995, we hosted the first of many scientific global symposia focused on the diet. As research into its mechanisms and applications has spiked, incredibly the professional communities have found the same metabolic pathway that is triggered by the ketogenic diet to reduce seizures has also been found to benefit Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, severe psychiatric disorders, traumatic brain injury, and even some cancers. I

In mid-1986, Letterman got an unexpected call from Dave Tebet, the Carson Productions executive who worked with “Late Night.” Tebet said that he and Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson’s extremely powerful attorney, business partner, and author of his 2013 tell-all, wanted to meet with Letterman—by himself, totally confidentially. Letterman was stunned when he heard what they had come to propose: They were offering him the “Tonight ” show; they wanted him to take Johnny Carson’s job. Bushkin, in his role as head of Carson Productions, said that the company intended to maintain ownership of the “Tonight ” show after Johnny stepped down, and now was the time to line up Letterman to slip into Johnny’s chair. The details were vague, and to Letterman they sounded deliberately so. He said he was flattered, he listened politely, but his radar was signaling a warning. Neither man told Letterman how or when this ascension would be accomplished, a problem that started sounding even worse when Bushkin advised Letterman that no one at NBC or anywhere else knew of the plan yet—not even Carson. Letterman, already nervous, now started to feel as if he were getting close to a fire he didn’t want to be in the same campground with. They asked Letterman not to tell anyone, not even his management. They would get back to him. The more Letterman thought about it, the more it sounded like a palace coup. His immediate instinct was to stay out of this, because there was going to be warfare of some sort. He feared Carson would interpret this maneuver as plotting and he guessed what might happen next: Johnny’s best friend Bushkin wouldn’t take the fall. Nor would his old crony, Tebet. It would be the punk who got blamed for engineering this. Letterman broke his promise and called Peter Lassally, Carson’s producer. Lassally was shocked by what he heard. He suspected that Bushkin was involved in all sorts of machinations that never benefited Carson. He thought about telling Johnny, but other attempts to alert the star to questionable activities by Bushkin had been harshly rebuffed. Lassally decided to see what developed and advised Dave to keep Bushkin and Tebet at a distance. Letterman had a couple of more phone calls from Bushkin and Tebet about the deal; they discussed it with Ron Ellberger, the Indianapolis attorney that Letterman still employed. Tebet blamed the lawyer for muddying up the deal, and eventually said that Carson knew of the plan and had approved of the idea of lining up Letterman for the future. But Tebet was lying; Carson had never heard a word about it, and when he did—long after the approach had taken place and Bushkin and Tebet were both long gone—Carson exploded with rage at the thought that this plotting had gone on behind his back. He knew exactly what he would have done if he had learned of it at the time: He would have fired Bushkin and Tebet before another day elapsed. Letterman had guessed right in steering clear of the coup. When he learned that Carson hadn’t known what was going on, Letterman was deeply thankful for his cautious instincts. When the offer from Bushkin melted away, Letterman tried not to give it any second thoughts. Only for the briefest time did he think that he might have walked away from an offer to host the “Tonight” show. The next time, it would not be nearly so easy to take.

In the summer of 1995, Leslie Moonves, the newly appointed head of entertainment for CBS, was wandering the halls of the network’s vast Television City headquarters. He was not happy with what he saw: it was 3:30 p.m. on a Friday, and the office was three quarters empty. As the media journalist Bill Carter reports in Desperate Networks, his 2006 book about the television industry during this period, a frustrated Moonves sent a heated memo about the empty office to his employees. “Unless anybody hasn’t noticed, we’re in third place [in the ratings],” he wrote. “My guess is that at ABC and NBC they’re still working at 3:30 on Friday. This will no longer be tolerated.

NBC actually did Star Trek a favor by canceling it,” William Shatner recalled in 1994, adding that Star Trek “would be remembered fondly as a great show that got screwed by the network, rather than a good show that got worse over time.

Conan O'Brien doesn’t have it,' the NBC lawyers assured Jeff Gaspin, Entertainment Chairman (at NBC Universal). 'Conan was guaranteed The Tonight Show. He was not guaranteed that it would start at 11:35 p.m'.