Lightning, thunder and the Powers That Be

Hi Carolyn,

A few evenings ago I had just settled down at the  keyboard with my ducks all lined up on the pond as it were and was about to crank out this weeks blog. Absolutely out of nowhere the sky lit up and almost immediately the house trembled as a massive thunderclap rolled through. I'm somewhat of a storm junkie. During the temperate months, if the sky darkens ominously, I'm always ready to drop everything and sit back and watch if a crackin' good storm hatches.  A thunderboomer in December here at the 45th parallel is almost never heard nor heard of.  It just popped up out on Lake Huron and rolled in over the Bruce Peninsula almost in a trice. As a weather and gadget geek I am prone to checking the radar four times a day or more but missed this guy. It just seemed to materialize in no time.




 While there weren't widespread outages, the lights went out and stayed that way around here until well past midnight. The whole incident wasn't all that portentious, it's true.  It did, once again, make me think of changing climate patterns and how, atmospherically, something is truly afoot out there. The meteorological powers that be are up to something.






While we're on the powers that be wavelength, last month I shared some thoughts on David Halberstam's " The Fifties" . My reading experience was so gratifying with that one that I decided to go back for seconds and downloaded his " The Powers That Be" tome which is of similar girth and only slightly less grand in its scope. Yuletide interventions mean I've only covered about half of the 800 pages but am ready to share a peek. In it he chronicles CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post , Time Magazine, and the L.A. Times and the fascinating histories behind what made them The Powers That Be in American media  during the 40's, 50's and 60's ( and clearly beyond).



It serves up more of Halbertam's seamless  writing style that really does make it hard to put down. Watching the Chandler Family  use its flagship paper, the L.A. Times, to help groom and promote a young Richard Nixon for greatness, even though they really couldn't warm up to him in the least. Or seeing how The New York Times grew from one of four dailies scrabbling to survive in the New York market, to become the pre-eminent, and erudite publication that it is to-day  are just a couple of the many engrossing subplots unfolding inside the covers. They'd be great stories even if they weren't true.




 
 
 
 
So far, however, the most memorable character I've encountered clearly has to be James T. Aubrey,  "The hucksters's huckster "  as Halberstam sees him. " A man so nakedly open about what he was and what he wanted - that is, the greediest side of the network so openly revealed and displayed - that even the other hucksters were embarrassed."

CBS turned to Aubrey to be their programming saviour after the quiz show scandals had tarnished their image. It would prove to be a Faustian arrangement of the first order. Aubrey must have inherited the spirit of P. T.  Barnum.  He had an uncanny ability to ferret out and cater to the lowest common denominator. His " greatest legacy to television " Halberstam notes, was a program called " The Beverly Hillbillies," as series so demented and tasteless that it boggles the mind. "

Aubrey's programming mantra might best be summed up in a memo that turned up in congressional investigations after his star had fallen, calling for more " broads, boobs and busts."  Once he berated his creative department noting "... they don't know the public. The people out there don't want to think."

How ironic that NBC should be home to probably the most trusted man in all of modern western history, Walter Cronkite, and this fellow at the same time. To cement his crassness incarnate reputation, Aubrey was heard to say just a day after the JFK assassination that Cronkite so poignantly reported, to the head of CBS news and a close friend of Kennedy, that he should " just play the assassination footage over and over again - that's all they want to see."

He was unapologetic to the max about his intention to lower the highbrow tenor that CBS had always had. " He set out to lower it, " Halberstam observes, " and lower it he did, to a rising graph of CBS profits."  By the end of his 5 year meteoric rise CBS was outdrawing the other two networks combined and the folks on Wall Street took notice and admired, even if they didn't watch his programs at all.  Aubrey's outrageous personal life actually turned out to be his undoing - Rob Ford take note.





Aubrey fought constantly with the news division at CBS. As Halberstam notes " ... the News Division took up too much air time, air time which could be used to sell detectives and hillbillies and monsters." 

 Wow, you were right last month, Carolyn, when you noted that as far as television is concerned some things never change.




I can't believe this hasn't been made into a movie. Maybe it's too close to home for the Hollywood bunch. I think Robert Downey could nail the Aubrey part.





So, I could go on but it's a short page. Next week I'm on the road to the land that Wi-Fi forgot for a Christmas swing to see relatives on both sides so I hope to chat earlier if only briefly.  I can most certainly appreciate what you noted last time around about things being congested so there will be  no riddle here tonight.

I hope you run the evaluation gamut with success, Carolyn. I haven't forgotten what its like quite yet and if I do my daughter, who is doing pretty well the same thing as you are, will keep me posted.

Be back soon. 



Don



All images sourced from Google Images:

Fig. 1 - walcrazy.com
Fig. 2 - ebookstore.sony.com
Fig. 3 - en.wikipedia.org
Fig. 4 - telegraph.co.uk
Fig. 5 - en.wikipedia.org
Fig. 6 - patheos.com