Marty Kaplan holds the Norman Lear Chair at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His Jewish Journal columns have won First Place in the Southern California Journalism Awards six times in the past six years. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com
Here’s progress: Big media companies now think Americans are as gullible as politicians do. It’s not just candidates who assume we’re nincompoops. The cable operators and networks take us for pigeons, too.
If only David Brooks’ eligibility rules for Egyptian political candidates applied to Republicans as well.
I have outrage envy. For nearly two weeks, more than a million citizens across Brazil have taken to the streets to protest political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, a crumbling infrastructure and – yes, in the land of Pelé – billions blown on sports.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the great pleasures of my life – reading the New York Times – is also bad for my health.
Say goodnight, Earthlings. That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.
Maybe the problem with Washington isn’t that there’s too little comity – there’s too much.
Prouty, we learned last week, is the 38-year old bartender who videotaped the $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraiser where Mitt Romney wrote off 47 percent of the country as victims.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly’s, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I’m used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100 – a “NuVal” score.
NASA scientists say that meteor explosions like the one last week injuring 1,200 people in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, are 100-year events. The last time a big meteor crashed into our planet, incinerating 80 million trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia, was in 1908. So if you’re feeling a bit panicky after Chelyabinsk, relax. Odds are it’ll be a century before something like that happens again – though it’s understandable if you decide to cross the Trans-Siberian railroad off your bucket list.
