As Seen on TV

First: Tyra Banks. Kate had put on her show because she said some of the teachers she works with are always talking about have mentioned her. Kate didn’t know from Tyra Banks. All I thought I knew was that she was a model (sorry–supermodel) who might have done some acting. I didn’t know she had a show, but there it was, an Oprah/Montel-esque self-help fest on the subject of anorexia and bulimia. We tuned in long enough, about 45 seconds, to hear Ms. Banks cry out to her audience, “You don’t have to be consumed by an eating disorder!” There–that’s Tyra Banks.

Next.

KTVU’s 10’Clock News. One of the stories teased on the show open was about the “Nobel Peace Prize” that had gone missing at the University of California at Berkeley. The story: Police had located the medallion and a suspect. I puzzled over what Nobel Peace Prize might be on the Cal campus; though the university is given to tiresome boasting about the number of Nobel laureates among its faculty, I don’t recall ever hearing of anyone who got the peace prize.

But before I could think more about that, the anchors launched into tonight’s top story: A burglary rampage in a rich little town, Orinda, on the other side of the hills. Then the details emerged: Over the last two weeks, police say, five burglaries have been reported in the town. The M.O.? Scary: Someone’s entering residences during the day through unlocked doors. The loot? Oh, big-ticket stuff: iPods, laptop computers, “even jewelry.” In other words, the kind of garden-variety rip-offs that urban dwellers are all too familiar with. It wasn’t even clear from the cop who appeared on camera that the police think it’s an unusual occurrence. The KTVU reporter did locate a woman who had a harrowing story about a confrontation with a burglar last summer; the intruder beat her and threatened her before getting away with $13,000 in jewelry. But as the on-camera cop said, that incident apparently has nothing to do with the current spate of thefts.

You could make a case for having the story somewhere on the show: “Genteel folk fret over predators in sylvan paradise.” But why was it the lead story? Probably because someone at KTVU lives in Orinda and either had their home broken into or knows a neighbor or two who have.

On to the Nobel Peace Prize story: Well, it turns out that someone tipped off UC police that a student had stolen the solid gold medal from Lawrence Hall of Science the other day. The cops went out and picked up the kid, who said he took the medallion from a display case “on a whim.” But it was the physics prize awarded to Ernest O. Lawrence in 1939, not the peace prize. If you care, and news people are paid to and should be doing something else if they don’t, there’s a big difference between the two medals.

Eventually, way down in the show, KTVU got around to the less important stories like Iraq and the Scooter Libby fallout and what have you. Overall, 60 minutes that barely moves the needle from “bad” to “mediocre.”

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God Shed His Grace on Us …

I haven’t been watching the news real carefully the last few days, and I didn’t see or read about Harold Pinter’s Nobel address (accepting the prize in literature) until I stumbled across it on Today in Iraq this morning. The speech is part about artistic process and the search for truth, but mostly about the United States and its influence in the world for the last 60 years. “Bitter” hardly begins to describe it; “enraged” might be more on the mark — though all the more effective for being controlled.

An excerpt:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

Full text and video on the Nobel site.