Pretty wonderful NewsHour story about orchestra “made up largely of Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs from around the Middle East, people who might consider the other an enemy and would likely never otherwise meet”:
DANIEL BARENBOIM: I think the full dimension of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will come to fruition the day that it can play in all the countries that are represented in the orchestra, whether it’s in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, and Israel.
JEFFREY BROWN: Will that day come?
DANIEL BARENBOIM: One day, I’m sure, I’m sure. One day, I’m sure.
“They have made nothing. They have contributed nothing to the country. They made deals for themselves. And once they got in trouble, they turned to firefighters and nurses and waitresses and small business people to bail them out. … So is it legit? You better believe it’s legit. Is it for real? Is there a tradition in this country of protests and citizen outrage leading to real changes, whether it’s abolition, whether it’s prohibition, whether it’s civil rights, whether it’s anti-war? There sure is.”
The early story of AIDS, as shown by PBS: The public broadcaster’s early “NewsHour” reports about AIDS during the early 1980s, in honor of the 30th anniversary of the first reported AIDS cases, do a lot to put a face to a difficult, multi-sided health crisis at a point where we didn’t really know what we were dealing with. At one point in this clip, an anti-AIDS activist compares the disease to leprosy and says this fairly shocking statement: “We are not talking about discriminating against gays, we are talking about discriminating against someone with an infectious disease.” Noted AIDS victim Ryan White, just a teenager when he died, is also shown in the clip being taught in one of his classes via telephone. Watch this. It’ll remind you how far we’ve come in 30 years.
TV news veteran Jim Lehrer retires:
PBS NewsHour, an hour of news, was based on the suddenly ancient idea that people sit down in front of their televisions to watch an uninterrupted hour of news. Doesn’t that, in this age of smartphones and Twitter and a million other points of electronic light, have kind of a when-dinosaurs-roamed-the-Earth ring to it?
Lehrer doesn’t flinch as he breaks into an easy chuckle.
“If we were starting the show now, we’d have to call it The NewsBlip, or The NewsBlink. The truth is our roots are very old-fashioned, but we are adapting to accommodate new desires. There’s going to be a new generation of gatekeepers; they’re not going to old white guys like me.
“But we still need gatekeepers, and those gatekeepers need to be professional journalists.”
At a time when all the buzz is centered on the notion of “citizen journalists,” such talk runs the risk of being dismissed as the worst kind of fuddy-duddyism. Lehrer is unmoved.
“I think people are slowly realizing that you need to know the facts before we can have an informed opinion — what exactly did happen, what were the contents of the speech, what does the birth certificate say? And for that you need a news source you can trust.
“A ‘citizen journalist’ may provide a tip for a story, but I would no more want to rely on citizen journalists for the news than I would a citizen doctor for my surgery.”
