Category Archives: radio

Salting the Mine

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Out in the Old West, there were stories told of people who wanted to sell a worthless gold mine to a gullible individual by putting a little gold dust into a shotgun shell and then shooting the gold into some of the mine’s rock, making it appear that there was gold waiting to be mined.

It was called salting the mine.

A few days ago, Philadelphia radio station WURD fired one of its talk show hosts who admitted she used some questions supplied by the White House in an interview with President Biden.  Andrea Lawful-Sanders has lost her job because she let the White House get away with it. .

She admitted on CNN that the White House sent her eight questions to ask when the interview was scheduled after the Thursday night debate disaster. She said she “approved” four of them.

WURD CEO Sara Lomax said in announcing the firing, “WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other administration.” She said the station’s trust by its listeners  to “hold elected officials accountable” had been jeopardized.

A second local radio host, this one from battleground state Wisconsin, has admitted he was given five questions.  But Earl Ingram has told ABC News he was not able to get through all of them in the limited time scheduled for the interview.

This story deserved to be made public.  This practice is not unusual.  There were times when the Missourinet newsroom got calls from campaigns suggesting we should interview their candidates.  In this case, a spokesman for the Biden campaign admitted to FOX News Digital, “It’s not at all uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. These questions were relevant to the news of the day.”  She maintained that acceptance of the questions did not determine whether the interview went ahead.

One night, when a presidential election was very tight, we got a call about 7:10 from one of the campaigns wanting to know if we wanted to interview its candidate about the importance of getting out and voting.  The person calling apparently was not aware that Missouri’s polls had closed ten minutes earlier and sounded shocked when he was told, “Mr. _____ never wanted to talk to us during the campaign and we’re sure not interested in talking with him now.”

“You mean, you don’t want to talk to the next President of the United States?” came the incredulous response.”

“What did I just tell you?”

“Oh.  Ohhhhhh—kay?”

The Missourinet had no patience—-and the current generation of reporters at the network is the same way—with people who want to salt the political mine, who think news reporters should be their mouthpieces.

Sadly, there are those willing to put candidates on the air on radio or TV just because they can—-and they lob a few softballs at them or ask the supplied questions because the interview makes great promotion material regardless of the informational value.

Candidates love “free media” and rely on outlets to become their mouthpieces.  And it’s easier to become a mouthpiece than it is to try to nail a candidate with a touch question that’s not part of the script.

It might be promotable but it’s not honest and the fallout from the Biden “salting” after the debate is deserved.

This stuff happens and it is painful to even discuss it openly because it justifies the thinking by some people that the media are controlled by whatever political ideology is different from theirs.

I don’t believe that.

I do believe there is too much talk and not enough hard reporting in my lifetime industry, which is why I also believe it is important for citizens to avoid focusing on a single information source. At our house we wander around among CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and we occasionally take a look at One America Network and Newsmax, the blatantly pro-Trump organs. And we check in with the traditional three networks from time to time.

We have our opinions and we like to think we have formed them independently because we evaluate competing ideas.

I would love to interview our ex-President.

I would introduce him as “Mr. Trump,” not “President Trump” because I believe in Harry Truman’s comment that when he left the White House he was “promoted” back to being a common citizen.  Some offices and some ranks are left in the office or should on a hanger in the back of the closet when a person retires from them or is excused from them.

We’re straying from our topic.

The temptation to accept an interview offer with someone who thinks they are important or someone who wants to be important comes to reporters all the time. Good reporters make it clear they, not the interviewee, are in charge of the interview and they are free to challenge answers or bore in when a straight answer is not given to a straight question.

And sometimes they should just say “No,” and enjoy the astonished reaction from the other person who has been thinking the talk show host or the reporter is just some clay to be manipulated.

I rather enjoyed doing that, in fact.

If you wanted to be interviewed on my air, I controlled the rules, not the candidate.  And to be honest, there were times when we covered an event or did an interview and put nothing on the air because nothing newsworthy was said.  We did not waste our listeners’ time because somebody had caused us to waste ours.

 

 

Creating News Deserts 

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A Facebook comment from Moberly noted last week: “The Moberly Monitor-Index (once a daily, now a weekly) made a brief reference to the situation on its Facebook account today as well, but I didn’t see anything on its website. Aside from any TV coverage from Columbia, that’s going to be the only local news outlet henceforth.”

The comment was about Alpha Media’s layoffs of all on-air employees at radio stations in Moberly, turning the station into just another satellite-provided bunch of programs with no local relevance.

The comment points to another alarming trend—the death of the local newspaper.

Small and medium-market newspapers have been swallowed up by Gatehouse (or as a friend of mine from one of those newspapers calls it, “Guthouse”) Media, including the Gannett chain.  Gatehouse now uses that name—Gannett, and other newspaper conglomerates.

The practice has been to buy small or medium market newspapers, hollow out the staffs, turn dailies into weeklies and weeklies into digital products as much as possible, again to the detriment of the local markets but to the great financial benefit of the corporation.

With gutted local newspapers and gutted local radio stations, we are seeing more and more news deserts being created.

At a time when we as a nation and we as a state desperately need more eyes on newsmakers and more diverse voices in our social dialogue—and more attention to local issues—we are getting less and what we are getting shows no industrial responsibility to giving consumers diverse viewpoints.

The corporate monopolization of our mass media is one of the greatest threats our country faces but one that gets little public attention.

More than a century ago this nation was crippled by the power of trusts, whether it was steel or petroleum or transportation trusts (even baking powder, which triggered Missouri’s biggest political scandal early in the last century) that limited competition  and put acquisition of corporate wealth above public interest, convenience, and necessity in so many parts of American life.

We are there again and media control is one of the most dangerous of all of those trusts.  Dwindling sources of information and increasing control of the remaining sources increases our national weakness.

An ignorant nation cannot be a free nation. And Alpha and Gannett/Gatehouse and their ilk are among the corporations that are controlling more and more of our information sources and reducing local service, replacing it with national voices that probably could not point to a map and show you where Festus, Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon or Bethany Missouri are.

Some degree of re-regulation of broadcasting is warranted requiring meeting a certain level of local responsibility. Some degree of trust-busting to provide an opportunity for more independence of opinion in our media is increasingly necessary.

While government can play a role—a carefully modulated role—in these ares is not beyond consideration, the ultimate responsibility for demanding greater diversity in media voces lies with the listeners, readers, and viewers of our electronic communications.

Letters to the FCC and to congressional delegations from places like these communities can carry some weight in Washington.  Boycotts from local advertisers, many of whom already rely on direct-mail or independent internet messaging, can carry weight with corporate broadcasting owners.

Newspaper corporations have one important thing that broadcasters do not have—the First Amendment. Government control of newspapers, as the FCC exerts licensing control over broadcasters, cannot exist and should not exist.

How anti-trust laws could be applied to newspaper conglomerates will be a difficult conversation, even more difficult than the conversations about internet abuses, although similar when the First Amendment enters the discussion.

Nonetheless, all of us are victims of those who control increasing percentages of our media outlets and see no responsibility for diversity of thought and opinion or of local involvement. We are victims only so long as we allow ourselves to be victims, only so long as we refuse to seek out challenges to our own ideas.

Why should we fear that?  Why should we let others tell us what to think and regard those who think differently as enemies?

The trusts were broken when they became so oppressive that the public forced governments to act.

We have reached that point now in our information industry. And we should not accept it.

Guillotines for Fun and Profit

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Alpha Media owns more than 200 radio stations across the country.  Its recruiting web page is loaded with corporate-speak buzzwords about “having a passion for great radio” and a “highly-functioning, best-of-class team on all levels” that goes about “building strong relationships in our local communities.”

“If you are looking for an environment where management has a passion for our business; in working hard to provide the best possible live and local radio in the industry; and in having fun, then Alpha Media is for you,” it says.

You will excuse a lot of people in Moberly, Festus, Lebanon and the Farmington/Park Hills areas if they gag on those words. They’ve been stabbed in the back by the owner of their legacy radio stations.

Alpha Media assassinated local radio in those communities last week, laid off—with no notice—entire on-air staffs including some folks who had been everybody’s neighbors for decades.

In place of the voices who talked about local things including local sports, weather, and events, listeners of radio stations in those markets will be hearing syndicated programs from Alpha. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not new.

Local radio has been dying by self-inflicted corporate wounds for a long time.

Your loyal observer, who believed throughout his professional career and continues to believe in the value of local radio, is astonished by the total hypocrisy of Alpha Media claiming it is “working hard to provide the best possible live and local radio in the industry and having fun.”

That’s precisely what these stations have been providing for decades.

Having fun?

If you think running a guillotine is lots of yucks, you’d probably be in total agreement with Alpha’s actions in these three communities. .

These radio stations were once owned by a man named Jerrell Shepherd, a small market radio entrepreneur who believed radio stations should not just be IN communities, they should be OF communities. The idea that grandpa or grandma might hear their grandchildren’s names mentioned during broadcasts of local high school sports events; the idea that the new president of the Lions Club would talk about an upcoming peanut sale fund-raising event; the county fair livestock auction; the hospital auxiliary ice cream social; Sunday morning church services; what the city council or school board did last night; that people might instantly go to their local radio station when bad weather approaches or has arrived—street closings, lunches at the schools or the senior center, obituaries—-are immaterial.  But those were and are part of being a locally responsible corporate citizen, especially in markets this size.

But that was then; this is now. The Hell with being a locally responsible corporate citizen.

The big-growth media companies, more interested in bottom lines than community responsibility and identity, only want to make money. And that’s why the familiar voices went to work one day last week and were told they would no longer have a job at the end of their shifts.

The “best possible live and local radio in the industry” became a lie that day in those towns.  And the definition of “having fun” became gallows humor.

Reporters from various central Missouri media who contacted Alpha to get an explanation have received nothing back.  A full-page ad in the local newspapers explaining, without the corporate doublespeak, why ditching true local radio is justified would be a courteous thing for Alpha to do. But don’t count on it.

There is no doubt that local newspapers and local radio stations have faced some struggles as more business is done through the internet.  And the issue with some businesses is not that they don’t make a profit—they just don’t make a big enough profit.

Employees reduce profits in all kinds of businesses which is why all kinds of businesses are finding ways to dump workers (Notice how few people at McDonald’s take orders at the cash registers lately?).  It would be nice if Alpha explained that to the people in these towns who no longer have a radio station they cared about because it cared about them.

Satellites and the internet allow for cutting the overhead of a radio station by allowing layoffs of as many of those dollar-consuming staff members as possible, replaced by voices of strangers from who-knows-where and who are unlikely to ever set foot in places like Moberly, Festus, Lebanon, or Farmington.

Broadcasting used to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission which required broadcasters to operate “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”  But the industry back de-regulation in the Reagan years and got it.

I was part of a national professional organization that supported de-regulation because we thought some regulations stifled public discussion of important issues more than it promoted it.

We supported it because it required stations to meet certain standards of public service that really were hollow standards.  We believed that serving the public did not mean government dictating, in some instances, what had to be said before a counter argument could be aired.

We were wrong.

We never anticipated the homogenization of broadcasting that comes with owning hundreds of stations, with the death of local programming thanks to satellite-delivered syndicated shows—Rush Limbaugh being the first of the great influencers, a man who is considered the savior of AM Radio.

But now, we are faced with asking, “Saved from what?”

Radio began to lose its soul when communities became markets; when stations became properties, and when staffs became overhead expenses.

Part of the answer to “saved from what?” was delivered last week in Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon, and Festus.

Alpha Media is advertising for new employees at the Missouri stations it has hollowed out. The openings listed on the company web page say something about how it will provide “the best possible live and local radio in the industry.”  The company wants a business office part-timer and a part-time board operator/production assistant and a business office/sales assistance person. They want an Integrated Marketing Consultant (Sales) for their stations in Bethany and Moberly and on-air programmer/board operators in Farmington and Festus.

Local news people? Local sports people?  Local talk show hosts?  Those are the people who are “live and local.” The company isn’t looking for any of them.  Board operators are the ones who throw a switch in the studio to bring in a syndicated show off the satellite or internet.  Production assistant?  Well somebody has to record or produce commercials—if sponsors want to buy them now.

What has happened in these markets and is happening in broadcasting generally also is happening in the newspaper industry. We’ll look at that on Wednesday.

Uncertainty

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I want to talk to you today about my greatest hero and about his life and his times which resonate in these uncertain days.

I want to tell you about helping George Clooney make a movie.  But Clooney, whose work I admire, is not the hero of this story.

Back about 2005, I was wrapping up my second chairmanship of my profession’s national organization, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (now the Radio Television Digital News Association) when George Clooney’s production company reached out to us to help with some information about Edward R. Murrow.  I also was the organization’s historian so the response fell to me.

Edward R. Murrow was, and is, my hero. To be involved, even in such a minor way as I was in producing an Oscar-nominated Murrow movie produced by George Clooney—who can be as serious as a heart attack in his work although many of his movies are light-hearted—is one of the most important distinctions I have gathered.

Murrow had given his greatest speech at our convention in 1958, three months after See It Now was killed by CBS boss William S. Paley. It’s known as the “wires and lights in a box” speech.  It’s also considered his professional suicide speech because he was critical of the early network television news decisions as he warned: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box….”

Here’s the entire speech, should you choose to listen, from our convention more than 65 years ago:

Bing Videos

I provided the background information and a copy of the organiztion’s 1958 logo for the opening and closing segments of the movie.  You won’t see my name or that of RTNDA in any of the credits, but that was my contribution. I am not bothered by the omission. It was, after all, a minuscule part of the story.

When the movie came out, RTNDA had a reception in Washington where Clooney, Strathairn, and Grant Heslov (who played a young Don Hewitt, the creator of Sixty Minutes), attended.  I have a signed movie poster in my loft office.

Seventy-one years ago, he said:

“If we confuse dissent with disloyalty–if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox–if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.”

McCarthyism was ramping up in America at the time.  There are those who feel we are in our greatest peril since then, perhaps greater.  Reading these words reminds us that we as a people have been where we are before and we have survived because reporters such as Murrow (and we still have some today although we are also bombarded by many on the other side) refused to back away or had no fear in confrontations with demagogues. The story of a free nation seems to be cyclical, which is one reason to study unvarnished history.

His most famous broadcast was “See it Now” on March 9, 1954 when he used McCarthy’s own words to condemn him, concluding:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it–and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

David Strathairn recreated those remarks with great effectiveness in the movie.

Bing Videos

I invite you, especially if you are a reporter today or a young person wanting to be a reporter in this rapidly changing world of journalism, to watch this 1975 program about Murrow, produced by the BBC.

:Bing Videos

And I invite you to read this column from constitutional lawyer John Whitehead, written in 2005 when the movie came out. It seems appropriate now:

The Rutherford Institute :: Edward R. Murrow: “We will not walk in fear, one of another.” |

I close with Murrow’s words that are a challenge to all of us when there are those who believe they can seize power because they can intimidate a nation.

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”

 Murrow reaches out to us seventy years after that broadcast. All we have to do is remove “Senator McCarthy” and fill in another name and we will understand the challenge we as citizens must not avoid meeting.

One of Murrow’s journalism descendents, Dan Rather, used to close his broadcasts with the word, “Courage.”

May all of us, we who are not descended from fearful men and women, find it in 2024.

 

Sixty Years

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I still find it awkward to tell people, “Fifty years ago…..” and then tell them what I remember from that time.

Sixty years ago today, I had been the producer of the noon news at KOMU-TV.  I was in graduate school at the University of Missouri and working as a graduate assistant instructor in the radio newscasting class which also involved being the assistant news director at KFRU Radio, anchoring some of the student-wrtiten newscasts on that station (this was before the Journalism School created KBIA where some students get their first taste of broadcast newswritig and anchoring), so I couldn’t anchor at Channel 8.  So I produced the noon newscast that reported President Kennedy had gone to Texas to assure Texans that he was not going to dump Lydon Johnson as his running mate in 1964.

We left the station at 12:30, about the time shots rang out at Dealy Plaza in Dallas.

When I walked through the front door of the rooming house at 508 S. Ninth Street (now one of at least three houses in which I lived that are now gone), one of the guys upstairs shouted down, “Is that Priddy?”

“Yeah.”

“You getter get up here! The President’s been shot!”

The people upstairs had been listening to KFRU and had heard ABC’s Don Gardiner break in with the first word of the shooting.   Most commemorations of the event today focus on Walter Cronkite and CBS-TV.  But it was Don Gardiner, normally the morning news voice on WABC in New York, who interrupting a middle of the road music show from WABC that was fed down the network between network news programs.

(105) JFK’S ASSASSINATION (ABC RADIO NETWORK) (NOVEMBER 22, 1963) – YouTube

Gardiner’s first bulletin about 12:33 p.m. CST came from United Press International correspondent Merriman Smith who was in the fifth car behind the presidential limousine as it moved from Dallas’ Love Field toward the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to deliver a luncheon speech.

Nick George, who is announced early in the broadcast as the New York Editor for ABC, later became a teacher at the journalism school and was an influential figure in the development of some early Missourinet reporters.

As you will hear, events unfolded quickly and the reporters—mainly Smith and AP’s Jack Bell .

In 1963, reporting from remote sites was, to say the least by today’s standards, extremely primitive.

The White House press pool reporter’s car had a radiotelephone in it, the only mobile phone available to the 58 reporters in the pool. Pool reporters rotated from the back seat to the front and it ws Smith’s day in front.  Smith grabbed the radiotelephone and dictated a FLASH (the highest priority item to go out on the wire service) to Dallas UPI Bureau rookie Wilborn Hampton, who typed it into the distribution teletype machine, showed it to his editor, Jack Fallon, who shouted, “Send it!”

UPI sent it out at 12:34:

“DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI) – THREE SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”

As the word went out and Gardiner started his broadcast, Smith was crouched in the front seat of the car while the AP’s bell was beating on his back and demanding, “Give me the goddamn phone!”  But Smith wouldn’t give it up and continued to give information to the bureau.  “On a story of this magnitude,” Smith later said, “I was not about to let it go until I new the office had it all.”

It took six minutes to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Smith gave the phone to Bell who called the Dallas AP burau—and couldn’t get through.  Smith ran up to the presidential limousine where he saw Texas Governor John Connally wounded. “I could not see the president’s wound. But I could see blood spattered around the interior of the rear seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president’s dark gray suit.”

Smith turned to Clint Hill, the Secret Service officer who was in the followup far and ran to the presidential limousine, jumped on the back and shielded Mrs. Kennedy with his body as the car sped to thehospital, and asked, “How bad was he hit, Clint.”

“He’s dead, Smitty,” said Hill.  Smith dashed into the hospital, took a telephone from a room clerk and started dictating the information you will hear Gardiner pass along to listeners that day. Most of what you hear Gardiner reporting is based on Smith’s coverage.

UPI ran another FLASH at 1:35 that Kennedy had been declared dead.  AP was two minutes behind.

The event was an important one for radio and particularly for television.  For the first hours, the story belonged to radio.  Newspapers already had gone to press for their afternoon editions. Several put out bulleting editions.  But in the early going, the story belonged to radio.

We had no satellites to relay the story as it unfolded.  There were telephones and wire services and that was all there was. Television relied on film that had to be shot and developed, mostly black and white (because color television was just beginning) and often not even processed as positive images.  We would shoot silent negative film and the television control room could electronically reverse the polarity of the film and the viewers saw black and white pictures.

KFRU’s newsroom was in the Columbia Tribune building at 7th and Cherry Streets (it’s partly a candy store and partly a restaurant now) because the station was half-owned by the Waters family that also owned the Tribune.

The main studios were out on the eastern business loop.  In Studio A, the main studio, a slver pipe rose up behind the control board and curved toward the announcer’s position.  The pipe contained wiring that was hooked to a small red light.  That was the network bulletin light.  If the network wanted to break in on programming, that light would come on and the board operator was immediately to flip a switch that put the network on the air. When that light came on, the board operator that day, perhaps Bill Younger who worked the afternoon shift threw that switch.

I quickly walked the four or five blocks to the KFRU newsroom to huddle with Eric Engberg, the news director and fellow graduate student—-Eric later had a long career as a CBS correspondent—and we started planning local reaction stories to run when the network broke away from its coverage for its local stations to report.

I was sent out toget reaction from Senator George Parker and Representative Larry Woods.

ABC did not break until Monday morning before coming back to broadcst the funeral.

I got to know, to a lesser degree in most cases but in a greater degree in one case, some of thosewho brought us the news that day.  Nick George, for example, became an acquaintance.

The one I knew best is the one who broke the news of Kennedy’s death on national television.  Eddie Barker was the news director of KRLD-TV and radio in Dallas that day and was at the Trade Mart preparing a broadcast of the Predident’s speech.  Word already had reached him that something had happened in the motorcade and moments late the motorcade roared past the mart.  He went on the air, broadcasting what he could learn.  One of his friends who was at the mart was a doctor at Parkland who went to a telephone and called the hospital emergency room where an acquaintance told him the president was dead.

Eddie’s friend saw he was “struggling to maintain a coherent broadcast with the limited information availability,” walked over and whispered into his ear, “Eddie, he’s dead.”

“The words sent a cold chill running down my spine. I didn’t want to believe them, but the source was too good.  I then made a decision that has caused a lot of comment in the years since that strangely brilliant Friday afternoon.  I told an audience that included the whole CBS network that a reliable source had confirmed to me that President Kennedy was dead.  What I didn’t know was tht my shocking report caused a lot of anxiety at cBS News Headquarters in New York,” he recalled in his autobiography, Eddie Barker’s Notebook several years later,  Shortly after that, Walter Cronkite told viewers, “We just had a report from our correspondent, Dan Rther, in Dallas that he has confirmed tht President Kennedy is dead.”   There still had been no official confirmation.

At 1:37, our time, CBS news editor Ed Bliss—and other of those I came to know well—gave Cronkite the AP bulletin that Cronkite is often seen reading to his audience when the story is recounted on TV today.

Dan Rather is often credited with passing along the first word of Kennedy’s death. Rather, who was the new chief of the CBS New Orleans bureau, had been on the other side of the railroad overpass west of Dealy Plaza, closer to the Trade Mart, when the motorcade flew past  He ran to the Dallas CBS bureau and started working the phones to Parkland Hospital. The doctors all were busy but an operator told him two priests were in a hallway nearby.  One of them told Rather, “The President has been shot and he is dead.”  Rather, his The Camera Never Blinks, said he asked, “Are you certain of that” and the priest, who was there to perform the last rites, respoded, “Yes, unfortunately, I am.”

Rather called Barker and told him what he had.  Eddie had just talked to the doctor.  They did not know that three people at CBS, New York were listening on the broadcast loop that had been set up for Barker’s broadcast of the speech. Before Rather could tell those listening, Barker, in his broadcast that he thought was only local in Dallas, announced a source from Parkland had told him the president is dead. Rather chimed in, “Yes, yes, that’s what I hear, too.  That he’s dead.”

It wasn’t official.  But CBS radio and television went with it.

It was only a short time later, as you will hear if you listen to the ABC account, that it was reported a Dallas policeman, later identified as J.D. Tippett, had been shot and killed.  And within a few minutes, a suspect named Lee H. Oswald had been picked up.

The night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had slept late that day but rushed to the office when he heard of the shooting.  The newspaper started printing special editions that were snapped up by the public as soon as they hit the streets. “Inside the city room it was bedlam,” recalled then-CBS correspondent Bob Shieffer in his book, This Just In.  When word came that Oswald was going to be held in the Fort Worth jail, Schiefer dashed there and was present when Oswald was brought in.

“Early in my police reporting days, I learned a truck from the cops. People will sometimes blurt out the truth if they are surprised by the question, so I jumped in front of the handcuffed suspect, who was between two detectives, and shouted, ‘You song of a bitch, why did you do it?’”

‘”Well, I didn’t,’ he said as the cops hustled him into the lockup.”

Schiefer was just settling in back at his newsroom desk when the phone rang. A woman asked him if someone could give her a ride to Dallas.  Schiefer responded heatedly, “Lady, this is not a taxi, and besides, the president has been shot.”

“I know.  They think my son is the one who shot him.”

“Where do you live?” Schieffer. “I’ll be right over to get you.”

On the way to Dallas, said Schieffer, she seemed more concerned about herself than about the death of a president. “She railed about how Oswald’s Russian-born wife would get sympathy while no one would ‘remember the mother.’”

When Oswald’s wife and mother heard the news, they had the presence of mind to get a lawyer, John Thorne. Police placed the family in protective custody.  Several weeks later, Eddie Barker called Thorne and expressed an interest in interviewing the Marina, how a widow. Thorne, who Barker did not know, surprised him by saying, “She watches you every evening nd I’ll be glad to ask her.”  The interview was arranged during which time she told him in her Russian-accented English, “I think Lee shoot Kenedy.”

Don Gardiner died in 1977.  Bob Schieffer, 86, is a podcaster— “Bob Schieffer’s ‘About the News’ with H. Andrew Schwartz.”—retired as the host of Face the Nation in 2015 and embarked on a singing career.  Eddie Barker died in 2012.

Dan Rather is 92 and still likes to stir the stuff.  He was fired from CBS in 2006 after some reports using unauthenticated documents to report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War-era service. After working on the cable channel now known as AXSTV for several years. Rather joined the Youngturks YouTube channel and five years ago began writing a news letter called “Steady,” on Substack.

All of those you hear in the ABC coverage are gone now.

Merriman Smith committed suicide in 1970.  Some say he was despondent about the death of his son in Vienam and perhaps suffered from PTSD from witnessing the Kennedy murder. Jack Bell died in 1975. Clint Hill is 91 and is the last surviving person to be in the presidential limousine that day.

At Jefferson City radio station KLIK that day, news director Jerry Bryan checked the UPI wire just after climbing the stairs to the third-floor newsroom in a pre-Civil War building on Capitol Avneue and checked the UPI machine before going home to lunch.

He picked up the telephone and called the on-air studio down on the second floor and started telling listeners what Merriman Smith was sending him. He continued to report via telephone until station engineer Ed Scarr put together enough cable to run a microphone from the studio up two flights of stairs and down the hall to the newsroom so Jerry had a microphone. The station operated only during daylight hours in those days and did not have a national network.  Bryan was the Don Gardiner of Jefferson City that day until the station signed off at 5:30. A reel-to-reel recorder in the newsroom was set up to turn on automatically during the “Missouri Party Line Show” when a phone call came in from a listener. Bryan’s call to the studio triggered the recorder, which had a large reel of tape on it.  His early coverage that day was recorded, by accident, and still exists.  Jerry resigned in 1967 and became the press secretary to Governor Hearnes and now lives in St. Louis.

His assistant news director, who had come to Jefferson City from KFRU at the start of 1967 replaced him.  His memories, which have been shared at length with you in this entry, remain vivid–as do the memories of many.

Walter Cronkite, who died in 2009, was a native of St. Joseph, Missouri. He attended the unveiling in 1999 of  bronze bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There were two speakers at that ceremony that evening—Governor Carnahan and me.

The next day, he was introduced in the House and in the Senate and made brief remarks.  The press corps in the senate was seated at a table on the floor to the right of the dais and when Walter walked in, we made him sit at the press table with us.

For the next fifteen years that I covered the Senate from that table, I always made sure that when a new reporter joined us at the table, I made sure that person knew that was Walter’s chair they were sitting in and they were expected to do him honor with their reporting.

Before Walter Cronkite became the icon he became at the CBS Evening News desk, he had a program on Sunday afternoons called You Are There, during which historical events were portrayed.  He always finished the broadcast by proclaiming,

“What sort of a day was it?  A day like all days, filled with those events that altered and illuminate our time. And you were there.”

November 22nd started “like all days.”  But it was filled with events that altered and illuminate our time.

And I was “there.”

The Bag

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Did you ever hear someone say something out of the blue that just hit you squarely between the eyes?   Something that stopped you cold.  Something you had to write down because it was so startingly profound to you that you dared not let it escape?

It is so rare that this kind of thing happens.  Stops you in your tracks.

I was asked to speak to the local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship a few days ago and on Thursday I was doing the final edits of my remarks before printing them out.

As I was typing those last thoughts, I was listening to Sirius/XM’s channel of old radio programs from the 30s into the 60s when radio drama and entertainment finally faded away because television had become the established preference for people’s entertainment.

I was listening to an episode of “Have Gun, Will Travel,” a western drama show about a gunslinger-for-hire named Paladin (no first name ever given). Some of you might remember Richard Boone in the role on television in the early 60s.  But before then it was on radio with John Dehner, whose face you might recognize before you recognize the name) as Paladin.

Paladin had been hired to deal with an Indian chief who was reluctant to give up a white child who had been kidnapped when his family was wiped out. The chief argued that the boy was “his son.”

They finally decided the boy was white and would be returned to relatives. At the end of the negotiation, the “chief” said something that reached out of the speaker and instantly grabbed me. It was so startling and so profound (in my estimation) that I paused the broadcast and went back to get the wording correct.

“Skin is leather bag God made to hold the soul. Color of bag no matter.”  

That’s a grabber.  I’ve searched the internet to see who really said something like that and can find no reference.  It was so startling, so different from the usual dialogue written for those old radio dramas for Native Americans, that I typed it at the end of the speech—-not that I planned to use it but because I had to make sure I got it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had something—especially a non-news item—jump out of the radio like that before and instantly force me to halt what I was doing so I could write it down—and I’ve heard a lot of great rhetoric (and a lot of really lousy rhetoric, especially lately) come out of the speakers of my radio, my television, and my computer.

I think I’ll tidy it up a little bit and find a good use for it from time to time.

“Skin is a leather bag God made to hold the soul.  The color of the bag doesn’t matter.” 

Amen.

 

Lost, Strayed, or Stolen

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I have often said computers are wonderful things because they can teach us new and innovative ways to cuss.

A few days ago as I was moving a bunch of pictures into a new file, they wound up in the wrong place.  In getting out of that place I appear to have hit a key that wiped out my shortcut to the files of great thoughts that I have prepared for this space.

I have been assured by my Geek Squad consultant that the files are not lost. They have just strayed into an unknown place.  I would offer a reward for their return if I thought they were stolen. So,while I am searching I will be able to post only new lightning strikes of wisdom.  And since Nancy and I shall be traveling for a few days the search will be suspended.

But I have found that travel can produce new wisdoms.

Years ago, in the so-called Golden Days of Radio, there was a popular show called “Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons.”  The comedy trio of Bob & Ray parodied the show with a routine called “Mr. Trace, Keener than Most Persons.”

Should any of you be more “Mr. Trace” than “Mr Keane,” your suggestions will be appreciated.

Unfortunately, the only reward will be getting to read the lost wisdom.

 

The demise of local news

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A friend has passed along an article written a few years ago by Jonathan Bernstein, a columnist on the Bloomberg Views website in which he lamented that the “demise of local news may be ruining Congress.”  Bernstein wrote that several senators facing re-election found that “no one in their home states knows who they are.”   He cited a piece by Washington Post writer Paul Kane, who saids, “A prime cause of this fight for name recognition is the increasingly fragmented media in which partisans largely receive their news from ideologically driven cable news and social media. Middle-of-the-road voters, reliant on their local news, are often left in the dark.”

Kane noted, “Overall, there are more reporters covering Congress than ever, except they increasingly write for inside Washington publications whose readers are lawmakers, lobbyists and Wall Street investors.”   He cites North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, began his Washington career in the House before moving to the Senate in 2005.  When he arrived in Washington, three newspapers from North Carolina had Washington Bureaus.  Now, none of them do.  “I can give a major policy speech, and no newspaper in Charlotte or Raleigh or Winston-Salem will even cover that I was there, much less that I gave a policy speech.”

Bernstein offers a scenario:  The president proposes a new initiative.  If the local newspaper has a Washington bureau, a member of Congress might figure out how district voters feel and then endorse whatever constituents want.  The constituents can then read the news coverage in the local paper.  But that’s not how things work anymore.

He wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season. So the safest bet for an incumbent is going to be to echo the party line (which will normally mean no coverage at all) or, better, just to keep his or her mouth shut. Why stick with the district’s needs over party loyalty when no one in the district will ever hear about it — except the die-hards who support the party line no matter what?”

He also worried that the changing face of the news business works against the local Senator or Representative proposing things that benefit the district.  “If the rewards for action are reduced, fewer and fewer members of Congress are going to bother,” he says.  The end result: “The demise of state and local political reporting is often thought of as a potential threat because without a vigorous press, no one will expose malfeasance, and politicians will have weaker reasons to avoid corruption.  But perhaps the reduced incentives for good behavior by these elected officials are an even bigger reason to despair.”

This is not just a national issue.  It is a matter of concern in every state.  The same concerns Bernstein voices apply to our state and city governments.

There probably are fewer reporters covering state capitols full-time than there are reporters covering Congress.  Newspapers from St. Joseph, Cape Girardeau, Springfield, and Joplin once had year-around reporters at the capitol.  Not today, although Springfield still sends a reporter to the Capitol during sessions.  There once were two wire services covering state government. The Associated Press is the only one left.  Second newspapers from Kansas City and St. Louis went out of business years ago.  Don’t expect to learn much from metropolitan TV or radio stations about what’s happening in Jefferson City although what happens at the capitol affects their viewers every minute of their lives.  Missouri Independent, a new and aggressive news organization whose articles appear in several newspapers, is an important addition and works hard to fill the yawning gap in coverage of state government and politics.

Missouri newspaper subscribers are more likely to get their news about state politics and government from weekly columns written by their legislators than they are to read anything from a local reporter that details or questions what the local lawmaker is doing or saying because few local news outlets have anyone focusing on covering the actions of their area lawmakers. The weekly columns from office holders must not be acceptable substitutes for reporters who are the fires to which political feet are held.

The situation is worse when it comes to local radio or television news telling of what lawmakers or even city council members are doing.   The corporatization of radio stations has eliminated many vigorous local news departments.  When stations that once had people covering city hall, the courthouse, the school board, and other local events become only one of a half dozen (or more) formats under one roof—and sometimes not even in the same town they are licensed for—with one person who does some news on all of the stations only during morning drive, citizens are not well-informed.

And in an election year, the voters are left to the mercy of manipulative commercials and partisan podcasts.

The economics and the technology of the news business have changed.  In general, those changes have led to more concerns about the bottom line and less concerns about informing the increasingly less-educated, more self-centered electorate who make up a political system that favors agendas over broad public service. The public is in danger of being the frog in the pot of water not realizing it is being boiled to death.

It has been observed that the best thing to happen to newspapers in many towns is the disappearance of local radio news.  People have only the local newspaper to turn to if they want to know about events at city hall and elsewhere. But it is unlikely those newspapers have anybody specifically assigned to make local and federal legislators accountable to their constituents. And in too many instances, local newspapers have come under ownerships that have no local commitments and thus provide few safeguards against poor public policy to their readers.

Some cities are fortunate that new owners step in who have a dedication to their communities and who believe in the responsibility the press has to them.

It is easy to blame the media for the shortcomings in political awareness among the public.  But to do so is to ignore the responsibility that we, the public, carry in a free society. Bernstein spoke of irresponsibility when he wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season.”

If we despair of today’s politics, we must despair of ourselves.  While the too-often bottom-line-only news media share the blame (some might say “the credit) for what we have become as a political people, we cannot escape our own personal civic responsibility to pay attention, to ignore the manipulator and the self-serving promoter, to question claims and concepts, to ask if those who claim they can do anything unilaterally really have the power to do so in a three-branch system of checks and balances, and to evaluate, think, and act for ourselves.  Citizens cannot allow themselves to be victims of “the demise of local news.”  It is better to live and ask questions than to exist and accept self-serving answers or comfortable assurances.

Think about that as we sit in the pan of water while the political stove gets hotter.

You can read Bernstein’s article at : https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-31/demise-of-local-news-may-be-ruining-congress

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SPORTS:  Look for a Long, Hot, Depressing Summer, Baseball Fans; Maybe You Should Go to a Race

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(BASEBALL)—We are left to recall a man who lived and died baseball, who passed up a potential Heisman Trophy college career to play the game of baseball, and who gave us some memorable thoughts and calls during fifty years in the broadcast booth as Jack Buck’s sidekick and later as the number one play-by-play guy with the Missourinet’s first sports director, John Rooney.

Mike Shannon is gone. He was 83. He was a multi-star athlete in high school who went to the University of Missouri on a football scholarship. In the days when freshmen could not play varsity football, Shannon so impressed Missouri coach Frank Broyles that Broyles thought he could have won the Heisman Trophy if he had stayed with football.

Instead, Shannon got a $50,000 signing bonus from the Cardinals and played baseball.

He gave us a lot of things on the field and in the booth. His Shannon-isms might be rivalled in all of baseball history (at least in our experience) only by the colorful phrasing of another native Missourian, Casey Stengel:

“It’s Mothers Day, so a big happy birthday to all you mothers out there.”

“Back in the day when I played, a pitcher had three pitches: a fastball, a curveball, a slider, a changeup and a good sinker pitch.”

(During a game in New York): “I wish you folks back in St. Louis could see this moon.”

“Ol’ Abner has done it again.”  (a late-game observation when the game is tight going into the last innings.)

“He’s faster than a chicken being chased by Ronald McDonald.”

“Our next home stand follows this road trip.”

“The wind has switched 360 degrees.”

“The crowd (is) on their feet for the Canadian Star Spangled Banner.”

And there were many more. Mike Shannon was Mike Shannon. Nice guy.  Good ball player. One of those guys who made a baseball broadcast booth much more than calling balls and strikes.  They don’t come along often and their enthusiasm for the game can’t be faked or scripted.

And we really need him these days.   His beloved Cardinals are in the pits. There’s no sugar-coating it.

They haven’t won a series since April 10-12 and were 10-19 after their weekend series against the Dodgers, wrapping up a road trip in which they went 2-8. They haven’t been this far under .500 in at least 16 years, 2007, the last time the cardinals finished below .500.  They have to go 80-53 if they’re going to win 90 games and compete for a wild card slot.

The Cardinals had never finished the first month of the season in last place in the National League Central—-and it was formed in 1994.

This weeks’ USA TODAY power rankings put the Cardinals 23rd out of the 30 teams.  The team started the year with fairly low expectations from the newspaper. They were ranked 11th.

And they’re expecting a 41-year old pitcher who has had a mediocre rehab assignments in Springfield and Memphis to lead a turnaround?   Wainwright had an ERA of 6.14 in Springfield and 6.35 at Memphis, 13 strikeouts in 12.2 innings in which he gave up 18 hits and nine runs.

Doesn’t me he can come up to the big club and do better—-rehab assignments aren’t necessarily about winning and losing.

But still…..

The Cardinals could be worse.  They could be the Kansas City Royals and ranked 29th by USA TODAY.  Only Oakland (soon to be Las Vegas, perhaps) is below them.

Where’s Mike Matheny when the Cardinals need him?

He’s in Kansas City where he is 172-242 in his three-plus seasons after going 591-474 in seven seasons in St. Louis and never having a losing record. The Royals went 7-22 in the first month of the season.

(MIZ-WHO?)—We confess that we’ve lost track of what the Missouri basketball team has won or lost since the season ended.  I think we’re suffering from portal fatigue.  They still lack a horse in the middle, a big one.

We’ll root for whatever Dennis Gates puts on the floor next year. But the era of carpet bagger-players the NCAA has ushered in with the portal and the NIL business has been a huge mess we prefer not to try to follow.

Pretty much the same for the football team.  We hope coach Drinkwitz is able to put together an outstanding team.  But by and large it’s going to be a bunch of strangers on Faurot field next fall.

It’s tempting to say that the NCAA has really screwed up collegiate sports.

(RACING)—All three major series were on track during the weekend—although the weekend stretched to an extra day for one of them.

(INDYCAR)—Close, but no cigar—again—for Romain Grosjean who led 57 of the first 66 laps before Scott McLaughlin fought his way past on lap 71 and held on to beat Grosjean to the line by about 1.8 seconds at Barber Motorsports Park at Birmingham, Alabama.

Grosjean, who started the race on the pole,  admits that he’s headed to Indianapolis for the two races in May—on the road course on May 14 and the Indianapolis 500 on the 28th.

McLaughlin’s win, his fourth in the INDYCAR series, was the product of race strategy.  His team planned on three pit stops. Grosjean’s team hoped to win the race on two stops.  But the three-stop strategy eliminated any fuel concerns for McLaughlin, who called it a “happy driver strategy.”

McLaughlin is the fourth driver to win in the four races run this year in INDYCAR.

Two-time series champion Will Power challenged Grosjean in the final laps but couldn’t get close enough to make a pass attempt.  Pato O’Ward and Alex Palou made up the rest of the top five.

(NASCAR)—The long dry spell for Martin Truex Jr., has come to an end after 54 races and 597 days.  Truex, opting for two tires on his last pit stop, held off Ross Chastain, who went with four, for the final fourteen laps.  Truex crossed the stripe a half-second ahead of Chastain.

The race was run yesterday (Monday) because it was rained out on Sunday. The win made the long weekend a family affair. His younger brother, Ryan, won the Xfinity race on Saturday.

Ryan Blaney, William Byron, and Denny Hamlin completed the top five. Byron led almost half of the 400 laps (193 of them) but couldn’t keep up with the top three in the closing laps.

Chastain’s run has put him on top of the points standings.

Chase Elliott, in his third race after returning from a broken leg was 11th and is now within the top thirty in points.  NASCAR rules say a driver must be in the top thirty in points and must have at least one victory if they’re not 16th or better in points at the start of playoffs.  Elliott is still looking for his first win of the year.

Josh Berry, who filled in for Elliott while he was recovering, was driving Alex Bowman’s car at Dover because Bowman suffered some compression back fractures in a sprint car wreck last week. He’s out indefinitely.  Berry finished 11th.

(FORMULA 1)—Sergio Perez is the first driver to win twice at the Grand Prix of Azerbain.

He beat teammate Max Verstappen, the defending f1 champion, by 2.1 seconds. Ferrari’s Charles LeClerc claimed the other podium spot.

Perez’s victory moves him to within six points of Verstappen in the standings. Both drivers have won twice this year. Two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso, who seems to have found a new life in his career driving for Aston Martin, is third.

(Photo Credits; MLB Tonight (Rooney and Shannon) and Bob Priddy)

 

 

Notes From a Quiet Street

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It’s baseball season.  And baseball is a great radio sport.

As Jack Buck put it when he was inducted ins the Radiio Hall of Fame in 1995:

“Turn the radio on. You’ll hear a friend. You will enjoy; you will learn; you will imagine; you will improve.

“Turn the radio on, at home, in your car, in prison, on the beach, in a nursing home.  You will not be alone; you will not be lonely.

“Newspapers fold. Magazines come and go. Television self-destructs.

“Radio remains the trusted common denominator in this nation.”

Or as others have said, in various forms: “Theatre is life; film is art; television is furniture; radio is imagination.”

Perfect for baseball.

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I Read.  I write.  I am an author.  A library tells me much about a town and its people.  I’ve been on various local and regional library boards for 14 years and counting. That’s why this sign was interesting:

Of course, I saw this sign on the internet.

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We keep hearing critics of the January 6 Committee refer to it as a Kangaroo Court.  Do they consider another form of investigation a Kangaroo Grand Jury?

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Your faithful correspondent has, for the last two cars he has bought, suggested, “This might be the last entirely gas-powered car I’ll buy.”  But we’re getting closer to where that statement will true. When grandchildren live in Colorado, a car that gets 250  miles before needing a charge doesn’t make the navel tingle.

But this one does. It’s the Mercedes EQ/XX, still in prototype stage. Mercedeces ranks its range at 747 miles. Might have to mortgage the house, twice, but when it goes into production, it might not be too hard to tell the grandchildren their inheritance is greatly diminished.  It even has solar panels on the roof to power some of the little things inside.

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We have heard our most recent ex-president say at least a couple of times, including last week, that he wanted to give himself the Medal of Honor but Congress wouldn’t let him do it.

Should he ever read one of these postings (and there are some serious suspicions in this lofty place that he reads much of anything), here is how the Medal of Honor is awarded.

The main way is through nomination and approval through the military chain of command.  The second is a nomination by a member of Congress who is usually acting on a constituent’s request.  The medal is general presented by the President, in the name of Congress.

A year ago about now, I was honored to work with some veterans and with Gold Star Families to put up a monument to those families that have lost loved ones during wartime. I cherish the opportunity to have been part of that effort.

The ex-president’s remark is an insult to those who deservedly have received Medal of Honor—-or to the families of those who did not live to know they would receive it. Actually, it is an insult to anyone who has ever worn our country’s uniforms.

In fact the first time he joked about that was at an AMVETS meeting a couple of years ago and he embroidered his poorly-read remarks by kidding Woody Williams about them.

Woody Williams died a few weeks ago. He was the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor winner.  It was his foundation that supported last year’s efforts to put up the Gold Star Families Memorial Monument near the Missouri Capitol.

Our ex-president might have thought he was being funny. I am ashamed of those who laughed or applauded.

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And finally, another observation about baseball:

You faithful observer has seen a new book that says “Bull Durham” is the greatest sports movie ever made. It is difficult from this recliner chair next to the TV remote to disagree.  Part of one of Hollywood’s greatest movie scripts is when Crash explains to Nuke how to use all of the great baseball clichés.

We suggest, however, that there are two baseball clichés that need to be thrown on the ash heap of baseball cliché history.

After watching  the Kansas City Royals and the St. Louis Cardinals leave some of their players behind, including some of the bigger names of both teams, when they went to Canada recently because they had not been vaccinated, we suggest these two clichés be discarded:

Take one for the Team.

There is no “I” in Team.

Maybe the Royals and the Cardinals need something we find supporting our high school sports.

Booster Clubs.