Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi.
Say their names. Say them out loud. Think of them as individuals, not simply as six hostages, abducted during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by terrorists from Gaza.
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A great radio station is dead, a victim of the ever-changing world of major media. WCBS Newsradio 880, a fixture in New York City for nearly six decades, has said farewell to its loyal listeners, me included. The shutdown on August 26, 2024, of the iconic all-news station marks the end of an era in local news broadcasting.
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The 2024 Democratic National Convention is about to begin in my hometown. I am worried.
In the summer of 1968, I was between my junior and senior years in high school. After a string of the usual summer jobs, delivering clothes for the local tailor, bagging groceries at the local supermarket, this summer I had a “real” job. I was writing computer programs for the City of Chicago. It was a big secret in those days that if you ignored a parking ticket in Chicago, you would never hear from the city. That was because the city’s traffic court, which had a crew of one hundred patronage workers dutifully typing the data from each ticket and each mailed in payment onto computer punched cards, no one had written the programs to match the two card decks and print out notices threatening arrest to the scofflaws who hadn’t paid.
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The consensus view holds that the candidates for vice president have little impact on voter’s choices in a presidential election. I have no evidence to refute this. But I do have a kind of gut feeling that the people slated to fill the number two position on the ticket may have more influence than usual this time around.
Read moreI was in grade school on the south side of Chicago when I began listening to the radio. It was AM in those days, and the format was Top Forty. There were two big stations in Chicago, WLS and WCFL. Since they both played the same music, they differentiated themselves by the personalities of their disc jockeys. One did a lot of comedic bits and spotlighted local comedians. And one of those was Bob Newhart.
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In my two previous columns (here and here) I detailed some of the winners and losers resulting from the opinions issued during the Supreme Court term just ended. Now let us look at the biggest winner of them all, the Supreme Court itself. In the last three weeks of the term, the Supreme Court transferred much of regulatory and administrative authority and rulemaking to itself. The federal courts were not authorized and are not equipped to serve as roving regulators of last resort for hundreds of federal agencies. According to the Court:
Every summer professors at the nation’s law schools huddle to discuss what, if any, changes should be made to their teaching curriculum after the Supreme Court term just ended. This year, they are scrambling to deal with the train wreck for constitutional law that was the Court’s 2023-2024 term.
I am not a lawyer. But after fifty years as a journalist, I am spending my emeritus years in part teaching a course titled “Media Law and Ethics for Journalists” in the UCLA Extension program. This is a required course in the school’s journalism certificate program and is available online.
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