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OCTOBER
2023
OCTOBER
30, 2013 
WAR
OF THE MEDIA
Tonight marks the 75th anniversary of a famous event in radio history. But did the public really react in the way we’ve been told?
The radio networks had begun presenting daily newscasts in 1930. Newspapers saw this as a real threat to their business, and within three years a “Press-Radio War” had broken out. The American Newspaper Publishers Association convinced the wire services, including Associated Press, to stop providing news to broadcasters.
Instead, the Biltmore Agreement established a Press Radio Bureau as broadcasters’ sole news source. The PRB was to deliver only enough material for two short newscasts per day, one before 9:30 AM and the other after 9:00 pm. No news story could air until it was 12 hours old and the newspapers had had the opportunity to print it. However, “occasional news bulletins of transcendent importance, as a matter of public service, will be furnished to broadcasters, as they may occur at times other than the stated periods above. These bulletins will be written and broadcast in such a manner as to stimulate public interest in the reading of newspapers.”
Not all radio stations went along, however, and the Agreement lasted less than a year. In 1934 CBS established its own independent news division, to be followed by other networks.
But newspapers still fretted about radio stealing their market share, which brings us to this date in 1938 — my father's 29th birthday. That night, Orson Welles aired The War of the Worlds on CBS, presenting the story as a series of dramatized news broadcasts that a few listeners thought were the real thing. The newspaper industry saw a public relations opportunity. “See? We told you radio news couldn’t be trusted. Those irresponsible broadcasters have spread panic across the nation!” The New York Daily News headlined, “Fake Radio ‘War’ Stirs Terror Through U.S.”
This article from Slate debunks that idea. Only 2% of the nation was listening, and there was no widespread terror — not even in New York, which the broadcast depicted as under attack by invading Martians.
Why do we keep retelling the “panic” myth? “For both broadcasters and regulators, War of the Worlds provides excellent evidence to justify their claims about media power. ...But the myth also persists because it so perfectly captures our unease with the media's power over our lives. ...It’s ABC, CBS, and NBC invading and colonizing our consciousness that truly frightens us. ...Today the Internet provides us with both the promise of a dynamic communicative future and dystopian fears of a new form of mind control; lost privacy; and attacks from scary, mysterious forces.”
OCTOBER
27, 2013
OFFICIAL
REALITY
In sportscasting news: a reader of Ken Levine’s blog asked him whether, when he’s describing a baseball game on TV, he watches the action live or on the monitor. “I’ve watched games ... where the announcers seemed clueless about what just happened.”
Excerpts from Ken’s reply: “I watch the monitor between each pitch. If the director is showing the manager in the dugout and I start talking about the flags in centerfield, I look like an idiot. [But during action] I generally watch the field. [The umpire’s] eyes are the only ones that count, really. So I’ll glance to him to see if a ball is a home run or the outfielder trapped it, etc.”
From my own experience in doing play-by-play on local cable 40 years ago, I agree. When a ball was hit in the air, it was often difficult from our makeshift press box to tell where or how far it was going, so I didn’t bother to follow its flight. Instead, I looked to the fielders to see who was trying to catch it. Then I could describe it as a popup towards second base or a fly ball to center field.
The umpire's eyes are the only ones that count. After a base runner is called out on a close play, fans who saw it differently will insist, “He was safe!” No, he wasn’t. No announcer would say that, because it’s contrary to the facts. Maybe replays will show that the runner should have been called safe, but the ump said he was out. So he is out.
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UPDATE ON DOING IT RIGHT: Game 3 of the 2013 World Series ended on a bizarre play involving an obstructed runner being allowed to score from third base. The TV commentators seemed momentarily puzzled, but Dan Shulman on ESPN Radio read all the umpires' signals and called the play accurately and promptly. |
When I used to broadcast football games, I watched the officials so I could report what officially happened. Nowadays here in Pittsburgh, I often listen to Bill Hillgrove’s radio call of Steelers or Pitt Panthers games, and he doesn’t follow that rule. Bill tells us what he sees. Sometimes that’s not the whole story.
“An amazing one-handed catch along the sideline, and they’ll move the chains! It’s another first down for Cincinnati. Wait a minute. What, now they’re bringing it back? They’re calling it incomplete?” His analyst, who saw the head linesman waving his arms across each other and then waving them both at the sideline to indicate the receiver was out of bounds, has to tell Bill what officially happened.
“They gang-tackle the ball carrier, and now the ball is loose! It’s on the ground. There’s a big scramble. And Pittsburgh has recovered the fumble! What a break! This completely changes the momentum of the game. Wait a minute. They’re giving the ball to Cincinnati? That's a terrible call. Pittsburgh clearly recovered the football! The coach has to throw a challenge flag on this one.” His analyst, who noticed the linesman holding up his hand while marking the spot where the ball carrier’s forward momentum stopped, must explain that the whistle blew before the ball came loose.
Moral: Don’t call them like you see them. Call them like the ref sees them.
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OCTOBER
22, 2023 |
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On a British TV programme I heard an elderly woman pronounce the short I in squirrel almost as if it were a long E. It sounded quite odd. “Squee-rell.” That's how one pronounces the short I in miracle or cirrus. And then I realized the reason: With the exception of miracle and cirrus, we usually pronounce IR as if it were URR. Squurrl, furr tree, shurrt, furrst, skurrt, gurrth, murrth, churrp, flurrt. How long have we been doing so? Not from beerth but from burrth. |
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OCTOBER
19, 2023 Jacob and Hanna's baby was born blind. They named him Worthless, which seems cruel, but he did in fact become a worthless beggar when he grew up. Then, however, something unexpected happened, and stunned onlookers said It Looks Like Him. |
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OCTOBER
16, 2013
BIG
QUACKER
Yes, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there’s a huge rubber ducky in the Allegheny River outside PNC Park. It’s part of this month’s Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts. The bird is due to paddle away after this weekend.
Like everyone else, I walked over to snap a few photos. That’s the ballpark on the left, beyond the Fort Duquesne bridge.
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The duck dropped anchor near the fountain at the Point, where the Monongahela River (in the background) joins the Allegheny to form the Ohio. And that is where its fans have been gathering to meet it. |
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At 40 feet tall, the giant toy is quite an experience up close. According to its creator, Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, “It joins people together and makes people happy. ...We are living on one planet, and all the waters of the world become a global bathtub.” |
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There are real ducks in the river, too, like this mallard. They dash over to snatch bread crumbs that boaters toss into the water. I even saw a few ducks trying to catch the crumbs on the fly. |
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Canada geese outnumber the ducks, but they aren’t as quick. A goose stares at a floating crumb for a second before deciding to reach for it, and by that time a duck has darted in to grab it. Stupid goose. This is why we don’t have cute rubber geese in our baths. |
OCTOBER
15, 2023 
LEARN TO IGNORE PAIN OR DEPRESSION?
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It's
estimated that 65 to 80 percent of the positive effect on depression
provided by “serotonin reuptake inhibitors” like Prozac can
be duplicated by administering a “placebo,” an inert sugar
pill that the patient believes contains active ingredients.
Placebos
are sometimes marketed as “homeopathic remedies.” |
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As I wrote for this website 20 years ago today: Scientific American Frontiers says a placebo (fake medication) can cause the brain to release endogenous opioids (natural painkillers). How? I suspect that pain is an alarm system: “Brain, we have a problem!” Once we've done something (placebo) to fix the problem, the brain tries to shut off the alarm so we can get on with our lives. Although the “something” that we've done may actually have a physical benefit, it's often sufficient for our brain to think that now we're safe: mommy has kissed our boo-boo, the chiropractor has adjusted our spine, or the herbalist has given us magic pills. |
> One-fifth of American adults suffer from chronic pain, experienced every day or most days during the past six months. Conditions include migraines as well as shoulder, knee and elbow pain. Roughly half a million Americans have died over the past two decades after overdosing on opioids, commonly taken in a desperate quest for pain relief. The view that chronic pain is fundamentally a psychological phenomenon is finally being proved true by science. Chronic pain is often “neuroplastic” — generated by the brain in a misbegotten effort to protect us from danger. And that's good news, because what the brain learns, we are discovering, it can unlearn. Sometimes our brains misinterpret threats and overreact by causing or prolonging pain when no danger is present. Our nervous system, triggered by fear, gets stuck in fight-or-flight mode, switching on our body's alarm bells in the form of physical symptoms. This does not mean the pain is imagined or “all in the head.” It's a brain response, like blushing, crying or elevated heart rate — all bodily reactions to emotional stimuli. Chronic pain is real and debilitating — and since it's learned by the brain, it's usually reversible. It's long been known that expectations about pain can affect how and whether it's experienced, with sham surgeries and other placebos able to trick people into feeling relief. Can people retrain their brains to turn off unnecessary pain signals? The technique teaches patients to reinterpret pain as a neutral sensation rather than as evidence of a dangerous physical condition. As people come to view their pain as uncomfortable but nonthreatening, their brains rewire the neural pathways that were generating the pain signals, and the pain subsides. |
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UPDATE As Tom Vanderbilt wrote for Backchannel@wired.com in December 2013: The word placebo comes from the Latin placere, “to please” (as in “more to please than to benefit the patient”). How does your doctor expect you to be pleased, much less relieved of your symptoms, by a prescription for sugar pills? Is she a quack? Fortunately, the answer is probably not. Many doctors — perhaps as many as 97 percent — prescribe placebos at some point in their careers. Your doctor is letting you in on the secret by prescribing a so-called open-label placebo. In the summer of 1963, researchers explained to a group of 15 “admitted neurotics” that some patients with similar conditions had found relief from a sugar pill, a “pill with no medicine in it at all.” Then they prescribed it to the patients. Most reported an improvement, and at least five wanted the treatment to continue. Some were convinced the placebo did contain an active ingredient, and one man speculated that doctors had deceived him to make him “think that he was helping himself.” Another described the sugar pill as “a symbol or something of someone caring about you, thinking about you three or four times a day.” Maybe we start to feel better when someone listens to us, shows respect for our views, and makes common cause with us against our ailments. And doing something rather than nothing can make us feel better. Placebos also haunt what the political scientist Murray Edelman famously termed the “symbolic uses of politics.” In voters' “anxious search for direction,” they might be drawn to leaders who can “dramatize” confidence — regardless of whether that performance achieves anything for the voter. So why, when we know the sham treatment is a sham, does it work? My best bet is that whether we're in a medical setting or casting a vote, we want to feel like someone's taking care of us. In a cynical, despairing world, a sugar pill that calls itself a sugar pill might be the sweetest thing around. |
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OCTOBER
12, 2023 With Halloween approaching, don't forget to pick up a couple of demons! According to the placard painter, they're only .39¢ each. If you want to get technical about it, that means not $.39 but $.0039 each, or three for a penny. |
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Also, a devil's dozen of 13 “spirits” will be telling their ghostly stories tonight at Prospect Cemetery, located a mere 500 yards west of my apartment in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. It's the final resting place of 13,000 people including Civil War soldiers, teachers, judges, socialites, legislators and other influential figures. Henry Brackenridge, the 19th-century judge/congressman/author for whom the borough is named, will be among the deceased being portrayed at the cemetery's annual ghost tour. Hundreds of people are expected to gather around the actors. According to local historian and event organizer Cindy Homburg, “It's very unique and fun and spooky.” |
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OCTOBER
11, 2013
WE'RE
NUMBER TWO
We televised another high school football game last week. After a lightning delay that lasted nearly two hours, West Mifflin defeated Elizabeth Forward to run their undefeated record to 6-0.
2023 UPDATE: You're wondering about the losing team's namesake “Elizabeth Forward.” No, she was not an accomplished daughter of Floyd Forward. The school district serves Elizabeth Township and Forward Township as well as the Borough of Elizabeth, all on the Monongahela River in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
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The Titans have been winners before. We showed this picture of their 1963 championship team. One detail in the old photo caught my eye: no player is holding up an index finger to proclaim that West Mifflin is #1. That tradition hadn’t been invented yet! |
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Instead, everybody seems to be signaling that they’re #2. This is, of course, the V for Victory gesture made famous by Winston Churchill and the “Greatest Generation” during World War II. |
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Some of the Titans were so happy to win the title that they went into full Richard Nixon mode. |
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“Dear Sir” is an old-time letter opener. This 1.2-ounce object commemorating the Apollo missions is also an old-time letter opener.
It had been only 42 weeks since the final trip to the moon when I purchased this souvenir on a visit to Cape Canaveral on this date 50 years ago. I still use it today.
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OCTOBER
7, 2023
WHAT I DID LAST WEEK
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Ten years ago, “Monarch” on complex.com rated my former hangout, WOBC-FM, as the third best college radio station in the country. “Oberlin College is fairly well known for being a bit weird. Sometimes you'll get your usual college radio fodder, but you're just as likely to get some absurdly obscure experimental noise rock, some type of gamelan, or just a few lesbians arguing about whether or not political correctness is politically correct in our day and age. Tuning into WOBC is a bit of a game of Russian roulette, but there's some great music to be discovered.” |
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A year and a half ago, it was announced that a major renovation of Wilder Hall required the station to be disassembled and moved to a different part of the building. Half a year ago, the station got back on the air. One week ago, I attended a college reunion, affording me the opportunity to find out what had changed.
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OCTOBER
5, 2013
ANIMAL
ALREADY HAVE TICKETS
Perhaps you’ve heard the breakout single, “Animal Already Have Tickets,” from the alternative rock band Neon Trees. No? Well, for the band's appearance in Pittsburgh we almost promoted their song that way.
The event was sold out, so the promoter was trying to get additional revenue by selling stage passes. These would allow ticket-holders to see the performance up close, for an extra fee of course. The copy the announcer was supposed to read included these lines:
AND SEE NEON TREES PERFORM ALL THEIR
HITS LIKE EVERYBODY TALKS AND ANIMAL
ALREADY HAVE TICKETS .
. .
GET YOUR PASSES
It appears that the copy had not been written to make it easy to read on the air. If it had been, it would have been punctuated better.
AND
SEE “NEON TREES” PERFORM ALL THEIR
HITS, LIKE “EVERYBODY TALKS” AND “ANIMAL”!
ALREADY HAVE TICKETS? GET YOUR PASSES
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And while we’re on the subject of writing copy for an announcer, why shout? Why do we still use ALL CAPS? Maybe it’s tradition, left over from the days of the mid-20th-century teletype. That primitive communication device conserved bandwidth over the telegraph lines by eschewing the bit that would have signaled “lower case.” |
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OCTOBER
3, 2023
I TOLD YOU SO!
Two and a half years ago, I told you that Katalin Karikó was going to win a Nobel Prize for the development of a much-needed vaccine. This week, along with Drew Weissman, she did!
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This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to biochemist Katalin Karikó and immunologist Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. The vaccines have been administered more than 13 billion times, saved millions of lives and prevented millions of cases of severe COVID-19, said the Nobel committee. |
Born in Hungary, Katalin moved to the United States in 1985. “Hopefully, this prize will inspire women and immigrants and all of the young ones to persevere and be resilient. That's what I hope,” she told Nature.
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I might have been a couple of years early with my prediction, but it did come true.
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OCTOBER
2, 2023
TRIPLE, TRIPLE TROUBLE AND TOIL
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It was 54 years ago this month that I wrote a radio comedy sketch for a class assignment. The script is this month's 100 Moons article. |
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And you can even hear the sketch as it was performed — well, the last 76 seconds of it, anyway — using broadcast techniques that are now hopelessly outdated. It's preceded by a musical public-service announcement and a brief 1969 newscast by Barry Iselin (who looks like this today).
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