With multi-camera coverage of events like we watched today, it's the director who tells the camera operators what to shoot, and who tells the technical director when to change from one camera to another.

So if the direction was terrible during this portion of the coverage -- and I agree that it was -- it was the director who was at fault. All too often, TV directors treat every live production as if it was a Dallas Cowboys game or something where the typical viewer has an IQ only slightly higher than their shoe size and an attention span of about six seconds.

It's a pity that it's that way, but you can blame universities which offer degrees in TV/Film but concentrate more on the mechanics -- the trade school aspects -- of the biz than they do on the cultural context in which their efforts will be seen.

I'd bet that the director of this coverage probably hadn't read a poem since Poe's "The Raven" in the eighth grade, and probably didn't understand it then.

Boycotting products and buying from competitors is fine, but especially in a recession, companies expect a certain decline in sales, and whatever's added to that by a boycott may not be noticed.

So the trick is to tell the advertisers why you're buying from the other guy instead.

Don't email.

Write the letter on a real piece of paper, sign it with your real name. Keep the content rational, non-profane, and don't get cute. Then put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it to the office of the president of the company.

If enough of us -- say, 100,000 -- write to the office of the president of Wal-Mart letting the company know that as long as they continue to advertise on Fox News, for example, and that we'll be shopping at Target instead, I guarantee you that the VP for Advertising at Wal-Mart is going to have a talk with the account people at their agencies, and those people are going to have a conversation with the people at Fox, and the people at Fox are not going to like it.

But to work, we'll need to bury the corporate offices of the targeted companies with real letters.

Try it, you'll like it.

Naw, Alex.

That's the kind of nasty stuff you get when you open a Manwich can and dump it over some shredded pig.

For the real thing,you want Augie's in San Antonio.

http://www.augiesbarbedwiresmokehouse.com/index1.htm

And because Augie's really cares about its food, they'd never let the likes of Karl Rove near the place, although they might hold him down until the keepers at the San Antonio Zoo (which is right next door) could come and put him back in his cage.

I grew up with Edward R. Murrow, and my father's reaction to Murrow nailing McCarthy's reeking hide to the wall made Murrow one of my heroes and was probably responsible for my getting into media.

It wasn't just Murrow or Trout or Cronkite. It was the whole environment at CBS which was set and defended by Dr. Frank Stanton, the soul of the network, and Bill Paley, the guy who ultimately overcame his whore's heart and protected CBS News as an independent entity at the same time he starved it financially.

The quality of news doesn't exist in a vacuum, and without a solid and protected base from which to operate, Cronkite would have been just a nice fatherly guy who told you what the news was and even Murrow would be someone who smoked too much and when he was in high dudgeon, was great fun to watch even as Keith Olbermann is today -- a teller of tales, "...full of sound and fury; signifying nothing."

The base doesn't exist without a reason -- a demand -- for what it provides, either but if it made money, hardcore solid journalism would thrive, even today. And if the audience demanded it, it would make money.

So, to steal from Shakespeare one more time, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

And as intellectual underlings and slaves to a WalMart philosophy of life, we get the news we deserve. That's why there are no heirs to Cronkite's mantle.

Sorry, Joan, but no one else can emulate his truth-telling, because no one else want to hear it.