A new news world, see it now. Posted on May 3, 2025 at 06:09:07 AM by William F. Buckley Jr
Cold, you havent been here long enough to remember that far back, how this all started.
As to grammar and spelling. Rman writes scripts as opposed to high brow magazine copy. Go get you an online copy of Rudolph Flesch's book, "How to Write, SPeak, and Think Effectively". He wrote "Why Johnny Can't Read" and was a consultant to govt legislators, teaching them how to write to be understood by the masses.
He urged "PLAIN ENGLISH" and diagrammed conversational, 'back fence' spoken word with all its run-on sentences, fragments, repetition that people actually say, as opposed to the formal written writing you'd read in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and all the east coast Ivy League speakers and writers from the 1950s and so on.
We're way past that today. Another change has taken place since Disney's ABC STyle Book writing for David Muir and his liveshot reporters who now write everything in present participle (verbs ending in ING. People too busy to correctly use the parts of speech, now they cover fires, tornados, shark attacks and wars without many verbs at all.
Headline stuff, phrases writing to the video. NBC's picked it up now. It's kind of a hair-on-fire delivery.
Cold, did you ever even go to journalism school? Media's changed a lot in 60 years since I took broadcast journalism.
Only CBS with its heritage of Cronkite and Murrow write with complete sentences today. Two men, salt and pepper behind the desk. But even their reporters no longer talk to viewers....they now just talk to the anchors who dutifully thank them for doing their jobs. Viewers are only listening into the dinner hour presentations.
ABC's moved since the first of the year further away from traditional news. Defining news as only what they have video for--fires, tornadoes, wars, shark attacks, celebrity news, ambulances and medevac helicopters, plus any aircraft incidents from airliners bumping wingtips on the tarmac to Blackhawks flying too high into the paths of airliners on approach. ALl written as a play by play program where everything's happening at news time, and todays reality narrators describe what viewers are seeing at the moment, frame by frame.
They don't write like I did, with dependent clauses and 2 dollar vocabulary. When Paul Harvey and I were alive, you could diagram our sentences, but no more.
Things changing, Cold. Marion the grammarian--left the building! We'll have those stories and more, after the break. Busy night, don't switch the channel.