Category: Media

By GEORGE SALAMON// “What a senseless waste of human life.” Customer, played by John Cleese, in Monty Python’s Cheese Shop Sketch as he shoots the shop’s proprietor.

You wish President Obama were mocking the “senseless” part of the “senseless violence” phrase he applies relentlessly to past and current destruction of life. But he’s caught the virus and doesn’t seem to be aware that he has now dropped into his huge “senseless violence” grab bag of human horrors:

By WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL// Attorney General Eric Holder said this week that he was “exasperated” by the flood of leaks from the criminal investigations of Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown on Aug. 9. He suspects local officials leaked the information favorable to Wilson, just as they had earlier leaked a video allegedly showing Brown robbing a convenience store owner.

But two of the three leaks – the ones in the Washington Post and the New York Times – were written by the newspapers’ Justice Department reporters in Washington. The Times story on Oct. 17 attributed the information to “government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation” – not the state criminal investigation.

Now that the USA and the coalition of the hesitant are stumbling toward the objective, NBC reporter Elizabeth Chuck had good reason to wonder “Why the Obama administration keeps saying ‘degrade and destroy’.” White House press secretary Josh Earnest finds the phrase “brimming with meaning.” Chuck did not. The strategy of air strikes on the black-flagged beheaders of ISIL (or ISIS or just the Islamic State) seems to be “in tatters” according to the UK’s The Guardian. Has Chuck’s question received a good answer?

By WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL// Two months after Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown, St. Louis remains at the vortex of a media whirlwind of live streaming video, social media, traditional media, national media and slanted cable and online outlets.

For this journalist of four decades, the coverage of such an important national story in our hometown is by turns exhilarating, anarchic, frustrating and frightening. Sometimes it seems like a shining example of a community working through deep, festering problems in a democratic fashion. At other times it feels like a mob as nasty Tweets on multiple hashtags fly by faster than they can be read.

A recent Google news search shows no new information about Jeffrey Sterling, the Missouri resident and former CIA agent accused of leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen.

By SCOTT LAMBERT// That doesn’t mean nothing has happened with Sterling. An upcoming meeting may mean a date for trial will be set soon. Once that happens, Sterling may get his chance in court.

Until then, members of the press get to sit back and watch the sniping between James Risen toward President Barack Obama and Obama toward the press in general.