Letters

The network newscasts forged in the sixties and seventies face viewer shortages, thanks to competition from cable outlets, digital, mobile, and the dot-com worlds (sometimes within their own companies). We need to figure out how to meet the traditional challenges of objectivity and fairness while meeting the business challenges.

Edward R. Murrow’s kind of journalism needs to take back the airwaves. A blogger does not always a journalist make. Nor does a person on television interviewing politicians always a journalist make. The responsibility now lies with the press—broadcast, digital, print, new media—to make it clear which of its representatives are objective voices and which are not. Our duty, our responsibility, as journalists is to help guide the public, as has been our charge since the days of Murrow.
MARIAN PORGES, J82
SENIOR PRODUCER, NBC NEWS
CHAIR OF THE JOURNALISM PROGRAM,
NEW YORK FILM ACADEMY

I enjoyed the “Changing Press” articles. I have been disturbed by the changes in journalism in recent years. I think you summarized it very well with the quote from former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee: when asked what he though about “citizen journalism,” Bradlee replied, “About what you think of citizen surgery.” Even the so-called underwriting on National Public Radio has been sounding more and more like commercial advertising. At least your articles bucked the trend and provided some in-depth reporting. Keep up the good work.
ELIOT MAYER, E90
BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS

Edward R. Murrow’s sententious manner may well have been matched by unique excellence in reporting (“What Would Murrow Do?,” Spring 2008). I leave that evaluation to historians, even though I suspect that his reputation owed something to the same ideological consensus that built the reputation of Walter Cronkite. No matter what Murrow’s achievement, I cast my vote for Bill O’Reilly as the greatest journalist in the history of television. Granted that O’Reilly is a news analyst, not a reporter, and that some of his stories can be classified as entertainment, but I have never witnessed anything like O’Reilly’s candid honesty and rhetorical skill in dealing with challenging issues. The surest sign of O’Reilly’s essential rationality and logical power is the contemptuous and contemptible responses he has gotten from the atheistic core of the modern journalistic and academic worlds. These responses have set a new standard for ugly mendacity in American culture. O’Reilly cannot afford the luxury of Murrow’s lofty tone, but he exhibits an even more valid sort of rhetorical power and flexibility of theme.
JOHN D. PILKEY, A64
OTTAWA, KANSAS

In the end I am glad I was an English major. It is an interesting and intuitive way of getting at truth. None of the academic disciplines can explain life to you. Each contributes in its own way, and the joy of learning comes in the attempt to weave them all together.
LINDA MACINTOSH RODGER, J63, J97P
ENFIELD, CONNECTICUT

MUSIC TO HIS EARS I would like to thank you for “The Town That Made Beethoven” (Spring 2008). In all the years I have received and read Tufts Magazine, I don’t think I ever read such an informative and imaginative article. Not only did I gain new insights into the character of the great composer, but I also learned a great deal about the period in which Beethoven lived, the Napoleonic Wars, the importance of the epochs that influenced him, and the setting of his great Choral Symphony.

Why can’t you publish more articles like this one? They could replace those dreadful wedding photographs.
JOHN K. NORWOOD, A48
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS

HOME RUN You smacked one out of the park with your very creative approach to the article “He-e-ere’s the Pitch” (Spring 2008)!
DAVID RUEF, A79
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

“He-e-ere’s the Pitch,” like most of the “Jumbolaya” department, was the brainchild of our contributor Beth Horning.
—EDITOR

THE ART OF SEEING “Blinded” (Spring 2008) is such a compelling story of a family confronted by crisis. I really liked how the author, Grace Talusan, deals with blindness on two levels—her niece’s and her father’s. I felt most deeply for her father. In Greek, we say that “the child of my child is two times my child.” His pain must have been enormous, and that was clearly communicated in Ms. Talusan’s work.
DIANE VARDAKAS MOLOKOTOS, E81
EASTON, CONNECTICUT