Tarnish on a Gold Standard

 Not only is this week the end of the road for Stephen Colbert; it also marks the end for CBS Radio News, which would have been a century old next year. Who can forget Edward R. Murrow, one of the many voices who got audiences through World War II?

I had a small part in CBS Radio history when I signed on as a desk assistant, the radio equivalent of a newspaper copy boy, at WCBS Newsradio 88, which met its own demise a couple of years ago. It became the second all-news station in New York in 1967, and I started working there shortly thereafter. Our anchor staff at that time included a young Charles Osgood. Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes fame was then a reporter. I got a Christmas card from him that year. Anyway, I remember his covering an ongoing school controversy in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. This involved a struggle between Black and Puerto Rican parents and the powerful teachers’ unions over community control of schools and had a critical impact on education policy in the city.

Another big story at the time centered on Francine Gottfried, a 20-year-old clerical worker at a bank in the financial district whose curvaceousness actually stopped traffic as she walked to work. She was called the Wall Street Sweater Girl, and it might sound frivolous, but as the crowds grew, it just had to be covered.

But I also saw how quickly a newsroom became a very serious place when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down what was called the Prague Spring, in which Czech leaders tried to advance human rights, much to the Russians’ chagrin.

A simple electronic advancement led to a major union dispute. WCBS got new Norelco handheld cassette recorders for the reporters to use, but the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers argued it was their job to handle sound using big Nagra machines. I almost caused a strike myself when I worked with a studio tape recorder at 3:30 a.m. to practice reading news and the IBEW shop steward caught me.

One afternoon I answered the phone and a man identifying himself as Dr. Wood said, “Please tell the anchors that they are mispronouncing the name of that South American country’s new president.” Charles Osgood was on the air, and during a break I told him,” Some crackpot named Dr. Wood called to say you’re not pronouncing a name right.” Mr. Osgood did not laugh but found a note pad and asked me what I was told about how to say the name. Turned out Dr. Wood was a linguist at a major university contracted to ensure that foreign word pronunciations were uniform among all the anchors.

I learned a lot that summer. Some of us will miss CBS Radio News. I certainly hope so.

Taking Out the Bad Ones

 

One of President Trump’s recent executive orders calls for ending the moratorium on the death penalty in federal criminal cases, speeding up their prosecution, and allowing the use of historical methods like the firing squad, electrocution, and the gas chamber.

Let me start by saying that I am viscerally opposed to the death penalty, but I’m not going to begin here with a debate about its propriety, but instead, about how it’s...um…executed. Over time in this country, we mostly sidelined the older methods as cruel and unusual. I guess my position is, if we must have the death penalty, let’s use methods that get the job done as quickly as possible.

Lethal injection was designed to be humane, but it hasn’t always worked well. My macabre joke is that if the cocktail of drugs employed in some states had a commercial on TV it would have to carry a warning that one of the side effects was LIFE. Injection with pentobarbital is allowed federally now, but death can take up to 10 minutes.

Electrocution is about the same as injection, it appears, while the gas chamber might not induce death for almost 20 minutes, according to reports. Even a firing squad would not always produce the immediate death of the target. Strictly from a layman’s point of view, I would imagine the guillotine or the executioner’s axe seem most efficient, though unpleasantly messy. OK, I’ll stop with this part now.

At one time, executions were very public events, the idea being that they served as deterrent, as in, “Look what will happen to you if you do what this person did!” I’m not sure the death penalty now accomplishes that purpose. It’s also argued that a disproportionate number of minority people are on death rows because of unfair convictions.

But I’d be willing to bet that most victims’ families are not all that interested in revenge in the form of seeing the perpetrator suffer. They just want the security of knowing that they no longer have to share space on this planet with that individual, and they get it with an execution. No chances of the perp being sprung on appeal or through a pardon.

However, there are also stories about lifers being rehabilitated in prison, truly repenting their crimes. Beyond that, there are even accounts of perpetrators meeting victims’ family members and being forgiven.

As for the death penalty, though, we might consider that one of the Ten Commandments is Thou Shalt Not Kill. There is a period after the last word. We have added a whole bunch of “unlesses” since Moses brought down those stone tablets from the mountain.