Ideas that may take some getting used to, from the Animals’ Agenda (June 1989): “If we could set aside species stereotypes and see chickens as they really are, we’d discover a sensitive and courageous bird.”
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Rrrm! Rrrrrmm! Appendectomies, anyone? “Providing all your electricity with only nuclear power and coal is like doing all surgeries with only chain saws,” writes Dave Kraft of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service. “The real future of energy lies in appropriate applications of diverse sources of energy to meet the specific end-use needs.” The city, he says, might do well in its franchise negotiations with Com Ed if it emphasized the neglected alternative-energy and conservation approaches.
Why is traditional TV so threatened by trash TV? Because “these shows, through their spectacles and sensationalism, expose their own artificiality and theatricalism, which in turn exposes these same qualities in so called respectable news shows,” writes David Crane in Milwaukee’s Shepherd Express (December 8-15, 1988). “Legit TV tries to mask its constriction in the myth of objectivity. It wants us to believe that it simply reports the news rather than manufactures it. If there’s any media manipulation going on (according to legit logic), it’s blamed on the evil spin doctors or publicists or some other outside agitators. But tabloid shows call into question the whole process of news production and consumption.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
