Table of contents for Not so prime time : chasing the trivial on American television / Howard Rosenberg.


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I. NEWS ON A HIGH WIRE: CLOWNS WITHOUT
SAFETY NETS
Team Coverage of Breaking News                           9
Poor Richard's Almanac of Horrors                         12
Obsession, Not Proportion, Drives Television News         16
Her Nose Makes News                                       19
Private Lives and Public Prying                           23
First Amendment, Shmendment                               26
When Ride-alongs Take the Public for a Ride               29
Foreign News? It's All Alien to the Networks              32
Let's Hear It (Again) for Old Glory                       36
A Lox Named Fox                                           39
If You're Not for Yourself, Who Will Be for You?          43
The Blurred Lines of Today's "Reality"                    46
Celebrating Fiction as Fact                               49
Paul Goes Home                                            53
Propping Up the Berlin Wall                               56
Out of the Anchor Chair, into the Fray                    60
The Russian Roulette of Live News Coverage                64
To Air Is Human, Especially When It's Live                68
Live from Iraq, Ready or Not                              71
Publicity, Thy Name Is Schwarzenegger                     74
The Day the World Shattered                               77




II. TRASH, YOU ROCK ... SOMETIMES
Ratting on Bill Was Her Duty                            83
Wanna Confess? Call Montel                              86
How Was Poor Jenny to Know He Was a Ticking
  Time Bomb?                                            90
Communing with Nature by Destroying It                  94
Transgressing All the Way to the Bank                   98
The Art of Rebounding                                   101
When Crummy Acting and Writing Equal Fun                105
In "Ark," Noah Plays Friars Club                        109
A Tale of Two Miniseries                                113
The Face That Launched a Thousand Cliches               116

III. THE POLS, PREZ, PROPS OF WAR, AND
OTHER PHENOMENA: READY FOR THEIR CLOSE-UPS?
Infomercials Disguised as Conventions                   127
Judging Political Parties by Their Stagecraft           131
And Now, for My Next Rehearsed Ad Lib ...               135
Do Great Moves Make Great Presidents?                   138
When His Presence Is the Message                        142
Our President: Man or Mannequin?                        145
Bush's Image Fails to Fill the Screen                   148
When No News Is Big News                                151
White Meat or Dark?                                     155
D-Day and the Resonance of War . . Now and Then         158
Looking to the Past to See the Present                  162
A New War, but the Same Old Tube                        166
War as a Sales Tool                                     170
Seeking Symbolic Moments in the Tides of History        174
Talking the Talk Before Taking the Walk                 177
Ultimate Reality                                        181
Timothy McVeigh: The Closed Circuit                     185
Let's Bring Cameras to Death's Door                     188
0. J. on Trial                                          191




The Year of Simpson                                       194
The Case for Cameras in Courtrooms                        198
Give bin Laden His (Televised) Day in Court               201
One Picture Can Be Worth a Thousand Clips                 205
The Death of Challenger Recalled                          209
Columbia: Freeze This Frame                               213
High Noon in Television's High Court                      216
TV Keeps the Dreams-and Dross-Alive                       220

IV. BURYING THE HYPE: TRUE HEROES AND
DEITIES UNMASKED
Big Man, Big Laughs, Big Legacy                           227
Excellence, from "Marty" to the Mafia                     231
I Confess! I Did Watch Perry Mason!                       234
A Toast for Kuralt and One for the Road                   238
Contemplating Cosell                                      242
The Life of a National Hero Has Its Perils                246
A "Masterpiece Theatre" of Pomp and Puff                  250
When the Coverage Is as Senseless as the Tragedy          253

Index                                                     257





Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Television broadcasting United States, Television programs United States