Calendar letters: Trump and the state of news today

What’s news, and not

Lorraine Ali has hit the nail on the head [“Trump and the Media: Have We Crossed the Red Line?” Aug. 20]. For a long time now cable news shows have been anything but news. Opinions and pundits rule the airwaves with “news anchors” who usually lead the guests with questions that have preordained answers, thereby attempting to sway the audience to the agenda of the hosts and networks. Those of us old enough to remember Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite can at least hang on to our memories.

Congratulations to The Times for putting this piece front and center.

William Goldstein, composer

Los Angeles

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Unfortunately for our country, your article is spot-on. Media news is no longer “news,” it’s gossip porn. President Trump has rerouted presidential utterances from the boulevard of historical greatness to the dirt road of reality show banality. Despite ourselves, and despite the damage, we rubberneckers can’t turn our eyes away from the train wreck. If the next president can’t fix this by being intelligent, articulate, relatable and media-savvy, upcoming generations are doomed to aspire to, at best, celebrity stupidity when it comes to presidential choices. The second dark ages are upon us.

Sharon Graham

Huntington Beach

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I’m absolutely turned off by the entire ordeal and the “reporting” of it. I grew up in the era of Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. There is no one of that ilk today.

Ed Masciana

Torrance

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The Donald Trump Show is a blockbuster TV series of a madman taking over the most powerful country in the world. The star conceived, produced and wrote the show. Minor characters come and go, and the viewers, while hissing the leader, are fascinated by his audacity and charisma.

It would have become a bit repetitious by this time and start to lose viewers except this reality show is reality, with the star character having the capability, on his own volition, to start a chain of events that will return civilization to the dark ages. We dare not look away.

Al Rodbell

Encinitas

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Lorraine Ali has it close to right when talking about the absence of news on the cable news channels. “Vice” news on HBO is the best current antidote. But 30 minutes is not even close to enough. News should teach like the first pass of history that it is. There is room for opinion, but on a foundation of reality. That reality, the reporter’s responsibility, is sorely missing from the vast expanse of cable “news.”

Jim Berland

Culver City

Where to place the monuments

Regarding “Symbols of Ugly History, Not Pride” [Aug. 19]. Christopher Knight’s article suggesting that Confederate monuments be put in museums is excellent. I would suggest that, instead of Appomattox, the location be an existing Civil War Confederate cemetery and that the cemetery be renamed something like “The Jim Crow Memorial Park.” I would also suggest that instead of citing the relocated monuments “as examples of ugly history,” we somehow acknowledge responsibility for enabling this history to occur.

Joseph D. Murphy

Venice

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Christopher Knight nailed it when he wrote, “Some claim that removing [monuments to the Confederacy] erases history. That’s backward. Erecting them does.”

Carol Wells

Venice

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Christopher Knight has written a balanced, thought-provocative article on the contentious issue of Civil War monuments. Many of these monuments were erected in the early 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was in the process of lynching many African Americans. A similar wave of monuments were erected in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when the civil rights movement was challenging segregation.

The conclusion is clear. If we are to keep these monuments, they must be balanced by understanding what they represented and symbolized.

Michael B. Natelson

Newport Beach

Why audiences skip ‘Detroit’

Why aren’t people going to see “Detroit” [“Why Did ‘Detroit’s’ Flames Fizzle Out?” Aug. 17]? Part of the reason may be that it’s two hours, 22 minutes long. Why can’t filmmakers say what they want to say in something closer to an hour and a half? I’m not willing to spend that much time watching a movie, unless I’m pretty darn sure it’s going to be worth it. (I’m only going tonight because I’ve enjoyed Kathryn Bigelow’s films so much in the past.)

Jeff Cohlberg

Rolling Hills Estates

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Simple: it’s a 2 1/2-hour movie with exactly 10 seconds of nuance. My friends of every skin color are sick to death of being baited into racial division by a media and culture that continue to pit peace officers against the inner-city residents who badly need their protection from drug- and gang-related crime. Today’s urban police forces are often majority-minority and/or majority-female, and bear no resemblance to the snarling Klansmen Kathryn Bigelow serves up in this picture. More generally, we’re sick of race being given grossly disproportionate pride of place in our national discourse.

Jordan Chodorow

Los Angeles

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Kathryn Bigelow’s boldness and the commitment to relevancy that her films adhere to is admirable. But the subject matter of “Detroit” is better suited to a documentary format aimed at a select and interested audience, not a wide-release feature film meant for mainstream moviegoers.

Ben Miles

Huntington Beach

Kennedy honors disappointment

How sad I was to read President Trump and the lovely First Lady Melania will not be attending the Kennedy honors and parties [“Trumps Bow Out of Kennedy Center Gala,” Aug. 20]. The president and first lady greet all the honorees at the White House the night before and there is a wonderful dinner party. I watch the program on television every year and have loved every moment of it. I probably will never watch it again. President Trump is a good man and what you see is what you get; he speaks truth and truth is a hard pill to swallow.

Elaine Vanoff

West Hollywood

Memories of ‘Days’ gone by

Thank you for taking me down memory lane with these movies that I first saw in the theater [“Still Resonating 30 Years On,” Aug. 20]. One film in particular,”Radio Days,” carries a somewhat more somber memory. The exterior shots were around the city of Rockaway, N.Y., before Hurricane Sandy moved through the East Coast. The next time you watch that movie, chances are likely that many of the homes (which were originally built in the ‘20s and ‘30s) no longer exist.

Dori Sahagian

Sunland

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