This is not rocket science, is as clear as the nose on your face, tobacco kills, guns kill, pharmaceuticals kill, but there is so much money to be made in their commercial civilian use that their manufacture cannot be curtailed as being just too big to be placed on a waning course of action and so they continue to prosper as more and more people die through their continued use and manufactured mass production…

Yesterday during Rachel Maddow’s show she wanted us loyal viewers of hers to watch The Beat with Ari Melber at 6p, after I DVR’d it I realized that at that hour MSNBC would be running the program with a news crawl, I never watch anything with an annoying news crawl. More annoyances were displayed, the animated program title, the word ‘live’, a clock, breaking news banner, subject banner, speakers text, split screen images in stills and clips at the mention of a name, all of which led me to DVR Maddow’s rebroadcast at midnight in the first-place in avoidance of the news crawl. As for The Beat I did not stick around long enough to discover any other annoyance that was in store, this shows screen clutter would make it very hard for me to concentrate on the reporting, at every turn a whiz-bang distraction. I will just have to wait to see if The Beat is rebroadcast in the wee hours of the morning without some of these on-screen distraction’s… One more point, it took me years to get used to the Very Large MSNBC network logo on the screen, and it still annoys me, I know what network I’m watching, thanks for the reminder… I’ll live with it for now until something better comes around that is not interested in blasting its name about…

Elizabeth MacDonald, daily sidekick on Fox Business’s Varney & Co. today made a very insensitive remark, see what you think, here goes; “And how was copper wire invented… by two Scots pulling on a penny” …

Here’s how a negative story concerning this American presidency is transmitted nationwide, is over reported by some news outlets, under reported by others, is much the same for any positive reporting, however, if the negative is referenced at all by this administration is promptly labeled ‘fake news’…

I was just reminded of a very dangerous incident in my life although I didn’t know it at the time, a full explanation to follow. I had to leave work early one day for an appointment in medical building housing hundreds of doctor’s offices that I had never visited before. I was dressed in my standard business suit carrying a briefcase that usually contained my lunch, check book, writing pen and paper and other assorted everyday things to free my pockets of the burden. On the elevator on the way down across from me a similarly dressed young man asked, ‘who was I with’? not fully understanding the question I looked around me and answered, no one. It was only after I arrived home that I understood the question and the information he was seeking which was clearly brought home to me after watching Sunday’s 60 Minutes piece on the opioid distribution. Now the danger, I could have been killed if it was thought I was a competing drug pusher trying to hone in on someone’s territory. Wow, I said to myself as I thought then and as I now broke out again into a cold sweat of fright.

Thinking about painting a room, Home Depot offer something I never heard of, Sure Swatch paintable clear flim, that you paint then place on a wall to see how it will look with the color scheme of your room, as always, the name of the color or shade will always depend of the eyes of each individual person, is it a blueish-green or a reddish-orange? And so, it is with news. In the beginning there was print, only print, print media, then media graduated to include radio, television and now the internet. The number of news organizations in the U.S. must be in the high thousands some including some facets of print, radio, television and internet or all the above.

From Forbes web site penned by Kate Vinton…”Some billionaires, like Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg are longtime media moguls who made their fortunes in the news business. Others, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, bought publications as a side investment after building a substantial fortune in another industry. Billionaires own part or all of several of America’s influential national newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times NYT +0%, in addition to magazines, local papers and online publications”.

It would be ridiculous even impractical to think, to expect that on any given day the same story would be reported the same way with the same spin everywhere and if one did otherwise it would be even more unfeasible to label it fake news, but that’s where we are today in the minds of some. When it comes to news, for it to labeled fake it must be untrue but as I have shown with paint shades the news is many-sided, it can be left, right or in-between on the political spectrum. There will always be some who will view the news from their personal perspective and with the thousands of reporting outlets that’s how it should be, and that, as was once said “that’s news to me” and I bet to you too…

This Saturday evening while watching a local broadcast news program, a Tylenol commercial ran featuring two fully gray-haired women and if that was not radical enough a salt and peppered pharmaceutist too. My thoughts were, how liberating until the report of the female field reporter made up with rosy cheeks, rushed me back to the dark ages of today’s broadcast standards, not offended enough, when a closer look reveled her straight hair wig, which begs the question, her idea or the station managers, anyway its looked at, it’s a kind of an indignity and cultural insult to ethic women hoping for a career in television, particularly in broadcast news, the world over.