"24" is a show worth watching live

For the most part, I stopped watching television a couple of years ago.

That doesn't mean I don't watch any shows. I do. But by either renting or purchasing DVDs of full seasons, I manage to control my viewing experience in at least three ways that make it more enjoyable.

First, no commercials.

Second, I can watch when I want to watch. Yes, I know about Tivo and other DVRs, but I choose not to go that route.

Third, I can watch entire seasons at whatever pace I want. If I feel like watching five episodes in one day, I can. And I don't have to sit through the weeks when the shows I'm watching are pre-empted or in reruns.

That's what I do with the few shows I choose to watch, and it's what I did for the first five seasons of "24." Two years ago, though, I decided I wanted to experience the show the way other people were; it is, after all, a water-cooler show. So I watched Season Six and saw Valencia get nuked, saw Jack's dad kill his brother and in the season climax, saw Jack battle his dad.

Then came the writers' strike and there was no "24" in 2008. Just another bad occurrence in a pretty bad year for me -- my dad died, I lost my job, we rented out our house and my 25-year fantasy baseball league gave up the ghost.

I did gain a granddaughter, which more than balanced out the rest. Except for "24." I missed "24" and Jack Bauer.

But as of tonight, Jack is back and the world is safe. Sure, he tortures. Sure, he kills. But he's our torturer and killer, and he never messes with anyone who doesn't deserve it.

So there were two hours tonight and two tomorrow night and then we'll settle in for 20 weeks of one hour at a time.

I'm stoked.

Jury service was very frustrating

I recently completed jury service that wound up lasting for at least part of five different weeks; I was a sworn juror in a murder trial that involved one dead body, two defendants, two different Los Angeles gangs and a drive-by shooting.

Nobody got convicted, even though I could give you good odds that both men were guilty.

All that happened was that I got to see a lot of the frustrations police and prosecutors must have serving as the thin line between us and total anarchy.

There are a lot of crimes -- murders even -- that are never charged and never come to trial. Without circumstancial evidence or eyewitnesses, there's simply no way to convict a defendant.

In our trial, two members of one gang -- the shooter and the driver -- were on trial for killing one member of a rival gang and wounding two others. One of the two who had been wounded was an eyewitness to the shooting, which took the life of his closest friend.

He had identified the two men in a police interrogation and in the preliminary hearing in February. But by the time of our trial, he was starting to feel the pressure to stop being a "snitch." He recanted his testimony, saying that he had lied earlier.

This was serious business. Snitches get killed and so do their families, so our witness actually had shown a great deal of courage earlier and just couldn't sustain it.

We were asked to believe he had told the truth earlier and was lying now, and there were too many people of the jury who just couldn't make that leap of faith. It didn't help that the young man who basically appointed himself our jury foreman was as close to a bleeding heart as you see these days.

We acquitted the driver and hung 11-1 for acquittal on the alleged shooter.

Our foreman was practically weeping. He told us he was "heartbroken" that we couldn't agree on an acquittal for the other young man, and that he might have to spend more time in jail if the district attorney chose to try the case again.

I felt like suggesting he get a testosterone shot, but I didn't.

When several of us -- not including our foreboy -- talked with the DA after the verdicts were announced, she disabused us of any notion that these were good guys wrongly accused. Both of them were already serving time on other violations, and the driver had actually done time for a murder he had committed as a juvenile.

I asked her why she had brought the case, given such a small hope of victory.

"It's my job," she said. "I feel like I owe it to the people in the community who will come forward to try the case."

I wasn't the holdout. I didn't see any point in it, but in retrospect I wish I had held out on both men. Not that it would have made any difference, but if folks are going to make the Sisyphean attempt to push the boulder up the hill, the more help they get the better.

Time to consider a new model for America's newspapers

"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."
--Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart. 1799

Was freedom of the press ever intended to be only for the men -- or women -- who own the presses?

That's the way we look at it now, when "press" has been extended to mean "media," and the constitutional protection given to newspapers has been claimed by radio, television and Internet outlets.

It's like the old joke about the Golden Rule, that he who has the gold makes the rules. The ownership of our newspapers has gone from people who love journalism, people who bleed ink, to people who care for little more than the balance sheet.

Thousands of journalism jobs were cut across the country last year not because the companies that owned them were in trouble, or because they were failing to show a profit. Oh, sure, some exceptions prove the rule. But the Rupert Murdochs, the Sam Zells and the Dean Singletons cut, combine and consolidate because they need outrageously high profit margins to handle the massive amounts of debt they took on to expand their companies.

When I was working in Ontario, Calif., in the mid 1990s, something our publisher said always used to annoy me. Mike Ferguson managed the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin for Donrey Media, and he always used to tell us that the Associated Press could cover the Los Angeles Dodgers for us, but only we could cover Ontario High School.

It annoyed me because he was right, and because it meant I didn't get to cover the Dodgers anymore. Up until Media News and Dean Singleton acquired our paper in 1999, we did a bang-up job of covering our local communities. You could get world, national, state and regional news from a lot of sources, but if you wanted to know what was happening in our cities, you had to read the Daily Bulletin.

That's why local newspapers mattered, and why they still matter. There are three cities with population of more than 150,000 in the Bulletin's circulation area, and no one covered them like we did. We had the resources and we cared enough to do the job well.

The Ontario City Council might try to deceive citizens, but we didn't let them get away for it for long. The Chino Valley school board might be a mess, but we made sure the people it served were well aware of it.

We made money, too. I can't deny that the economy was different, but I never understood why a business that made a lot of money during good times shouldn't take some of that money and use it to get through the bad times. You can do that if you're part of a small group, or if you're owned by a family that cares about the news.

You can't do it if you're part of a big corporation with stockholders and debt service. Every quarter has to stand on its own, because Wall Street and the investment banks are always watching.

So Dean Singleton buys papers and then immediately starts looking for ways to cut costs and improve profits. Our newsroom lost 30 percent of its staffing the first year, and that was only the beginning. After that, all sorts of coverages started getting combined, first with the San Bernardino Sun and then with the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Our business section, which was basically a page, went from covering an area from San Dimas in the west to Fontana in the east to one that eventually stretched all the way east to Barstow and up into the Victor Valley. That made it nearly impossible to do something that had been our bread and butter, writing stories about local small businesses.

When Singleton bought the two papers, both the Sun and the Bulletin had a business editor and a business reporter. Four people. By 2007, one person was doing the work those four did eight years earlier.

You can't cover the news that way. All you can do is juggle coverages, eliminating some and adding others and hoping folks won't notice. So we started missing city council meetings, and instead did things like wasting an entire day for a reporter and a photographer trying to catch Lindsay Lohan doing her community service in Pomona.

But there's the balance sheet, and the bean counters will tell you that's all the coverage we can afford. Classified advertising has all but vanished and display advertisers have cut way back and might never return.

No question. It's hard times, but I keep coming back to Jefferson. Remember that he said given the choice between newspapers and government, he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.

We shine the light.

We expose the wrongdoers.

That's our mission. Imagine Watergate without the Washington Post, or with a Washington Post so concerned about its balance sheet that it didn't have the manpower to go after such a longshot of a story.

Yes, newspapers in the current model are in big trouble. But why do we think the current model is the only way to go? Why not accept the possibility that maybe an industry with a constitutional protection ought to be something different? Why not take the profit motive out of it and make newspapers not-for-profit organizations?

It's worth considering.

Otherwise all we're going to see are more and more cuts, less and less coverage and fewer and fewer readers.

What happens if we can't trust anyone?

A very rich, very well-respected man killed himself today, another of the victims in Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme that has victimized some of the wealthiest, most influential people in the world.

Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, whose family name is among those listed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, apparently opened his veins with a box cutter and took sleeping pills in his office. He didn't leave a note, but the word is that his investment decisions that put his clients into Madoff's scheme will result in a 10-figure loss.

I don't know why he killed himself, whether it was because he was ruined financially and would no longer be rich or that he felt a sense of dishonor over what his decisions had cost his clients, among whom are Liliane Bettencourt, the world's wealthiest woman.

One of the hardest hit investors in Madoff's scheme is hedge fund Fairfield Greenwich Group, which reportedly lost $7.5 billion. FGG is being sued for failing to protect its investors.

Now $50 billion seems like a lot of money, and I'm sure that if you or I squandered $50 billion, we probably would lose sleep over it. But in the overall scheme of things -- mostly meaning numbers so large they're beyond our comprehension -- it's a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Really. A recent study by Oliver Wyman, the management-consulting firm that’s part of Marsh & McLennan, total wealth held by the world’s financial millionaires is $50 trillion.

That's right, with a "t," and those are just the millionaires. So even if $50 billion with a "b" has vanished from their accounts, that's one-tenth of one percent of their wealth. It means that of every million these guys have, they lost $1,000.

Of course that's ridiculous. A lot of really rich people didn't have any money invested with Madoff, so a lot of people who couldn't afford to lose money probably lost some through their 401(k) accounts or other investments.

That's not the biggest problem here, though.

The biggest problem is that the last 30 years of Reagans, Bushes and Clintons have cost us so much of our regulatory safety net that an awful lot of Americans have to be wondering where -- if anywhere -- they can put their money and feel safe about it.

I was invested relatively conservatively in my 401(k), but I've lost almost a third of its value this year. And that's with a reputable company.

Our economy is tanking, but half the stories about the money the Bush Administration is using to bail out the financial sector are about how much of it is going to year-end bonuses and other perks for executives. There's little or no federal oversight of the bailout; Bush has so hollowed out the federal government that it barely works anymore.

I don't know what's going to happen if people completely lose faith, if they start putting their money into their mattresses instead of their retirement accounts. There really is still a chance that our entire economy could implode.

I'll tell you what would really hurt. If Madoff winds up with a short sentence in some country-club jail and still gets to keep some of the money he stole, we are going to see riots in the streets.

Too bad he didn't have the decency to kill himself.

It's looking like a devilish future

"What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing.

"He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance ... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen."

-- AARON ALTMAN, "Broadcast News," 1987


A report out of Denver says that Dean Singleton, who owns the Denver Post, is taking advantage of the woes of the competing Rocky Mountain News to tell his unions that he needs to cut $20 million in operating expenses to remain competitive.

Here's what it means:

Within the next 2-3 years, Denver may just become the first major American city without a metropolitan daily newspaper.

The Rocky has been losing money for a long time and may not survive. Many newspaper owners would be happy to lose their competition, but that isn't enough for Singleton. He's using the weakness of his competitor to go after his own employees.

I was one of those employees for more than eight years at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and I saw Singleton and his minions cut our staff from one that was doing an outstanding job covering its own area as well as reaching out to do important projects to one that almost disappeared as a force in its coverage area.

In 1999, we had two columnists, excellent Hollywood coverage and a strong sports department as well as top-flight local coverage. Our owner, Donrey Media, wasn't known for paying well, but we still managed to have a good, experienced staff.

Within five years, our staff had been cut by half and we were sharing coverages with the San Bernardino Sun, which previously had been our most bitter competitor. This is vintage Singleton. He combines all his papers in a region to save money. That means seven or eight papers in Los Angeles all use the same reporter to cover the Dodgers, or the Lakers, or USC football.

It also means less regional, national and international coverage, with the Associated Press picking up most of the slack.

It means less talk about getting the story or covering the news and more about "servicing our customers."

In Southern California, Singleton's people just announced that six different newspapers -- the Sun, the Daily Bulletin, the Redlands Daily Facts, the Whittier News, the Pasadena Star-News and the San Gabriel Valley Tribune -- are going to share a copy desk at San Gabriel.

It's "more efficient," which of course means fewer copy editors doing more work, and it will certainly mean editors who may never even have visited Redlands or San Bernardino editing stories about those cities.

Lower standards, bit by bit.

Flash over substance.

Several years ago, Singleton's minion who is in charge of all those papers gave us a speech about why the railroads vanished. They thought they were in the railroad business, when they were really in the transportation business.

He said we needed to be aware that we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the information business.

So if newspapers disappear in favor of Blackberries, laptop computers or PDAs, it's really no big deal as long as the folks who own the newspapers can still make money off them.

Sound like someone has been taking lessons from the Devil?

It isn't about covering the news, or holding out for the truth, or forcing government to be responsive to its citizens.

Nope, it's about keeping that revenue stream coming.

My old friend and editorial cartoonist Gordon Campbell says the current media is vanishing and the future will all be about "citizen journalists" blogging and posting the news on the Web.

God help us. How will anyone ever be able to tell the difference between truth and lies, gold and pyrite, silk and straw? Without responsibility for what they publish, folks can put anything out there and half the people in the country will believe it.

"Rush Limbaugh sodomized by amorous rhino"

I posted that in a satirical piece a couple of weeks ago, making very clear that it had never happened. But I would be willing to bet I could go almost that far with an outrageous lie and plenty of folks would believe me.

I've always wondered why newspapers are run for profit anyway. Why shouldn't they be not-for-profit, semi-public enterprises dedicated to the truth above and beyond the balance sheet?

Riddle me this: What other for-profit business has Constitutional protections?

If newspapers are going to survive in this country -- heck, maybe if telling truth to power is going to survive -- we need to get rid of the Singletons and force newspapers to be run for some reason other than lining people's pockets.

It isn't too late, but it's getting there.

Immigrant shows us best of being American

Most of us can only dream of handling tragedy with as much grace as Dong Yun Yoon, the San Diego man who lost his entire family when an out-of-control F/A-18D Hornet fighter on a training mission crashed into his home Monday.

The plane crashed after the pilot ejected to save his own life, but the South Korean immigrant's words for the Marine flier were only kind.

"I heard the pilot is safe. Please pray for him not to suffer from this accident. I know he is one of our treasures for our country. I don't blame him. I don't have any hard feelings. I know he did everything he could."

Actually, he blamed himself and told the press of his father-in-law, who was on the way from Korea to grieve for his lost wife, his daughter and his granddaughters.

"I don't know what to tell him. I don't know how he'll ever forgive me."



There has been a lot of talk this year about greatness, and millions of Americans believe that we have elected a great man to be our next president. I believe that's yet to be seen, although I like Barack Obama and have high hopes for his presidency.

But there is one thing I do know.

Dong Yun Yoon is a great man.

A great American.

Amazing baby has flown the coop

Our three weeks with my lovely granddaughter Madison Kastner, aka the Amazing Baby, ended Saturday when her parents took her north to Seattle for three weeks with the other grandparents.

They'll be there through Christmas before returning home to Beijing in time for Maddie's first New Years Eve.

While they were here, my mother and my brother came out for the baby's baptism, and one picture was taken of baby, mother Pauline, grandmother Nicole and great-grandmother Yvonne. I haven't got that picture readily available, but here's one that cuts out the middle two generations and shows Maddie with her great-grandmother.

It's sad to realize we won't see the Amazing Baby till next summer, but we're happy to have had this time with her.

Au revoir, Madison.