Max Sawicky wrote:
> I used to watch Letterman all the time but stopped. The show went down a
> lot in the past five years. He was more liberal back then too.
This concern about the *change* Letterman represents seems odd to me -- like a close comparison of the odors of differing varieties of excrement. This leads to a gross overestimation of the TV and radio of the past. Doug went into this sort of thing in detail in his fight on PEN-L on that press critic (from the Nation I believe) who was so concerned about centralization of media power and how it was destroying something that never existed in the first place.
Was not Fred Allen the last (and also the first?) radio/tv personality who in any serious way critiqued the medium. At the time I did him an injustice by assuming that his fights with network VPs were more or less staged. My wife has been reading a history of radio that makes it clear the fight was very real.
Nostalgia usually is as misleading as utopianism. The shit used to be blacker and richer.
Carrol