A late 1980s WORT show (still running), A Public Affair, was recalled in Salon's column yesterday by Glenn Greenwald.
Jeff Hansen, the former host of A Public Affair in the 1980s, interviewed an array of brilliant guests, packing intelligence and insight into a one-hour radio, phone-in format.
A frequent guest of Hansen's was Noam Chomsky.
In one memorable show, Hansen interviewed media talking head Jeff Greenfield, (a UW-Madison alum and former ABC News Nightline reporter) and provoked Greenfield to candidly defend corporate broadcast news' dumbed-dumb editorial product on the basis of "concision".
Concision is the constraint of news guests' analysis that is fit in between commercials.
In one show after Hansen played his Greenfield interview on air to Chomsky, Chomsky ripped the concision imperative that Greenfield allowed and pointed to the results plain to any TV news viewer.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald, a first-rate legal-political columnist, referred to the WORT interview in this week's column after Greenwald's recent spate of appearances on broadcast TV news shows. Greenwald bemoaned the concision constraint.
Check out the Greenwald column and the video below. Writes Greenwald:
... (S)ee this definitive 3-minute explanation from Noam Chomsky on precisely how mainstream television's demand for 'concision' -- which shapes how the overwhelming majority of Americans receive their 'news' -- precludes any meaningful examination or challenging of prevailing political orthodoxies ... .Below is an excerpt from the video, "Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent," in which Chomsky talks about concision and the Hansen interview with Greenfield.
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