Media Matters

     President Trump's potent insult to  Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings about his hometown of Baltimore left an indelible mark on this critic. Although I  was born and raised in Baltimore, I had not been there for decades. And yet it's a place I will never forget, just as the Baltimore residents will never forget Trump's statement that it was a rat-infested city not fit for human beings. ( I wonder if he had read the relatively recent account  in the Baltimore Sun that a rat had been found in the iconic Lexington Market, America's oldest public market place, circa 1782 ). Name me a city in the U.S.A. where rodents have never been spotted. Or name me an urban center which does not have its share of  poverty-laden neighborhoods. Baltimore is no better or worse than most other cities of its kind.      Yet Baltimore is also different: where diversity and uniqueness give Baltimore a fullness of life overflowing with sights, sou...

     Last week's second 2020 Democratic Debates brought up a lot of issues as usual, but keep coming back to  an important consideration: which candidate seems the most electable. Or somewhat electable. Or even a little electable. Those are hard questions to answer, because the election is so far away and things change. One situation may alter the election outcome a week before the vote. It's not impossible.      Yet there are some things that may never change a candidate's electability. This critic learned decades ago as a student in Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson's class that people vote for a President based on the individual's  knowledge, trustworthiness and charisma. And what is the one characteristic that's the most important? CHARISMA. ( Jamieson is now Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.)      Those three traits still hold true as far as many people are concerned. Meaning: charisma is still the most salient a...

     Robert Mueller is in the news again when he testified before Congress this Wednesday. Not that he was ever out of the news. But the real star of the show has always been The Mueller Report itself. And how to interpret it.     Three kinds of formats attempted to provide information about The Report, using different media and purposes. Consider MSNBC'S TV documentary," What You need to Know,"  on Sunday, July 21. Such exposure was a good idea. After all, how many people will ever read the original material and therefore really understand what it says or seems to say? But it was easy to lose interest in the documentary because it contained material we've seen many times on MSNBC's  cable news programs.      The Mueller Report took another form in Mueller's live TV testimony before the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday, July 24.  It was more captivating then the documentary, because it was live, but ...