In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote, “he who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” He might have added, he who controls the news, controls the present. In Russia, Vladimir Putin controls...

photo courtesy Gage Skidmore   In August, 2016, I wrote an article for The Huffington Post entitled Donald Trump Is Going To Be Elected. As soon as I saw Trump, I knew he was going to be elected because...

Ayn Rand – image courtesy Wiki Commons  OK, let’s be honest. Most documentaries, and in fact, most non-fiction factual content (and here I am excluding reality TV shows) are pretty unwatchable. Yes, the content is both intelligent and ‘important’,...

Harlem, 1943 courtesy Wikicommons In the 1990’s, I was part of a very interesting experiment in local news called Harlem Live. The idea was rather simple. We gave video cameras to teenagers who lived in Harlem. We taught them...

As my friend, Boyah Farrah, explained to me, “Somalia has it rough.” Boyah is the author of the new and quite popular book, America Made Me A Black Man  (Simon & Schuster 2022). The reason I know Boyah is...

The Family of Man exhibition at The MoMA – 1955 The arrival of the iPhone as a video camera has caused a great deal of discussion and no small amount of dissent amongst videographers, particularly in the news business. News...

Flying Ace Roland Garros Crosses The Mediterranean in only 8 hours!   Last week, NASA finally launched its Artemis rocket headed for the moon. This mission was unmanned, but if all goes according to plan, NASA expects to put...

Photo courtesy Kslewellen via Wiki Commons   I have recently begun to pay attention to Twitter. For years, I ignored it, putting most of my efforts into Facebook, but Alicia Brooks, my literary agent strongly suggested that I become a...

In the process of writing my new book, THE RISE OF THE MEDIAVERSE, I have been reading Susan Sontag’s excellent tome, On Photography. It’s an analysis of the impact of the invention of photography on society, but what Sontag...

Hooray for Hollywood! The story of my first almost motion picture with a major studio: In 1990, I was working on my first TV station in the United States, Time/Warner’s NY1. Instead of using conventional crews, the whole 24-hour...