Maggie Shnayerson

Lara Logan, “Drones: America’s New Air Force”

Many, many times, as it turns out! Let’s count, for kicks. From tonight’s ’60 Minutes’ update of Logan’s May 10 story on pilotless drones:

LOGAN (narration): “Colonel Chris Chambliss was one of the top F-16 fighter pilots in the Air Force, a member of the legendary Thunderbirds. Now the unit he commands has no jets—just pilotless planes known as the Reaper and the Predator.”

Did she just say that his unit had no jets? One.

LT. COL CHRIS GOUGH: “I’ve never been more engaged in a conflict in my life.”
LOGAN (narration): “And he’s never been safer. Lt. Col. Gough sits half a world away from the war zone.”

Ouch. Two.

COL. CHRIS CHAMBLISS: “In battle, in combat, in the fog and friction of war, there are always gonna be times that your judgment isn’t with hindsight, you can see things with more clarity.”
LOGAN: “But you’re not there in the fog and friction of war. You’re sitting here in your cockpit in Nevada.”

Anyone else feeling kind of uncomfortable? Three.

CHAMBLISS: “Once you pull the cockpit out of the airplane, then whether you are 50 miles away from the airplane or 5,000 miles away, it really doesn’t matter anymore.”

LOGAN: “Do you think that distance makes it—it’s kind of like a video game and not like real life?”

Seriously, the woman just can’t help herself. Innuendo not intended; Pareene nailed it on the whole Baghdad hanky-panky front.

“Media workers have the gifts of adaptability and organization,” says Allison Hemming, founder of the Hired Guns talent agency (thehiredguns.com) and author of Work It! How to Get Ahead, Save Your Ass and Land a Job in Any Economy. “This makes them ideal project managers.”

[TimeOutNY's Guide To Changing Your Job]

Cannot take my EYES off of David Frost hammering nail after nail in the coffin of Richard Nixon’s coffin on WLIW right now.

MYSQL errors be damned. I’m fixing my blog NOW.

“Errol Flynn died on a seventy-foot yacht with a seventeen-year-old girl. Walter’s always wanted to go that way, but he’s going to settle for a seventeen-footer and a seventy-year-old.”
—Mrs. Walter Cronkite

“I was eight, watching him on black and white television every night in Elmira, NY. In our home, my mother refused to serve dinner until the CBS Evening News was over. And I announced my intention to my family, apparently at the age of eight to my family, that he was the man I wanted to be and this was the profession I wanted and I’ve lived such a charmed life that I got the chance to explain that to Walter and tell him that and make it clear and just—was able to breathe the air he exhaled.”

—Brian Williams, recipient of The 2009 Walter Cronkite Award, presented each fall.

inothernews:

CBS News to Air Tribute to Walter Cronkite on Sunday Evening

In one respect, this makes sense: Sunday evenings have a higher viewership than Friday or Saturday evenings.  But, still. Something, ANYTHING tonight would have been the right thing to do.