Bob Woodruff seriously injured

I heard that on the news.

It sounds like the injuries are pretty severe.

I wish him ALL the best in his recovery.

---

When will the madness end?

---

I heard about this on the news this morning. It's terrible. I wish him, his cameraman, and their families all the best.

---

That is sad, Dollypop, and I wish him a speedy recovery, but would you have posted his pictures or even start this thread if he were on the ugly side? I doubt it. I find the fact fact you even posted one picture, let alone THREE (as if to say "This is SOOOO sad because he is SOOOOOO cute!!") just a tad distasteful.

"Another Pretty Blonde White Girl Missing"

---

Applause and a virtual online croissant for being honest, DP.

Honesty is the new Brokeback Mountain here on BWW.

Speaking of "the tragedy" of David Bloom. I liked the good looking Bloom when he hosted Weekend Today because he was sort of a bumbling boob. The "tragedy" of his death however didn't hit me. The only tragedies I saw involved a press corps bound and gagged by signing up to be "embedded" with squadrons, rendering them cheerleaders for rather than analysts of the costly and apparently endless quagmire the US finds itself in in Iraq. The hyper-ambitious Bloom had his eyes fixed so firmly on Tom Brokaw's job the only thing missing in his reports were pom-poms, a megaphone and a USA #1 foam rubber finger.

By his own admission he neglected his wife and children in the pursuit of his end goal. Intellectually, I can see it is sad. But like Morales and Mr. Karp, I felt nothing.

---

I wasn't a big Bloom fan because he'd taken over for Jack Ford on the Weekend TODAY show. Ford (another good looking guy!) was perfectly suited to the TODAY show. He brought very special qualities to the job and made the weekend show work. Then he got big-headed, left the job and failed at at least two other on-air positions. Had he stayed with the TODAY gig, he might have been an out6standing part of television journalism. Who knows what he's doing today?

Bloom didn't fill Ford's shoes at all. He seemed to be inept at the job. Still, his death upset me.

---

---

Updated On: 1/29/06 at 01:20 PM

Sorry, Sing, I missed your post before. There isn't much journalism left anywhere, I agree.

---

You got it. Of course there's no budget for news anymore. People don't read newspapers. All the majority of the public cares about is celebrity gossip. So the "news" programs give them that.

It really has become a case of "celebrity" being the opiate of the masses. I was someplace that had one of the myriad celebrity gossip shows on the television, there are so many now, it's hard to believe that Entertainment Tonight was once the only such show. Anyway, maybe it was the Insider or Access Hollywood or one of the others. And it was post-Golden Globes and they did a feature on "how to get yourself ready for the red carpet!" treating the viewer as if there was actually a chance in hell that they would be soon walking down the red carpet at an awards show and that they were in desperate need of tips like "Keep your touch up make-up handy!"

I found the whole thing incredibly depressing.

And believe me, this is part and parcel of a culture that spotlights fake authors telling made up stories of hideous abuses that never happened.

---

Updated On: 1/29/06 at 03:02 PM

The concentrated ownership by megacorportations doesn't bode well for that happening any time soon, Plum. Coming up next, Angelina goes baby shopping with Brad, find out what Jennifer's friends say the "Rumor Has It" star did to retaliate!

---

Right, I was thinking the same thing, Namo, and I know you seriously mistrust the Internet, but don't you think that it could somehow act as a counterforce to that? It's pretty much the antithesis of concentrated ownership, and mainstream journalists have been writing enough snippy columns about weblogs that you know they feel threatened.

Plum, on the one hand I suppose the "promise" of the internet is the more democratic nature of information sharing. On the other (here's where I might seem to contradict myself and/or sound like a ginormous snob) just because one CAN have a blog probably doesn't mean that one SHOULD have a blog. The more noise there is, the more it just becomes a numbing drone. What I'd LOVE to see is the alleged 24 hour news sources on TV not all cover the same three non-stories ad nauseum per shift. I mean, is that asking too much?

And then, given the chilling effect such things as the demand by the Bush administration for Google's search histories can have on people's sense of "freedom," I do wonder how even something as amorphous as the internet can be clamped down upon.

---