*As we know, those State of the Union addresses don’t draw as many viewers as they used to. This year President Barack Obama’s SOTU drew 31.7 million views, down about 5 percent from last year. His first one, in 2009, drew 52 million. It’s not necessarily a comment on the office-holder, but a reflection of viewer habits and how people get their news.
So, in an understandable effort to go where the viewers are, the president–who’s not averse to taking his message to late-night talk shows–even sat for some YouTube interviews. One, however, was with the buffoonish GloZell Green, whose fame claims are her signature green lipstick and a video showing her in a tub filled with cereal. Early on she referred to the First Lady as the president’s “first wife.” It didn’t get any better.
Lest this sound too naive or even Fox-like, President Obama’s ill-advised media sortie was truly beneath the dignity of his office. Embarrassingly poor form–even in the good name of going where the viewers are. In this case, the viewers of GloZell Green.
And let’s not forget, and many in the media inexplicably still do, that Obama sitting down for an online interview with GloZell Green is not the 2015 version of Richard Nixon going on “Laugh-In,” Jimmy Carter giving a Playboy interview or Bill Clinton doing the Arsenio Hall show. They were all CANDIDATES–not sitting presidents–when they strategically deviated from the daily newspaper, nightly news forums.
* By all accounts, the Dalí-Picasso exhibit, including works on loan from more than 20 museums and collectors worldwide, has been a smashing success at The Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Pete. The juxtapositions of the two artists are intriguing and alone worth the artistic pilgrimage.
Also on display: works of Dalí and Pablo Picasso before they became iconically associated with Surrealism and Cubism, respectively. Indeed, their formative years are also revealing.
* “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” “The Nat King Cole Show.” “Julia.” “Sanford & Son.” Racially, American prime time television definitely doesn’t look like it did a generation or two ago when tokenism was the standard.
In fact, according to an Associated Press analysis, in the fall 2014 season, ABC, NBC and Fox now have a higher percentage of (regular cast member) blacks in prime time than there is in the general population (13.2 percent). Obviously, it’s a lot more than “Black-ish.”