Wreckage Found, Morley Safer Dead at 84
Friday, May 20, 2016
Vol. 5, No. 141
EgyptAir: The Egyptian military says it has found debris and personal belongings of passengers from the EgyptAir flight lost in the Mediterranean. So far there’s only speculation about what brought down the passenger jet with 66 people on board.
It’s the second air disaster for Egypt in a year. The Islamic State claimed they planted a bomb that took down a Russian tourist jet over the Sinai desert last November.
Egyptian authorities say yesterday’s crash may have been caused by an act of terrorism, but it is too early for them to know.
Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were among the first to suggest terrorism. Trump tweeted, “Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris,” and Clinton said on CNN, “It does appear it was an act of terrorism.”
They don’t know either.
**All About Donald**
Poll-itics: The national political gabfest has turned to the latest Fox News poll that has Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by three percentage points in a head-to-head election. The Rasmussen poll, which had Mitt Romney winning four years ago, puts Trump up by five.
The Real Clear Politics Average of six major polls, including Fox and Rasmussen, has Clinton leading by 3.3 percent.
She Said: Hillary Clinton described Donald Trump as “divisive and dangerous” and “unmoored” in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. She went on, “I know how hard this job is, and I know that we need steadiness as well as strength and smarts in it, and I have concluded he is not qualified to be president of the United States.”
Clinton is struggling with what to say to take back the headlines from Trump. She seems to know she would lose a battle of insults but her policy speeches can put a cup of coffee to sleep. Julie Pace writes for the Associated Press that as opposed to Trump, “The former secretary of state, by contrast, throws a policy-filled kitchen sink at voters.”
End of Times: Matt Taibbi muses in Rolling Stone about the fracturing of the Republican Party: “If this isn’t the end for the Republican Party, it’ll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word “American” by insisting they were the only real ones.”
___
The Obit Page: Morley Safer, a reporter whose dispatches from Vietnam for CBS News changed American views and the course of the war, and who was a pillar of 60 Minutes since 1970, died yesterday in New York at age 84.
Safer had been ill for months. His retirement last week and a retrospective documentary had been planned since January.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of a single story Safer filed from Vietnam when American Marines burned a village that had been occupied and abandoned by the Viet Cong. It revealed the power of television news. Safer said in his report, “This is what the war in Vietnam is all about. The Viet Cong were long gone. The action wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine and netted four old men as prisoners. Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature. To a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”
Safer was at heart a writer who prospered at a time when television news valued words over good looks and on screen performance. On 60 Minutes, Safer became the urbane and gently bemused observer of everything from Tupperware parties, to the game of croquet, and the domestic diva Martha Stewart. He caused an uproar in the world of art when he described much of modern art as “worthless junk” destined for “the trash heap of art history.” Safer was an artist himself, who painted pictures of the interior of countless hotel rooms he stayed in all over the world.
He said of his ability to blend words with pictures, “It’s not literature, but it can be very classy journalism.”
-30-
Leave a Reply