“He didn’t try to do a caricature or an impression,” Dan Rather told me. “He just tried to capture some of the essence of the person.” Rather was sharing his thoughts about Robert Redford’s performance in the role of Rather in the movie Truth...

2013

May

'FRONTLINE' FEATURES FILMMAKER'S HOLOCAUST MEMORIES By Eric Mink

There’s almost a sense of completion to Marian Marzynski's new film, Never Forget to Lie, as if he might feel that time will preclude another piece of work...

2011

Sep

WHY I WON'T BE WATCHING 9/11 10TH ANNIVERSARY COVERAGE By Eric Mink

Early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, life stirred in the television department at the New York Daily News, pretty much as it had every workday since Dave Bianculli and I had become colleagues more than eight years earlier. As we soon learned, every workday after that would be different from those that had come before...

2011

Jul

OWN 'SERVING LIFE': TRACING A PATH FROM SENSELESS VIOLENCE TO SENSITIVE TENDERNESS By Eric Mink

Tap into any online news feed at any time of the day or night. Catch any television newscast or radio news summary. Scan the headlines of any newspaper. Somewhere therein, you will find evidence of human beings assaulting other human beings with such casual cruelty and violence that your brain can't even process it...

2011

Jul

HBO REVIVES 'FLOOD' OF MEMORIES By Eric Mink

Curt Flood started in center field for the St. Louis Cardinals of my childhood and adolescence. He was an alcoholic. He abandoned his family. He ran away from a team in the middle of a season and never came back...He helped the Cardinals win World Series titles in 1964 and 1967, but in the '68 Series, he missed a fly ball in the seventh inning of the seventh game that arguably made the Detroit Tigers that year's champions.

2011

Jun

DOES KEITH OLBERMANN MATTER? AND HOW SHOULD HIS SUCCESS BE MEASURED? By Eric Mink

If there's a sharper, more passionate writer than Keith Olbermann working in television news today -- someone who wields the raw power of nouns and verbs better than he does -- I don't know who it is. Olbermann, whose second incarnation of Countdown with Keith Olbermann premiered June 20 on Current TV, has something else, too...

2010

Aug

"DEADLINE -- U.S.A.," AN OLD MOVIE WITH A STILL-TIMELY MESSAGE By Eric Mink

Journalism wallows in one existential crisis after another. Take your pick: Internet technology is killing the news profession; the Great Recession is suffocating a business model already on life support; concentration of ownership is destroying media's vital competitive drive...How startling, then, to discover not only a measure of reassurance about all this, but also some genuine wisdom, in a 58-year-old Hollywood movie...

2010

Jul

GUEST BLOG #107: ERIC MINK REMEMBERS, AND OFFERS AN APPRECIATION OF, VETERAN NEWSMAN DANIEL SCHORR By Eric Mink

There's a great Yiddish word for Dan Schorr: noodge. Either a noun or a verb depending on context, the word describes both a kind of conduct and the kind of person who engages in the conduct. The most apt definition I found for "to noodge" is "to annoy with persistent complaining, asking, urging, etc." You can quibble about style, but I'd argue that great reporters have a lot of noodge in them...

2010

Jun

GUEST BLOG #100: TVWW WELCOMES ITS NEWEST CONTRIBUTOR, ERIC MINK, WHO ASSESSES THE MEDIA FLAP OVER THE MCCHRYSTAL STORY By Eric Mink

[Bianculli here: Just in time for the relaunch, we're proudly adding yet another co-conspirator to TV WORTH WATCHING: Eric Mink, whom long-time New York Daily News readers will remember was my co-conspirator, and fellow TV critic, there as well. And for his first story for us, Eric offers his take on the reporting of, and reaction to, the Gen. Stanley McChrystal remarks...]

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Eric Mink

Eric Mink most recently was the op-ed editor and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He previously wrote about television and media for the Post-Dispatch and the New York Daily News. He now teaches film as an adjunct assistant professor at Webster University in St. Louis.

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