On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a partridge. In a pear tree. Really. This was a few years back, when we were still courting. But I'm reminded of her generosity and creativity every year about this time...

2011

Nov

FIGHTING FOR PBS'S 'FIGHT OF THE WEEK' By Noel Holston

If it please the court, I'd like to advocate on behalf of The Advocates. It's a series whose time has come. Again. The Advocates was a weekly public-TV presentation from 1969 through 1974, revived as a bi-weekly program for most of 1978-79...while the fisticuffs were all verbal, it could pack a wallop. Many an intellectual hotshot left the arena with his or her ego bruised...

2011

Nov

AN ARTISTIC CHAIN REACTION: MUSIC BY 'OZ'-MOSIS By Noel Holston

Art is a never-ending seduction. One thing leads to another. And another and another. Examples of art begetting art are innumerable, from Chagall's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream to the W.H. Auden poem inspired by Breughel's Fall of Icarus...and there is perhaps no better example of this artistic chain reaction than the immortal 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, which will have its umpteenth annual showings this weekend on TBS...

2011

Sep

IS THIS A $16 MUFFIN? (NO.) By Noel Holston

Speaking at an RTDNA conference the other day, Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News, decried the lack of investigative reporting by television news operations these days. "I think a lot of people shy away from it because it's expensive and it's difficult and it takes a lot of time...We succeed at 60 Minutes by doing it and by caring about it and by working hard to make it as interesting as we can, because there is a place for it and I think there's a hunger for it out there..."

2011

May

PEABODY AWARDS AT 70: 'OSCAR WRAPPED IN AN EMMY INSIDE A PULITZER' By Noel Holston

I'll never forget the time George Foster Peabody made Jon Stewart cry. Well, in manner of speaking. It was back in May 2006. Mr. Peabody, by then, had been gone from this mortal coil about 68 years. Stewart, the incorrigibly irreverent host of The Daily Show, was on stage at the Waldorf-Astoria's grand ballroom, overseeing the presentation of the awards that bear the late, great philanthropist's name...

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