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What was once just a wanted poster on the post office wall has been recently revamped into a 21st century, multimedia dragnet – the FBI’s Most Wanted list. G-man John Miller explains the history, efficacy and enduring appeal of being wanted.
Does anyone know what the song was that followed this piece? I really dug it.
Two magic words turned up in your piece with John Miller, a reporter-turned-official whose work has always had an authoritative tone. AP (Associated Press) and UPI (United Press International), with the added bonus of Miller’s phrase, “on the wire”, all recall a time of yore when Clear Channel could not claim that jammed phone lines prevented warning residents of Minot of a tornado.
Another lost artifact that tied all these words together was the teletype machine, once the core of any broadcast news operation, clicking out AP’s or UPI’s version of reality. Back in the ‘80s, I sat through a meeting at the Yale radio station with WNYC’s senior reporter while our AP machine belted out a ten-bell alert (nuclear attack), over and over, falsely it so happened.
A student at my college served as the overnight engineer for the automated WBCN, (just as the so-called “on-air” personnel Clear Channel claimed it had really, no doubt, were) right before it adopted the progressive rock format invented at WYBC in the ‘60s, and he said he mostly slept. Be assured a ten-bell alert would have woken him up.
Deregulation helped hasten the concentration of media ownership, but it also undermined an independent emergency communication system the lack of which we are still suffering. In those days of yore, broadcasters were tied together also by the government’s oversight of their public service record’s, another fossil like the ten most wanted.
Chris, Again with the Minot myth...
This is my second post. Hopefully it will make it through the sensors this time. I left out the Clinton reference that seemed to displease the powers that be.
Just because someone claims something is a myth doesn't make it so. The documentation cited supporting that claim was from a company flak, admitting the result (an unwarned of tornado) but disputing culpability.
Legendary and emblematic Minot may be, but the basic fact that the public there was ill-served by Clear Channel and the entire deregulation process begun during the Reagan years is based upon evidence. Minot was not a myth.
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