At a time when employers are increasingly looking for job applicants with relevant experience, the College's Career Development Center is increasingly looking for alumni who can provide internships to Union students.
Janet Mattis, assistant director of the center, says that more and more students are coming to the center earlier in their years at Union, looking for internships.
“There's no question that having relevant experience is more and more important both to employers and students,” she says. “And internships are not just a summer experience anymore, either. Many students work on internships over the six-week winter break, and many local companies are looking for part-time interns during the academic year.”
Mattis says that a number of alumni have already come forward with internships for Union students.
Rob Quish '83, president of Lowe Lintas, an advertising agency in New York City, hired four students last summer, and Robin Florio, the company's benefits and payroll supervisor, said the four were “exceptional, very well presented, a joy.” (Kristen Peterson '91, a senior planner at the agency, served as mentor for the internship program.)
One Lowe Lintas intern reports that her time at the agency was “challenging, a little scary, and more than I could have foreseen. There is so much thought, energy, and labor which supports the creation of an advertisement, and these have given me a new perspective.”
Another student said the internship helped her reshape her future goals. “My supervisor always asked me to go to status meetings, local photo shoots, or anything that she thought might enrich my experience here. She just wanted me to be exposed to as many things as possible, and I am so thankful for her guidance.”
Other alumni who helped set up internships recently include Ron Kinghorn '90, who works in the IT division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Patrick Haskell '94, who works for Credit Suisse First Boston.
More than 1,200 alumni are volunteers in the Union Career Advisory Network, and Mattis hopes that more alumni will come forward to help provide relevant internships. “We're especially eager to establish programs in such fields as advertising and marketing, the media, the arts, consulting, and Wall Street — but alumni in all fields can be very helpful,” Mattis says.
Alumni who would like to lend a hand can contact Mattis at the Career Development Center. Her e-mail address is mattisj@union.edu, and her telephone number is 518-388-6176.
At the College's opening convocation this September, President Roger Hull welcomed first-year students to “the most congenial surroundings for personal growth that our society provides.
“We are a community — a place where the aim of everyone is the respect for, and encouragement of, the best in each person,” the president said. “At times, your education will be a solitary business — working, for example late at night on a paper. Yet, for the most part, education here is a social activity — a community activity.”
The president said that the French philosopher Alexis deTocqueville provided an interesting perspective. To Tocqueville, the true genius of American democracy was revealed in the way Americans founded voluntary associations — churches and synagogues, orphanages and temperance societies, political associations and colleges — that harnessed American individualism for service to society.
“Unfortunately, many of these voluntary associations have lost some of their ability to rein in the individualistic impulse,” he said. “Politically, Americans too often are collections of narrow special interests with little tolerance for compromise and less allegiance to anything approaching a concern for the common good. All too often we split socially into competing ethnic, racial, and religious groupings; all too often we are economically a small group of 'haves' and a growing and increasingly disaffected group of 'have nots;' and all too often we specialize so intensely that we lose the ability to speak meaningfully to each other on key issues of the day.”
Colleges, especially liberal arts colleges with their long championing of the interrelatedness of knowledge, retain an important ability to restrain the forces that threaten to fling us apart, he said. “Our size and commitment to undergraduate education challenges faculty and students to seek ways to integrate the disparate scholarly disciplines into a coherent education. And, at their best, liberal arts colleges give students an experience of community — a community that builds character.”
He noted, however, that without respect for the views of others, there can be no community. Noting that civility sometimes suffers because of a fear of change, he said, “In our continuing efforts to improve and raise Union to its next level of excellence, we must change — substantially change — the social, residential, and academic character of our College. As we discuss change, I trust that the rule of civility will prevail and the level of our discourse will be raised while the volume of our voices will be lowered.”
He concluded, “We must continue our journey towards true community while continuing to celebrate the autonomy and individuality of each member of the student body, faculty, and staff. Alexis deTocqueville could not have wished for more, and we should not settle for less.”
Also at the opening convocation, Peter D. Heinegg, professor of English, received the Stillman Prize for excellence in teaching. Christina Sorum, dean of the faculty, quoted several student nominations, one of which read, “Professor Heinegg's classroom is one of intellectual engagement and excitement. It's like getting a drink from a fire hose.”
Pratikshya Bohra '03 received the Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence among first-year students in general education. Christopher D. Roblee '02 was honorable mention. Also honored were the 683 students who made the Dean's List in 1999-2000.
The first female president of Union's student body and the 1983 winner of the Bailey Cup, Ilene Landress is now a producer on the hit television show “The Sopranos.”
Ilene Landress '83 admits that it's hard to explain what she does for a living.
“My best line is that my whole life my mother said, 'Get off the phone and stop watching TV.' Guess what? Now they pay me to talk on the phone and watch TV.”
Landress is a producer of HBO's smash hit, “The Sopranos,” a drama about the Mafia, family, and human nature. With a middle-aged Mafioso on Prozac as the protagonist, this show is more than your typical mobster series, and critics have hailed the show as “just plain brilliant,” “innovative and entertaining,” “thrillingly good,” and “the classiest TV phenomenon in years.”
Overseeing budgets and sets, location scouting and production design, wardrobe and casting, Landress makes the show happen, using a lot of the people skills she learned at Union when she “majored in committees.” She is, in short, a “sheepherder” on the show. “I tell the actors that they are the sheep, and I am the sheepherder,” she says. “They don't particularly like this.”
Her fingerprints are everywhere. She works closely with the creators of the show, reads scripts, and figures out how to make their ideas a reality. She's very involved in casting and works with nearly every cast and crewmember — from the parking assistants to the biggest stars. “I can't say that I know every name, but I have contact with all of them,” she says. “I am the one who tries to keep it together and keep people happy.”
The Sopranos Family
What makes it a little more difficult to explain her job is the fact that the details depend on whether or not the production company is shooting the show. “The Sopranos” takes ten weeks for preproduction followed by twenty-four straight weeks of shooting. Once the cameras start, the crew shoots back-to-back episodes, breaking for ten hours between shooting days. “The first day of shooting on one episode is the first day of prep on the next episode,” she says. “It's like a treadmill. You never get to really enjoy the shooting because you are always prepping the next episode.”
The prep time before shooting involves hiring the crew, making deals, writing, and outlining the season. There are lots of meetings and scheduling — with production designers, location scouts, set builders, electricians — and Landress finds herself often peeking over the writers' shoulders, trying to determine where the show might go and what their needs might be.
“We are logistically challenged on 'The Sopranos,' ” she explains. The show's stages are in Long Island City at Silvercup Studios (usually there are two or three big sets for each season), but all exteriors are shot in New Jersey. So Landress spends a lot of time going back and forth between Queens and New Jersey.
“David (Chase, writer and creator of the show) is a real stickler for detail,” she says. “New Jersey is really one of the characters of the show. You can go out your back door in Queens and make believe you're in New Jersey, but David is really strict about not letting us do that. So if it says it is New Jersey, it really is New Jersey. At the beginning I used to try to convince him of places in Queens that could be New Jersey, but I learned I wasn't going to win that battle. You don't mess with success. It's worked, so you don't question it too much.”
Breaking into the business
Landress broke into film watching parking spots.
“I was interested in show business, but I never even took a film course at Union,” she says. After graduation, (she was a combined biology and psychology major), she earned a master's in nutrition from Columbia's School of Physicians and Surgeons. She then applied to medical school, but immediately deferred.
“I knew I either had a year to figure out how to get a job in the movie business or I was going to end up in medical school.” Within a few days, she had a job as a production assistant for Crocodile Dundee, watching parking spots and running errands. “I did what everybody did. I was very naive about the whole thing,” she says. She saw a company filming on the street, volunteered to work for free for a couple of days, and soon was hired.
Landress went on to work on “a bunch of movies no one would have heard of,” and then worked on the television series “The Equalizer” in 1986 and 1987, on the pilot of “Law and Order” in 1988, and on Stanley and Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert DeNiro. “I've worked with the biggest stars on the worst films they've ever made … that they'd most like to forget,” she says.
But as soon as she broke into the movie business, she was hooked. As Hanna Schygulla, star of The Marriage of Maria Braun, told her, “The movie business is like a disease.” “It's true,” says Landress. “You either get hooked on it and like it or you just say, 'this is ridiculous' and leave.” The twelve- to sixteen-hour days are tough, she says, but she loves it.
To gain more experience in movie production, she chose to specialize in accounting — even though she hadn't taken an accounting class. “Everybody in the movie business kept talking about the budget like it was brain surgery,” she says. “What you learn when you start working in accounting is that the budget is no big deal, but it's the big secret of movies and television. I figured that if I worked as an assistant accountant, I would find out where the secrets were.”
As an accountant, Landress worked on the film Quiz Show and then moved into production for the film The Perez Family in Florida, Up Close and Personal. In 1995, she was a production manager/associate producer on the pilot “Dear Diary,” which was produced by Dreamworks Television for ABC. Though it wasn't picked up by the network, “Dear Diary” did win an Academy Award as a short film. She continued at Dreamworks Television as a production executive on the television show “Spin City” during its first year.
Then came “The Sopranos.”
Landress had just finished working on “Spin City” when she received a call from HBO asking about her availability. Exhausted and headed to Europe for a vacation, she didn't send a resume. A few days later, HBO called back to say that it found an old resume. Finally, she agreed to look at a script. “I thought that it was going to be run-of-the-mill TV,” she says. “I just wasn't interested. But they sent me the script and I read the script for the pilot episode, and I thought, 'Oh my God, this is really good.'”
She flew to Los Angeles to meet with Chase and was offered the job.
When she took the position, the show had not yet been cast. With such a great script, there was pressure to cast it well. Casting is difficult in television, she explains, especially because you have to convince people to sign on for five or six years, and casting for “The Sopranos” was especially demanding — Chase wanted actors from the East Coat and “as Italian as possible.”
By August 1997, the show was cast, and HBO picked up the show in December 1997 (originally written for Twentieth Century Fox, “The Sopranos” was passed up by Fox and the other major networks before HBO took a chance). “It was a big commitment for HBO,” Landress says. “They hadn't done anything like this before. It was definitely a risk for them.”
But the risk quickly paid off, as “The Sopranos” became the most-talked-about show on television. “I knew that it was really good,” Landress says. “But something being really good and something being a smash hit almost never happens in television, because usually something really good gets homogenized and pasteurized. The beauty of HBO is that they hire filmmakers like David and let them do their thing.
“I knew that the writing was amazing, and I knew that we did a really good job casting it, but you never know if it is going to be accepted by people,” she continues. “Rumor goes that 'The Sopranos' initially tested really well with women and smart people. At a network, if something tests well with women and smart people, you can pretty much be sure that it is never going to be on the air. But for HBO, that was OK. “
The media surge
The media surge surrounding the show was immense, and by the second season Landress had added helping HBO handle the deluge of publicity on the set to her day-to-day responsibilities.
“The first season we really toiled in obscurity,” she says. “We shot the show, but it hadn't been on the air yet; nobody knew what it was. I got a couple of calls a day from the outside world and David Chase got a couple of calls from the outside world. The second season, we were just bombarded.”
Much of her job became time management, but it was nearly impossible not to let the hype infiltrate the set. “The publicity thing does become pretty hyped up,” she says. “We do a lot of it, but we are trying to be selective. People are doing these stories like 'What's The Sopranos' favorite food?' You want to be nice to everybody, and our actors want to fulfill all of the requests, but you can't. There are not enough hours in the day to do everything.
“You still have to shoot the show everyday,” she points out. “All we wanted to do was make our little show. Everybody wants a story about how Lorraine Bracco and Edie Falco don't get along, but Edie and Lorraine don't even work on the same days, and when they do, they really like each other. And they want to know if Jim Gandolfini is a good guy, but Jim is a great guy.”
And then there were the award shows, when the media scrutiny intensified. Last year “The Sopranos” won four Emmys (Edie Falco for best actress, David Chase for best screenplay, casting directors for best casting, and editor on the pilot for best editing), but didn't win for best drama (“The Practice” did). “The Sopranos” did win the Golden Globe for best drama, however.
Naturally, Landress had more fun at the Golden Globes than at the Emmys, and it's clear that the loss to “The Practice” is still a little painful. “When we lost the Emmy, all of our actors kind of turned into their characters. Everybody got sort of hostile. It's a little overwhelming. The Golden Globes were really fun because we won.”
“The Sopranos” has also won numerous other awards, including dominating the Directors' Guild Awards and the Screen Actors Guild, a Peabody Award, and the Television Critics' Association Award. This year, “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing” were nominated for eighteen Emmys each.
“Basically, we all have a good time doing the show, and that's what the cast and the producers want to put out there — that's it's great to win an award and we're very thankful for it, but at the same time it is really fun to do the work and it's really great that people like it.
“My lawyer said to me a couple of weeks ago, 'Enjoy it now because it's never going to be this good again.' That's really depressing,” she says. But she realizes it is an important lesson. At lunch this summer with Lorraine Bracco, Landress says that she was complaining about being burnt out — about needing a vacation on a desert island where no one has seen “The Sopranos” — and Bracco reminded her, “Come on, we're having fun. This is good. This is really good. Enjoy this.”
“So yes, this is the best job I've ever had,” she says.
Eyeglasses not only improve our vision, but, according to a Union research professor, they also may help us monitor our exposure to radon, a cancer-causing gas that is blamed for 15,000 deaths a year.
Robert Fleischer has discovered that many eyeglass lenses make perfect “personal radon dosimeters.” Most lenses these days are made of a particular plastic CR-39 (also known as allyl-diglycol carbonate) that is damaged by the alpha particles of radon; the damage can bee seen after chemical etching. Since many people wear their eyeglasses throughout waking hours, and leave them close at hand while sleeping, eyeglass exposure gives a direct and complete picture of personal radon exposure.
Robert Fleischer
Fleischer, a former General Electric Co. scientist now working in the College's Geology Department, says his discovery was “an accidental recognition that this stuff [plastic lenses] has information on it that we can pull out.”
At GE, Fleischer's research concentrated on determining astronauts' exposure to radiation as evidenced by etching tracks in their helmets, used during the missions of Apollo 8 and 12. But when he learned of the contents of plastic eyeglass lenses, he recognized a remarkable similarity to case of those astronaut helmets. Having spent much of his professional career tracing the “etchings” made by radon alpha particles, he hypothesized that he would find similar results from etching in eyeglass lenses. In 1987, he wrote a paper titled “Serendipitous Dosiometry: An Opportunity and an Opportunity Lost” for the journal Health Physics, hoping that another researcher might make use of his ideas.
But no one did, so last year, Fleischer finally decided to embark on his own study, seeking assistance from geology students Stephen Hadley '00 and Nicholas Meyer '00. They gathered discarded eyeglasses from a local optician, who provided information about when each pair was made, and were able to measure the eyeglasses' wearer's exposure to radon over the life of the glasses.
Fleischer says that his method of using eyeglasses to measure radon exposure is a significant improvement over the commonly-used radon detectors in basements. “The tendency to measure basements is an unwise decision by the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] — most people don't live in their basements,” he says. “What matters most are the numbers on the first and second floors.” In addition, Fleischer's method allows for measurements in a wearer's home and work environment, thus measuring the actual average exposure throughout the day.
The next step in Fleischer's research is to compare the radon exposure findings from analyzing eyeglass lenses to findings from the stationary radon detectors traditionally used in homes. He expects to find that the readings are very close, but since most people do not spend all of their time in their homes, Fleischer anticipates that discrepancies between two findings might indicate when the major source of radon is outside of the home.
Fleischer, Hadley, and Meyer delivered their paper last spring at the meeting of the American Geological Association and published their findings in the September 2000 issue of Health Physics. Fleischer also has presented the findings at the International Radiation Protection Association in Hiroshima, Japan. Since returning from Japan, Fleischer is expanding his research in fission tracking to examine the evidence of radiation in glass from near to “ground zero” of the hydrogen bomb blast in Hiroshima.
A call for glasses
If you wear eyeglasses during most of your waking hours, and if the lenses are made of plastic CR-39 (the most common plastic lens), Professor Bob Fleischer would like to use your glasses to measure your exposure to radon.
Working with a team of Union students, Fleischer will monitor your exposure to radon based on the “alpha tracking” in your old glasses as well as with small detectors designed to measure radon at different levels of your home. Fleischer is looking for alumni willing to participate in this study of how much of a hazard environmental radon is and how best to assess a person's exposure to this primary form of indoor radioactivity. Because Fleischer or one of his students will be personally conferring with you on useful, unobtrusive locations for detectors in your home, only participants within a 30-minute drive of Union College are currently acceptable. At no cost, Fleischer will supply you with the results of his research.
To learn more or to sign up, please call Fleischer at (518) 388-6985 or e-mail fleishr@union.edu.
Has the sensationalistic media coverage of high-profile trials and investigations of the 1990s undermined the public's faith in the justice system?
Richard Fox, longtime news junkie and assistant professor of political science, thinks it has. In a new book written with Robert Van Sickel of Purdue University, Fox argues that media coverage of the sensational trials of the 1990s (the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the JonBenet Ramsey investigation, President Clinton's impeachment trial, and more) is “having a profound impact — and not a healthy one” on public perception of the justice system.
Richard Fox
In fact, Fox's research shows that the O.J. Simpson case alone caused seventy-five percent of survey respondents to have less confidence in American criminal justice.
Fox first became fascinated by the media's coverage of these cases when he was in graduate school at the University of California at Santa Barbara (he has his undergraduate degree in government from Claremont McKenna). While O.J. Simpson and William Kennedy Smith are seemingly a far cry from his specialization in Congressional politics (he is author of the 1997 book, Gender Dynamics in Congressional Elections), the Los Angeles native has always been interested in television and the media.
“Watching some of these programs where the lawyers are screaming at each other is like a sitcom for me,” he says.
Although the media have long been drawn to sensational criminal trials, Fox says the attention has increased greatly during the past decade. What concerns him — and angers him — is that the sensational news coverage is supplanting real news. “People can't find Yugoslavia on the map, but they are spending hours — especially on these new twenty-four-hour news stations — discussing these cases which really have little importance to anyone's life,” he says. “We become interested in them because they are sold to us.”
After dozens of lunches together discussing the demise of the media and hypothesizing about its impact on the public, Fox and Van Sickel decided to research and write a book on the topic. The result, Tabloid Justice: Criminal Justice in the Age of Media Frenzy, is due to be published this winter.
They began by studying the details of these high-profile cases, and then surveyed 1,003 randomly-chosen Americans about seven of the most highly-covered trials and investigations. Three of them — the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the JonBenet Ramsey investigation, and President Clinton's impeachment trial in the Senate — caused, respectively, seventy-five percent, seventy percent, and fifty-eight percent of the respondents to say they have less confidence in American criminal justice.
Less damaging in their effects but still negative overall were three other high-profile trials — the first trial of the police officers who beat Rodney King, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and the Louise Woodward nanny trial. Only the case of the Menendez brothers, the only defendants to be convicted and sentenced to prison terms, brought an increase in confidence among respondents.
The seven cases also led people to feel less secure about how the criminal justice system will treat them personally. Forty-four percent of the respondents say they feel less confident that criminal justice laws will protect their rights. Other findings included:
The cases had a particularly negative effect on black attitudes toward the police and judges. Sixty percent of blacks, in contrast to thirty-six percent of whites, said they were less confident than they previously had been of being treated fairly by the police if arrested. Forty-five percent of blacks, and twenty-four percent of whites, were less confident of being treated fairly by a judge.
As a result of the seven cases, forty-five percent of women said they had less confidence than previously that criminal justice laws would protect their rights. Thirty-seven percent of men felt less protected.
The cases had a much more adverse impact on the old than the young. Sixty-nine percent of respondents over sixty, but forty-eight percent of those under thirty, suffered a loss of confidence in the system as a result of the Clinton Senate impeachment trial. For the JonBenet Ramsey investigation, the comparable percentages were eighty-six percent and sixty-five percent, and for the Simpson murder trial, they were eighty-three percent and sixty-seven percent.
The results, Fox says, are in keeping with earlier surveys by the Pew Research Center, which found, among other things, that more than five times as many people could identify Judge Lance Ito as could identify Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
“Because these cases are covered extensively in all the media, almost all citizens become aware of them,” Fox says. “There is an almost total cultural immersion in them.”
The survey results, he says, contradict the predictions of many journalists and scholars who said that opening up judicial proceedings to more scrutiny would be healthy. Instead, it seems to be generating public distrust of a key element of the judicial system.
“While the coverage of these cases does draw attention to serious issues, its tabloid style — its overwhelming concern with entertainment — is antithetical to the kind of discussion that leads to meaningful reform,” Fox says.
In my opinion…
Professor Richard Fox, whose criticism of sensational media coverage of trials is the centerpiece of a new book, is a sometime member of the press himself. In his four years at Union, Fox has written several opinion pieces that have appeared in major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The motivation for his op-eds, he says, is anger — generally, anger at the media. In fact, if he isn't angry enough about a topic, he won't finish the op-ed.
Here is a sampling of his commentaries:
Audience participation
The New York Times
February 11, 1999
Almost a thousand students, faculty members and administrators packed Union College's largest lecture hall to hear the Rev. Jesse Jackson give an address on the first day of Black History Month. This was quite a turnout for a college of only 2,000 students. The local press was there, as were the Albany affiliates for the television networks.
Mr. Jackson spoke with great passion about the dilapidated condition of inner city public schools, the high number of children living in poverty and the expanding prison population. He noted that the civil rights movement is now stalled along economic, not racial lines. One thing Mr. Jackson did not dwell on was the impeachment trial of President Clinton.
By all accounts Mr. Jackson gave a masterful performance. His oratory was powerful, and he was interrupted numerous times with applause. Whether they agreed with him or not, members of the mostly white, middle-class audience responded to his passion- not an easy task in this cynical time. After the speech, Mr. Jackson first took questions from the press.
The members of the press asked only six questions. The first was whether Mr. Jackson would run for President in 2000. The next reporter asked, “What do you think about what is going on in Washington?” The next question was, “Do you think that the President should be removed from office?” The next: “Have you and President Clinton gotten closer since the Lewinsky scandal broke?” And then: “How would you like to see the scandal in Washington resolved?” And finally: “What team did you cheer for in the Super Bowl?”
The journalists in attendance were clearly taking their cues from the national press corps. Not one of them asked about the substance of the speech. They did not seem to care what impression they made on the audience.
When it was the students' turn, the tenor of the questions changed. The first student asked, “How can we help to bridge the economic gap you spoke of?” The next audience member asked, “Martin Luther King used to refer to a 'beloved community.' What does that term mean to you?”
But the highlight of the evening came when the next student spoke. “You just gave a very powerful and moving speech, and the press asked you only about the scandal in Washington,” the young man said. “What does that say to you?” The hall erupted in the loudest applause of the evening.
No one wanted to hear about Monica Lewinsky. Everyone wanted to think about serious issues. The message the audience was sending was clear: The press is speaking for itself, not for us.
The president goes Hollywood
Wall Street Journal
January 21, 1997
Co-authored with Teresa Ortega
Television's immense power to influence American politics first became apparent during the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates. Since then, image has prevailed over substance as TV has become the medium of choice for politicians of all stripes, who use ads, interviews, scheduled appearances and “infomercials” to present sanitized or enhanced images of themselves and their agendas.
But the TV movie “A Child's Wish”, airing tonight on CBS, breaks new ground. “A Child's Wish” is a celebration of the Family and Medical Leave Act — a dramatization of the economic and emotional hardships suffered by the family of a child stricken by cancer. The movie highlights the long political process leading up to passage of the act: The family despairs after hearing news of President Bush's veto, and later gathers in the family room to watch TV footage of President Clinton signing the act into law.
The show boasts a ratings-grabbing “special appearance” by President Clinton. The dramatic climax occurs when the terminally ill daughter is brought to Washington in the hopes of fulfilling a last wish to meet the president. In the heart-rending concluding scene, Mr. Clinton appears at the door of the Oval Office, then steps forward to meet the dying young girl and kneels in front of her wheelchair.
The girl's character is based on a composite of two girls who actually met the president under similar conditions, making this scene a reenactment of sorts — a moment of “reality television” in which the private affairs of the White House are used for the purposes of commercial profit. The scene's remarkable success as drama can be attributed to the way it exploits viewer's feelings about youthful death and dying at the same time as it invokes audience nostalgia for a time when the office of the president was viewed with childlike awe and respect.
Mr. Clinton, of course, is not the first president or candidate to appear on commercial television. Richard Nixon started the trend with his 1968 cameo on “Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In”. Since then, Americans have watched with cautious amusement as Jimmy Carter, Bob Dole, and Al Gore have poked fun at themselves with the likes of Jay Leno and David Letterman or made stiff cameos a la Nixon, as Mr. Dole did on a recent episode of NBC's “Suddenly Susan.”
Many of these appearances carried no political agenda beyond simply humanizing the politicians. But “A Child's Wish” disturbingly blurs the line between this sort of public relations and political speech. Consider that CBS chose to air the movie the day after Mr. Clinton second-term inauguration. Did CBS's executives aim to capitalize on the inauguration to draw higher ratings? Were they looking to win favor with the White House and give their corporation political pull?
In any case, it is a child's wish indeed to think that TV audiences will not recognize when politicians are getting what amounts to free air time to promote their causes — especially since Newt Gingrich's recent troubles involve the mixing of politics with a televised college course.
It is tempting to view Mr. Clinton's participation in this project on terms of his well-known desire to be loved and admired by the American people. Making this interpretation all the more disturbing is his evident cynicism and sense of entitlement about his prerogatives as chief executive.
By choosing to act in a Hollywood Production — in a film that conflates reality with drama — President Clinton will be casting into doubt the sincerity of his future “performances” in press conferences, town hall meetings and other public forums. With the election behind us, it is time we examine how television has changed the office of the president — and how the office of the president is now changing television.
Hate crime legislation a good solution
The Times Union (Albany)
February 2, 1999
In the wake of the deaths of James Byrd, Jr., of Jasper, Texas, and Matthew Shepard, of Laramie, Wyoming, Fox argues for the enactment of hate crime legislation in New York State.
Wyoming's intolerance proves deadly
The Times Union (Albany)
October 23, 1998
Drawing on his own experiences as a resident of Laramie, Wyoming, Fox asserts that Wyoming's masculine culture might feed hostility toward homosexuality.
Graphic videos are not really necessary
The Times Union (Albany)
February 8, 1997
Co-authored with Teresa Ortega
Responding to the major television networks' coverage of a military hazing scandal that showed the “blood-pinnings” of young Marine recruits, Fox argues that the networks need to be “more thoughtful about how violent graphics further or detract from presenting the content of a story.
Women leaders must be heard
The Times Union (Albany) March 23, 1997 Co-authored with Teresa Ortega
Writing in response to the widespread accusation of sexual harassment in the Army and the formation of a committee to review the military's sexual harassment policy, Fox maintains that the male-dominated leadership of the Army and the House and Senate may jeopardize the quality of the debate on sexual harassment. He presents a case for electing more women to public office.
