Word: formulaic
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...commission recommends that the next President hold a minimum of two daytime press conferences a month plus six evening sessions a year. Dukakis embraced that formula; Bush refused to commit himself. However, as the report points out, most modern Presidents, including Reagan, promised to be more accessible to reporters, only to retreat as their terms wore on. Former NBC News correspondent Marvin Kalb, director of the Barone Center, is convinced that politicians cannot be truly successful without being open to the press. But his experience as a reporter forces him to admit that they can avoid the press with little...
Some Soviet television critics take a measured view of the changes. The only truly fresh idea developed at Ostankino headquarters, they contend, has been the "music-information" program, a formula that has been successfully repeated three times in View, Before and After Midnight and 120 Minutes. Critic Lidiya Polskaya of Literaturnaya Gazeta even suggests that the two national channels should compete with each other to spur greater imagination and innovation. "The workings of Central Television are like a closed black box," she argues. "There is no place for such a monopoly during a period of perestroika. The truth is that...
...formula is simple: a celebrity, an interviewer and a video camera. That is all Estonian journalist Urmas Ott, 33, requires for his monthly 90-minute interview show, Television Acquaintance, which ranks fourth on the nation's popularity index. Never mind that the back of his head is more familiar to audiences than his face or that he speaks Russian with a syncopated Estonian accent. Soviet viewers feel that they are eavesdropping on an intimate chat with such personalities as chess champion Anatoly Karpov, figure skater Irina Rodnina, painter Ilya Glazunov and pop singer Alla Pugacheva...
...five books and a Chicago-based radio talk show, the oral historian defines the American experience with collages of interviews. By now Terkel, 76, can be justly charged with employing a formula. Still, it is his formula, sedulously aped but never accurately reproduced. This latest compilation, subtitled Second Thoughts on the American Dream, finds an absence of consensus. "Things can go either way," Terkel observes. "There was a phrase in vogue during World War Two . . . Situation Fluid. It is so now as it was then...
Thomas Jefferson had the right formula for governance when he wrote that "reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error." Apparently, the words of the architect of democracy have little connection with Harvard; how can the Board fairly review the administration's decisions if it is chosen by that administration...