Word: macneills
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...MacNeil does not shy away from expressing his emotional reactions to these experiences--a freedom that the ethics of this craft prevented him from exercising while covering the events. MacNeil emphasizes his continuing, if somewhat ironic, fear of missing the big story, his awe for various world leaders, and his frequent fear for his personal safety. The journalist naturally has an eye for the unusual anecdote MacNeil got directions to a telephone immediately after the Kennedy assassination from a man experts now believe was Lee Harvey Oswald Rather than settle for the stock picture of political strife, he paints...
...JOURNALIST, not even this extraordinary example, spends his entire career witnessing great events in world history MacNeil explains that along with his press card, a reporter receives "a license to penetrate and intrude into the private lives and rituals of all the people of the earth." And that is what he spent most of this time doing. He "intruded" throughout Europe for 15 years, and he takes the reader on a highlighted tour of the continent. In Tangiers, he tried marijuana at the Casbali, the famous Morrocean sector of the city. He led one of the first camera crews...
Concluding his book. MacNeil addresses the only major event of the times on which he did not report: the Vietnam War. It was an event which he experienced like everyone else, by watching TV, but it had the greatest impact on his outlook on television news and his own career...
...professional life was "going smoothly," moving "so rapidly that I never really paused to ask myself what it was all about." MacNeil recalls. But MacNeil saw a war being "sanitized" for the American audience in the editing rooms of the three major networks. He charges that this cleansing of the news and refusal to challenge the White House's party line actually slowed the anti-war movement and prolonged the carnage in Southeast Asia...
...slowly became aware of television's frequent triviality, its distorting brevity, its obsession with action and movement, its infantile attention span and its profound lack of thoughtful analysis," the author says. Turning away from the money and the fame. MacNeil walked...