Columnists: Phil Mushnick

Latest Columns

• Grace and Banfield too close for comfort

  Gotcha! If one didn’t know that Turner TV’s news networks are trying to be serious you’d think of them as the TV homes of brilliant farce and satire.  As video documented by the site Atlantic Wire on May 7, CNN’s studio...   May 19, 2013

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• MSNBC preaches doom for America

  I enjoy sea cruises. Good value, lotsa eats, easy to relax. Can read three books in seven days. The office can’t get you unless you go to the e-mail lounge, which I avoid. Not much I can do if I’m needed; I’m on the...   May 12, 2013

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• Ch. 11 sex infomercial down and dirty

  Common Sense in Exile, Part I:  On Sunday, April 21, at 10 a.m., WPIX Ch. 11 may have established a fresh low for desperate, anything-for-a-buck TV when it aired an infomercial called “Best Sex Ever.”  The program was...   May 05, 2013

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• Milking the Boston bombing

  Too often the problem with funny is that it’s unconditional, indiscreet, as if funny just can’t help itself.  On April 19, as law enforcement invaded Watertown, Mass. in search of Boston Marathon bombings suspect...   April 28, 2013

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• Lizard People trip up ‘Today’ stars

  Ask a silly question . . .  For pure, unintentional, unfiltered absurdity, we dare you to top NBC’s “Today” show of April 3rd.  The topic, among co-hosts Natalie Morales, Al Roker and Bill Geist, was the results of a...   April 14, 2013

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• A $616 million nuisance fee

  The funniest sitcoms on TV remain the unintended ones that appear on financial news channels.  Last month, after the large hedge fund operation run by Steve Cohen — one of its biggest boys had already been indicted for...   April 07, 2013

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• Video games a real dead end

  Roughly 15 years ago, I wrote a sports column about a neighborhood recreation complex, one replete with five baseball diamonds that, during daylight, non-school hours went unused — save for a kid on a dirt bike, now and...   March 24, 2013

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• Jersey trial too hot for local news

  Who is Shiquan Bellamy? Why is it unlikely that you never heard of him?  1) Following last week’s selection of a jury, the double-murder trial of Bellamy, now 21, was scheduled to begin. He’s charged with the robberies...   March 17, 2013

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• Questions with obvious answers

  Don’t blame me. Reader Jim Mulloy started it with, “What percentage of non-attorney spokespersons in commercials are spokespersons for attorneys?”  And that got me to thinking . . .  Why are we told that “viewer...   March 10, 2013

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• Let’s make believe this is a true story

  Having been told, over and over, that Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is a must-see, especially as an historically immaculate treatment of the man and the times, it recently came to light that a significant event in the...   March 03, 2013

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• The Obamas have a Jay-Z problem

  Fair play, a derivative of honesty and once a companion of common sense and common decency, is so lost in mainstream American news media that it may never resurface until it appears in an obituary.  Imagine if our...   February 24, 2013

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• CNN’s Nancy Grace sinks even lower

  With any luck, the shameless state of US broadcast news bottomed out, last Tuesday at 10:14 p.m, ET, on CNN’s “Headline News.” That’s when Nancy Grace, the ghoulish stalker of ghoulish stalkers — real and hoped-for —...   February 17, 2013

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• Another failing grade for local news

  I know it’s over; we lose. Still, it remains impossible to reconcile the pathetic condition New York City newscasts as produced and presented in the media capital of the world.  What once-proud local news divisions now...   February 10, 2013

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• Time to put this show in ‘Storage’

  Omg, A&E! There are certain unforgettable lights-on, slap-to-the-face “Wake up, stupid!” moments for all of us TV-watchers, right?  But what a shock to have recently learned that David Hester — a heavily featured, then...   February 03, 2013

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• NBC validates Gibson’s anti-Semitism

  It has been bothering the hell out of me, so let me ask you something: If Mel Gibson were a born-and-raised repudiator and minimizer of American black slavery, if he made an epic movie depicting blacks as the scourge of...   January 27, 2013

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• No easy wins at ‘World Series of Poker’

  One of TV’s perverse beauties is that we can see for ourselves. We don’t need anyone’s help. We don’t need social scientists, statistics or the Parents Television Council.  Roughly 10 years ago, poker, in the form of...   January 20, 2013

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• Gore’s Al Jazeera sale suspect

  Former US Vice President and still fully devoted global environmentalist Al Gore last week took a lot of heat and ridicule for dumping his viewer-starved Current TV cable network for $500 million. He sold it to Al...   January 13, 2013

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• No one found right words for Newtown

  By now it’s abundantly clear that we live in a region dominated by intellectually diminished local TV newscasts, news carefully steered toward the slowest common speedometer.  Of course, that makes double-little sense,...   December 23, 2012

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• Media wise guys biggest bullies of all

  London nurse Jacintha Saldanha, 46 and the mother of two, was “punked” by an Australian radio station, on Dec. 7th. So she killed herself. If you look hard enough, you’ll see that what the media, social scientists, the...   December 16, 2012

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• Anybody know what ‘racist’ means?

  In a world gone nuts, it has become one of the easiest, cheapest and most reckless claims to make. Yet, it still makes headlines. And headlines can make the accusation part of your permanent Wikipedia record. The claim?...   December 09, 2012

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• All-news CBS 880 learns to shill

  Excuse this self-indulgence, but I feel as if I’m losing a very good and very old friend.  From the time I was in high school, all-news WCBS-AM, 880 Radio was a steady and perhaps career-inspiring stop. News, weather,...   December 02, 2012

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• Give the ACLU a reality show

  Another gridlock alert for the corner of Idealism and Practicality.  I’ve always admired the American Civil Liberties Union for its ideals. Everyone’s presumed innocent — until they do it a fourth, maybe fifth time....   November 18, 2012

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• ‘. . . And I disapprove of this message.’

  What a rotten time to have held an election — any election. Check that; what a rotten time to have run political commercials on TV.  So last week, more than two days after Sandy hit, I finally got to a place with an...   November 11, 2012

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• TV continues to deride and conquer

  Perhaps the most frightening change in commercial television is that networks continue to lay off – never to rehire – their better angels. Flat ratings, ya know. So the proliferation — the epidemic, the disease — of...   November 04, 2012

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• When young voters grow up

  For all the polls and all the ensuing examinations and dissections of those polls, every presidential election campaign, they all seem steeped in superficial sameness. There’s no genuine, long-range tracking or meaning...   October 28, 2012

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• No warning on outrageous ‘Wife’

  Every now and then, on radio or TV, we bump into a cheery social scientist or urban studies academician who tells us that America’s moral alarmists are all wet — things aren’t much different and no worse from what they...   October 21, 2012

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• Minaj bound by rappers’ code on ‘Idol’

  It might make a good, single-panel newspaper or magazine cartoon:  The outside of a large auditorium is depicted. Two long lines of humans form at the two-door entrance. One line extends around the block to the left,...   October 14, 2012

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• Smell of the book sell at ‘60 Minutes’

  There’s nothing worse, we’re often told, than a crooked cop. And the longest serving crooked cop in the history of TV journalism — or what’s left of it — is the most celebrated program of that high-minded genre, CBS’s...   October 07, 2012

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• TV snow job meets the Arab Spring

  Given that there have been no reminders, it seems that we’re supposed to forget.  Twenty months ago, the entire TV news media, individually and as a whole, reported a sensational, world-changing story: the Arabic...   September 30, 2012

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• Assange escapes media grilling

  It often seems that the first thing the news media removes from the bigger, sustaining stories is common sense.  In the case of “politically oppressed” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, we’re supposed to forget or...   September 02, 2012

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