Word: paranoia
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...Paranoia has been running at a high level in the executive suite for months, and last week's events were hardly likely to reduce it. The final Nielsen ratings for the regular 1978-79 television season gave NBC its worst average in more than a decade. Johnny Carson, the brightest star in the insomniac firmament, was keeping network nabobs awake at night wondering whether he would indeed quit the Tonight Show before his contract runs out in April 1981. An embezzlement scandal was boiling, affiliate stations were restless and gossip was rampant. Parent Company RCA laid...
...some egregious mistakes in reporting and analysis. It's crucial to Halberstam's argument, for instance, that when the Los Angeles Times finally gave Nixon "fair" coverage in the 1962 California governor's race, asked tough questions, allowed his opponent equal space. Nixon would break down and reveal his paranoia. So Halberstam completely distorts the famous "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more" press conference after Nixon lost that race. Quoting only one Nixon sentence, Halberstam claims that Nixon completely lost control and launched into a screed against the press. Aha! the reader is supposed...
...bearing on any other film, and certainly no bearing on 1941 as the history books have recorded it. "We're taking history and bending it like a pretzel," says Spielberg. "I would use the words stupidly outrageous to describe this movie. It's really a celebration of paranoia. I hope that you'll come away saying that hypertension...
...victim and witness. But he is also bitterly amusing. For unlike most children of the Gulag, the au thor manages to combine the traditions of Dostoyevsky's brooding victims with Gogol's antic farceurs. The more benign psychiatrists, he notes, diagnosed opposition as a mild form of paranoia that did not require special treatment. The hardliners called it "creeping schizophrenia" and prescribed agonizing sulfur injections...
...like Hurricane Agnes. Robert Wood, a former CBS president turned producer (The Cheap Show), refers to them as "the goddamn sweeps." He complains that "there shouldn't be such weeks in the TV calendar. They are artificial and destructive, and they contribute to the general feeling of paranoia." Like most other pernicious institutions, the sweeps still perform a function. Using two relatively small samples, Nielsen keeps regular tabs on how well the networks are doing. Some 1,200 families have the famous Nielsen meters attached to their sets to show which channel is being watched; 2,300 other families...