From: radioacti...@gmail.com   
      
   Shales was one of the half-dozen most perspicacious TV critics I've regularly   
   read since the late 1970s (the late Robert MacKenzie* of TV Guide and Harry   
   Waters at Newsweek were two others on that rarefied roster.)   
      
   When Pulitzer winner Shales was unceremoniously dumped by The Washington Post   
   early this century, instead of naively attributing the move to a personnel   
   matter or something else related to his quirky personality, I should have   
   recognized it as a horrific    
   harbinger of the accelerating out-with-stale-white-bread/in-with   
   hip-hop-culture trend that is relegating the talented AND experienced boomer   
   generation to tiny internet blog audiences.   
      
   Can't tell you how many times over the last decade or so, after enduring some   
   typical network or cable inanity, I've wondered, "How would the Shales wit   
   have skewered this nonsense?"   
      
   It's one thing for the wise, old guard to be naturally dying off, as Shales   
   now sadly has--and of the Kung flu, to boot!--but it's quite another for the   
   wisened minds of this graying generation to be shunted aside for   
   supposedly-skilled writers who never    
   bothered to learn (much less MASTER) their 5-Ws-and-H basics, and who think   
   it's "kewl" to pepper their juvenile journalism with coarse, even obscene   
   language...all the while forgetting the purpose of published writing is to   
   inform and enlighten, not    
   engage in the textual equivalent of those ever-puerile end-zone choreography   
   the hideous-hairdo and bushy-beard players are going to shove in our viewing   
   faces this NFL Playoffs weekend.   
      
   BRYAN STYBLE/Florida   
   -------------------------------------   
   * A frequent guest during the '80s and '90s on my "radioactive" commercial   
   newstalk radio broadcasts, I'm proud to report.   
   ===================   
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Shales   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)