Sunday, April 9 – Great opening story
on the air strike in Syria. John acknowledged
the extreme no-easy-answers-ness of the situation but also brilliantly laid out
the many factors Trump likely didn’t give any serious consideration to before
taking such a strong action fraught with potential fallout. The observation that a man who runs on praise
just got a lot of it for bombing someone was chilling. The show also discussed Bill O’Reilly’s
sexual harassment allegations, in which we were subjected to the horror that is
Bill O’Reilly narrating a sex scene from a book he wrote – there’s not enough “ewww” to cover it. The main story looked at gerrymandering and
the epic ways it skews elections. It
seems crazy that there are hardly any rules in place to guard against it, or
that redrawing district lines falls into the hands of elected representatives
at all. What gives, Congress?
Monday, April 10 – I like Roy, but his “best
of” special was a little uneven for me.
I thought it started and ended strong (with his piece on Black
journalists putting up with racism on cable news and his amazing Trump-quote rap,)
but the clips in the middle weren’t quite as good. There was his “peak Blackness” piece after Moonlight won Best Picture, the
suggestion to get funding for Meals on Wheels by militarizing it, showing off
the stupidity of HB2 by setting up a fake food truck in North Carolina and
refusing to serve randomly-declared gay people (a tag team with Jordan,) and
the field report about Texas anti-gun folks protesting campus open carry laws
by carrying around dildos. I dunno – a lot
of it was good, but it wasn’t great,
and I know Roy has better stories than some of the ones included. Maybe his strongest stories tend to be
race-related and they were going for more variety?
Tuesday, April 11 – If you told me a
year ago that I’d be excited for a “best of” special from Ronny, I wouldn’t
have believed it. But Ronny is
hands-down my pick for most improved correspondent, and while I think the show
could’ve swapped out a couple of these stories for better ones, it was
well-done overall. They covered his epic
takedown of Fox News’s racist Chinatown piece (still my favorite story of his,)
a field report about Christian/Jewish/Muslim cooperation in Omaha, a piece on
the whole “Trump will be great for the economy” idea, a bit on a minor clash
between Lunar New Year and Black History Month, and one of his recent tech
pieces about the proliferation of smart devices. Good stuff, but I would’ve thrown in the one
about the Australian getting back by a crocodile (probably bumping the
Tri-Faith initiative one, because I still don’t like the stuff with the imam –
I know it’s satire, but I didn’t like it.)
Wednesday, April 12 – Pretty good,
well-rounded special for Desi, although I think they really should’ve included
her field piece at the NRA convention – that’s one of my favorites of
hers. Instead, they covered her
interview with the creepy and ultra-rich “Trumpettes,” a story on a Clinton
supporter who ran a business selling misogynistic political T-shirts, a
catch-all “What the Actual Fact” segment that covered several different
occasions (it seems to hearken back to the “old days” to be talking about Ted
Cruz in a debate – wow,) a response to (again) Cruz’s remark about “New York
values,” and a piece about the surge in women making appointments to get IUDs
after the election. While I don’t know
if this was Desi’s absolute best, there weren’t any real misses in here, so it
might come out as the most consistently-good of the specials for me – not too
shabby.
Thursday, April 13 – Hasan is my favorite
correspondent, and my only complaint here is that I wanted more. For his special, they kept it to one story
per segment, showing all or most of the story rather than trimming it down to
fit in an extra piece or two (although the first was from a two-parter that
they condensed to fit one segment.) So,
we got US hysteria over Syrian refugees in Canada (featuring Hasan’s interview
with Justin Trudeau,) the US women’s soccer team’s pay disputes, a fact rundown
of Trump’s first Muslim ban (featuring the immortal line, “Waterboard that
puppy!”,) and his raw, shell-shocked reaction to Trump’s election. Like I said, there are so many more excellent
pieces they could’ve gone with – his response to Trump’s original call for a
Muslim ban, his field piece on the “ban the box” movement, one of his Mad Money-esque segments, his visit to
the RNC – but all the stories they did include were great.
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