At least audiences had heard of the first three, but this guy…it was true, when it came time to select an actor to play Dr. Rumack, my brother Jerry, Jim Abrahams and I remembered, “This one guy, he’s been in hundreds of television shows and I think he played the captain of the Poseidon. What’s his name…?”  

Our research revealed that the actor’s name was Leslie Nielsen. Jim and Jerry and I were thrilled when he agreed to meet, not because he was “funny” but because of his long resume of serious films and TV. To us, he was hysterical. The long list of straight dramatic acting roles demonstrated to us that he would be perfect. When we watched those movies, we laughed.

At our first meeting, he mentioned proudly that he had done an episode of M*A*S*H*.

We assured him we wouldn’t count this brief comedy experience against him. But when he read the Airplane! script he “got” its unconventional nature and off-beat style. We heard later that he told his agent, “Take whatever they offer, I’d pay them to do this.”   Arguably the best role was that of Dr. Rumack,  played by the guy no one wanted or ever suspected would be funny, much less go on to have a second career starring in feature films as a goof-ball comic. Leslie was great in the role because he never “winked”—let on that he knew he was in a comedy. This was essential to the style, and Leslie had a natural instinct for it. 

In all the movies we did together, we hardly had to shower him with any verbal praise. He always said he knew he was doing okay because “I could hear David laughing  during the take,” he would say. And I was!  Tough to just sit there silently during “Nice Beaver!”

Off screen, he wasn’t so much of a joke or storyteller but a chronic prankster. The stories are legion about the fart machine, which he kept hidden and sprang on any hapless stranger who approached him. He used it on set, on talk shows, anywhere he could find a victim. One time, at a press junket in Charlotte, I remember watching Leslie let loose with the device on a crowded elevator, the other occupants squirming up against the walls in an effort to distance themselves. And just like the scenes we put him in, he never broke character, never let on that he knew he was being funny.

Leslie got the biggest kick out of his newfound status as an international comedy icon—almost as though that, too, was some kind of prank he had pulled.  But mostly, he just really loved to laugh. Doing goofy things on and off the set made him happy, which was almost always his demeanor. And in turn, he made all of us happy. I think we all got along so well because we were all anarchists at heart – grown up kids who still got the giggles from poking fun at authority figures.  

As the years went on, I always tried to find a place for him in whatever movie I was doing. And he was always delighted to accept. And when each movie came out, he always turned out to be the funniest thing in it. A director couldn’t ask for a better track record. 

In the movie business, friendships tend to be intense—and brief. You live with someone every day for three months and then, despite promises of keeping in touch, getting together, calling, you go back to your separate and individual lives.  Looking back on it, I think I wanted Leslie to know that we valued him beyond that—and how much we all appreciated him, as a talented performer and a friend. 

We invariably would get to discussing our history together, reminiscing a bit, and renewing our good-natured debate about who the hell was luckier to have met the other, Leslie Nielsen or the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team. The truth was, that all of us knew how grateful we were to have each other in our lives, both professionally and personally, and we expressed it to each other often.  

Leslie was grateful for everything in his life (most especially his wife Barbaree), almost as though he didn’t feel he deserved any of it. Maybe that’s why he was so happy.

And maybe that’s why he was so good at making everyone else happy.

In a move that bodes well to strengthen TV programming overall in both primetime and late night, NBC has confirmed that Jay Leno will be moved back to his original 11:30 slot and his 10 p.m. show canceled on February 11, as rumored over the past week. USA Today reports:

Under the new plan, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon would move from 12:35 a.m. to 1:05. (Carson Daly’s talk show, which now follows Fallon, would be canceled, though Daly would remain under contract at the network.).

O’Brien, however, decided not to agree to the changes, in a public statement:

I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction.

Thus Leno will return to the Tonight Show in its usual time slot, and O’Brien will move on to presumably greener pastures.

The new 10 p.m. schedule will likely include a return to scripted dramas. Insiders argue that cost-cutting moves at NBC instituted by CEO Jeff Zucker denuded the primetime schedule of quality shows and helped make way for the disastrous Leno-O’Brien moves. That allowed a big increase in audience numbers on cable/sat stations in particular, while also helping NBC’s broadcast competitors. NBC is now playing catch-up, but analysts consider the move good both for the network and primetime TV in general:

To replace Leno at 10 starting March 1, Gaspin said, NBC is likely to add two more hours of scripted dramas (it can use repeats of Friday Night Lights and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which now first air on other networks), along with an expanded Dateline NBC. Other current series, such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, could shift to later slots.

For fall, NBC ordered seven drama pilots Sunday as potential replacements, including series from high-profile producers David E. Kelley, Jerry Bruckheimer and J.J. Abrams and remakes of Prime Suspect and Rockford Files.

Gaspin said NBC is spending 30% to 35% more on new-program development than in recent seasons and promises viewers will see “high-quality, more traditional NBC programming” next fall with “smart, sophisticated and fun content.” After years of audience erosion, “I think we have a shot at actually going up.”

Jonathan Littman, who heads Bruckheimer’s TV division, welcomed the Leno news.

“Any time you can get more scripted programs on the air, the better,” he said, noting that a typical drama employs 200 workers.

“A lot of people really saw this as having a pretty negative impact on our business,” said CBS programming chief Nina Tassler, who called Leno’s move to prime time “an experiment that obviously did not work.”

The analysts are correct: a stronger, more competitive NBC will make for better programming at the other broadcast and cable/sat networks as they compete more aggressively for viewers.

The flattening of the audience disparity between broadcast and cable/sat outlet has been highly salutary for TV audiences, creating more variety and more options as networks such as USA, TNT, Lifetime, and A&E, but the process was reaching the point where weaker networks such as NBC, CW, and MY TV were in serious danger of insolvency. The cutbacks in original scripted programming at NBC and MY TV were reducing variety and competitiveness in the TV industry.

NBC’s addition of at least some original scripted programming will help stabilize the network and increase the amount of choice for TV viewers. Thus it can be a good thing for all parties—provided NBC plays it smart and schedules programs intended to please audiences, not transform them into political progressives. The current reworking of the schedule is Gaspin’s first big move since taking over as NBC Universal chairman, and it’s a smart and tough choice on his part. Perhaps NBC is headed for an upswing under his tutelage.With the increased amount of competition already provided by stronger cable/sat channels, any arrogance toward the audience NBC covets will be quickly and severely punished by the audiences themselves.

That’s what brought on the network’s current travails, and it will happen again if they don’t learn the right lessons from all of this. The same applies to the other networks as well: competition makes for better products, and the customer is always right.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno Show at 11:35.  For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news.  I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting.  The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.  Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot.  That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it.  My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction.  Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter.  But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next.  My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Read the full statement here.

From that point on, I was addicted. I couldn’t get enough of Peter Maas, Robin Moore, Woodward and Bernstein, Nick Pileggi, Ovid Demaris, James Bamford, James Michener, Cornelius Ryan, anything from the Ballantine Espionage/Intelligence Library, and too many others to list here.

I only recently read Michener’s The Bridge at Andau, an account of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising based on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, written in novelized form to protect identities at the time. It takes you right into the chaotic and revolutionary Bupapest of the day as though you were there.

Mr. Michener, who was living in Austria at the time, went to the nearby Hungarian border to conduct interviews among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the brutal Soviet backlash, which claimed the lives of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops. The Bridge at Andau is a must-read that clearly illustrates the contrast and conflict between an oppressive Communist regime and its freedom-seeking people.

Many of the above authors’ works were serialized in the press, and stand as testaments to pure investigative journalism that always followed hot on the trail, no matter where that trail led. Stalwarts such as Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow risked life and limb to give Americans the real skinny on World War II, be it reporting from rooftops during the London Blitz, or from the beaches of the Pacific.

If you wanted to go all the way, you might even call Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize-winning Gulag Archipelago masterpieces of eyewitness investigative journalism, though they are far more than that. These profound words from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, from his address to Harvard’s graduating Class of 1978, really jump out at me:

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit.

Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Those words could not sum up more my attitude to and perceptions of today’s Fourth Estate in America, and even the entire democratic Western press. It is like I married young and totally in love, only to watch as the years passed as my betrothed became bitter, polarized, angry and even a mortal enemy. I still remember the reasons I fell in love, but am now filing for divorce out of my own bitterness and remorse at how far a once-great love has descended into madness.

And it has been a long downward slide. I certainly know how John Nash’s wife felt now.

Pyle’s and Murrow’s war reporting was intelligent, gritty, unfiltered and unadulterated with propaganda. Unlike, say, Geraldo Rivera giving away our troops’ positions to the Iraqi army. Or TNR knowingly fabricating Nazi-like tales of American soldiers in the Iraq War.

Or anything on the Iraq War from Pinchy’s New York Times. This Times article is eerily reminiscent of DHS’ implication of veterans as prone to violence, though the numbers in fact prove the homicide rate is far lower for returning veterans than the general population. And they always throw in alcoholism on vet stories. It’s like there’s a left wing playbook somewhere. Hmm. Curious.

Even worse, I had to kick all their asses to start reporting on Roxana Saberi when everyone, and I mean everyone, the White House, State, Congress, the press, EVERYONE, pulled a major disappearing act on Roxana in early March. It’s like they were all trying to sweep the Obama bad press on Roxana under the rug.

By the way, my best piece on that subject is approaching 4000 hits. You tell ME who’s doing the reporting as a public service here! In fact, the only subject the MSM is even more silent on is Iran’s egregious human rights abuses. Bunch of hopeless dupes is what they are on Iran, just like Team Oscar and Sean Penn. I ask you. What good are they?

In short, ‘excellence in journalism’ today is less reflective of Murrow and Pyle than Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Frederick Foer. And why? Because like Fox Mulder in the X Files, all their editors Wanted To Believe, because those frauds and plagiarists wrote all the News To Print That Fits. When editors like the NYT’s Howell Raines get stories that line up neatly with their own left-wing tinfoil worldviews, who needs editorial oversight? Doesn’t exactly give me a tingle up my leg.

One could go back as far as the Vietnam War and the Big Three’s incessant campaign to ensure America’s loss in that war, turning even major battlefield victories into ignoble defeats. The Big Three are still at it even today, only now turning their cameras into swords to hack their fellow citizens, who peacefully protest against government policies with which the Big Three’s PRAVDA-like bureaucracies happen to vehemently agree. By the way, pravda in Russian means truth.

I don’t believe it necessary to rehash every propaganda lie spewing forth from today’s ‘Main Stream Media’. We are awash in them. Perhaps the seminal moment in American media today, in which the Fourth Estate shed all vestiges of objectivity and aligned itself ideologically to the Democratic Party lock, stock and barrel, occurred in 1998. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff was denied the scoop of a lifetime, because Newsweek’s propaganda chiefs buried his expose on President Clinton’s sordid affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Even today, Newsweek is still burying Isikoff’s scoops, as they did with this piece outlining senior Obama advisor David Axelrod’s extensive lobbyist connections, even as candidate Obama vowed that “lobbyists won’t work in my White House!” They also had no issue with David Axelrod, still an Obama kingpin, suggesting Tea Party protests could ‘mutate into something that’s unhealthy’ and are ‘peaceful so far,’ implying an underlying proclivity toward violence that has no basis in fact.

Even worse, Mr. Axelrod’s own left wing extremist viewpoint is now official government policy based on equating all conservatives, and even veterans returning from war, with Timothy McVeigh, much in the same manner Lefties condemn furiously when all Muslims are equated with Osama bin Laden. It is in fact blatant propaganda aimed at alienating and intimidating the minority party of dissent. Nothing less. And our so-called Mainstream Media is right there with him one hundred percent.

But what else would you expect from a de facto fourth branch of government? Or ‘news giants’ that even hold meetings to pressure their networks to lay off the President? Or fails to condemn Janeane Garofalo’s slandering of Tea Partiers as ‘racist teabagging rednecks’ based on journalistic standards? How sick and twisted a policy is THAT?

The really sad part is, that ideological rigidity is only the publicly visible tip of a very large iceberg into which MSM Titanic is sailing with reckless abandon. Actually, perhaps the Bismarck is a better analogy. That terror of the seas was once all powerful as well. It, too, was also sunk by its own crews on captain’s orders. And I couldn’t be happier to see all the MSM lifeboats being hoisted today, just as the Allies took a great deal of pleasure in watching the Bismarck fanatics take a dunk.

Since I was very young, I have been both fan and student of the methods and processes of intelligence gathering, propaganda, psy-ops and counter-intelligence, i.e. the Spy Game. Blame Ian Fleming. Even scored a 3.8 on the very tough officer-level Fundamentals of Naval Intelligence course, which the Navy graciously allowed me to take as an enlisted man.

I also spent a few years of my naval service during the Cold War listening to Radio Moscow, which often interrupted VOA broadcasts through jamming, which the USSR spent more money on at the time than we did on the entire VOA program. Even caught Radio Moscow’s coverage, if it can be called such, of the KAL 007 passenger airliner shootdown in 1983, which consisted of jamming VOA broadcasts for three days straight with silence, then spewing a series of heated accusations that KAL 007 was actually on a spy mission. They even pointed to the KAL flight number, 007, as proof.

The main point of my listing all my bona fides here is that I know propaganda when I see it. And boy, do I see it today. Too much of it! I believe today’s MSM would not look so much at that Soviet ‘reporting’, or even Orwell’s ‘1984′, less as examples of the worst form of propaganda and more as instruction guides. And they have learned well from their Soviet-era progenitors. Too well.

In fact, I really can’t tell which is the bigger lie from the infamous Olbermann-Garofalo hatefest: Garofalo’s rant that Tea Partiers are all ‘racist teabagging rednecks’, or Olbermann’s opening claim that Garofalo is ‘an actor and an activist’. Where is the evidence for any of those claims?

The big difference here, of course, it that Radio Moscow and PRAVDA were organs and extensions of the Soviet-era government masquerading itself as a free press. Actually, I take that back. No difference. But that is what happens when our so-called Fourth Estate abrogates its duty as an impartial, objective and investigative free press and becomes a fourth branch of government, slandering opposition candidates, even turning on its own citizens with unbridled contempt and sinister intent, in order to demonize huge swaths of the American electorate for political purposes.

We even have names now for these types of political manipulations by the press, so common are they. RatherGate, a blatant and clumsy attempt to influence an American presidential election with fake documents. Fauxtography, primarily used by the worldwide press to demonize Israel during their war with Hezbollah in 2006. When the press starts piling up colloquialisms for their blatantly fraudulent attempts to manipulate the news, you know we’re in trouble.

And now the four branches of government, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seek total and absolute media dominance with the Fairness Doctrine. Which of course, only would mean less Fairness and more Doctrine, and could even regulate web content. Just like Iran and China do.

What else can you call it but a Goebbels-like left wing power grab, when Rush and conservative talk radio is specifically targeted, yet NPR and Far Left TV news ‘reporting’ is considered so honest and grand it doesn’t require any intervention? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.

But all is not lost. It was the ‘pajamas media’ that ran Howell Raines out the Times’ door on a rail. Otherwise, he and Blair would probably still be there. And even though Newsweek buried the Isikoff scoop on Lewinsky, Matt Drudge picked up on it and set the bar for online journalism.

I remember reading somewhere, I believe either in Matt Drudge’s Drudge Manifesto or Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors, that White House operatives were refreshing the Drudge Report screen 3500 times an hour during the Lewinsky scandal. If our press functioned today as it should, the White House would have full-time crews doing the same for dozens of media outlets. Not really necessary when those same media outlets ARE your full-time crews.

Yet Americans are not as stupid as those in the MSM, America’s left-wing extremist Reichministry, would have you believe. In fact, it is the MSM’s own stupidity and unabashed bias which is now leading these media behemoths straight into the tarpits of history, not unlike those in La Brea which devoured the mammoths of old. And like those towering monstrosities, today’s versions stagger likewise into those tarpits, totally oblivious and self-blinded to the dangers their own clumsy and misdirected footsteps bring.

The Dead Tree Press is in fact today’s Petrified Forest. Though many claim the explosion in online journalism and fall in ad revenues is to blame, even the New York Times’ online version is as biased and partisan as the fishwrap edition, which explains their demise. Yet the New York Post and Daily News have actually seen increases in circulation, and USA Today is holding relatively steady.

The same is true for television. Though FOX News is roundly condemned as right wing by those who proselytize a left wing agenda, FOX is at least willing to brook opposing opinions. The puerile jolly teabag frat house jokesters of the MSM brook none. And that is why FOX is blowing them all out of the water. Who wants to watch a ‘news’ program when you already know what their ‘news’ is going to be, or whose ‘reporters’ insult the very viewers they seek to attract?

Predictably, members of Congress, spearheaded by Senator John Kerry, are even now looking at ways to bail out left wing propaganda organs like the Boston Globe, aka the New York Times Jr, and which may close its doors soon if a contract with union workers falls through. Celebs like Alec Baldwin are pleading to save the New York Times, which may bring added weight in Congress to that facetious argument.

Yet in reality, the only real political difference between a privately or publicly financed Globe or Times would be their source of income. In fact, government paychecks to the press would actually be more honestly reflective of their current ‘journalism’ status.

I say let them die. Pull the plug, even. They are dying for a reason. Put them, and all of us, out of our misery. And I’ll be damned if my tax dollars go to Pinchy so he can remain President Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s PRAVDA on my dime! On that note, here’s Congress. Let your representatives know how you feel about the government subsidizing their own private Reichministries with our tax dollars. And let then hear it on the Unfairness Doctrine, too.

I hope someday we see a real press that not only doesn’t serve as a fourth branch of government, but engages in the same old-school investigative journalism that should keep our government officials sitting on pins and needles. THAT is the function of a truly free, objective and impartial press, regardless of the ideological positions of the government in power.

Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one. But I am withholding my dollars and viewership on the most egregious offenders. And I hope you do, too. Let the free market decide these modern-day dodo birds’ fates, and not our government and tax dollars. All bad things should come to an end.

Good Night and Good Luck.

AFTERWORD: One very pleasant surprise in modern-day reporting, and I never thought the day would come I would say this, is today’s Huffington Post. Granted, many of their pundits are as brain-dead as KOS, but their Iran coverage is phenomenal, perhaps the best out there. As a bonus, even many of their naively idealistic pundits are starting to realize Iran isn’t the Garden of Paradise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, AMPAS and Sean Penn would have us believe.

And I seriously doubt in HuffPo’s early days that you would have seen Op-eds like this one by Daniel Sinker: “When The Left Went Teabagging: As You Chuckle At The Right’s Newfound Activism, Don’t Forget That The Left Sucked Balls For Years.” Some are even criticizing President Obama!

Hope Springs Eternal.