Overnight headlines.
Tuesday, April 7th, 2020
The twitterverse is (fittingly) filling up with the lyrics of John Prine, who died Tuesday. Almost any 280-character chunk of Prine’s words is evocative, sparkling, powerful. Sad that he will not be around to craft new verses.
The guy (the acting acting something of the Navy) who flew all the way to Guam to unfairly castigate the commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (after firing him!) has apologized and resigned.
The woman who did an astonishingly bad job as White House Press Secretary has returned to a comfortable job with the First Lady as she is replaced by an even worse television personality who spent a lot of time taking unfounded, ill-informed shots at President Obama on right wing television.
The Attorney General of Texas has taken this moment of chaos to suspend abortion services as “non-essential.” It goes without saying the Attorney General of Texas has never been pregnant.
One of the guys who created Twitter, Jack Dorsey, will give one billion dollars to fund COVID-19 relief. He says it’ll all happen transparently because you can follow along on a shared Google spreadsheet.
And the people of Wisconsin voted. in masks and gloves, and many carrying plenty of midwestern contempt for the GOP leaders who made it go down this way.
There are nights I wish Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobyns were reporting this to me, along with some duck-gargling electronic music and just enough wry world-weariness… as perfect for the early 1980s as it would be today. NBC News Overnight.
Here, to the right, is a picture of the original Overnight anchors, Ellerbee and Dobyns. It’s in black-and-white, although the show was broadcast in color. That thing she’s leaning on is called a typewriter. Those things he’s leaning on are called books. That big thing on the wall to the right of the TVs is called a paper map, which showed them where Greybull, Wyoming is. The white thing with the thick cable dropping out at front right is, of course, a telephone. And lurking behind the telephone, I believe that’s an ashtray.
Now you know how newsrooms smelled in those days.
And so…it goes.
