Viewers are complacent boobs: Why does it not surprise me that the majority of viewers apparently approve of Julius Hunter's comment concerning the death of Cassandra "Casey" Williamson [D.J. Wilson, "Anchor Damnation," August 7]? Inept viewers deserve nothing less than inept broadcasters and infotainment as their source of news. Local and national newscasters have been allowed to slide down this slippery slope for years, masking commentary with, among other things, "happy talk" and "news you can use" and taking with them an audience complacent enough not to care. Objectivity be damned. Whether one agrees or disagrees with how a newscaster feels about a particular issue, regardless of how emotional an issue is, it is completely inappropriate for producers of a news program to allow a newscaster to stir in his or her opinion with news reporting.
Mark Jefferies
via the Internet
Give that anchorman an ax: Our news is so full of disaster, murder, war and crooked politicians that it's necessary to see someone who actually has an opinion or feelings about what they're reporting. We could also use some town-square executions and public humiliation to deter these cancers on society.
Joe Povis
Manchester
We aim to please: Everyone knows TV is entertainment. The news is in print.
Pete Skiba
via the Internet
Clock Watchers
Sharks know when it's feeding time: If any of these kids had been hurt on the job during that five-minute leeway, you can be sure every lawyer within a 30-mile radius would have been checking those time stamps [Mike Seely, "Timed Out," August 14]. Clocked in is clocked in and should be paid for accordingly.
Mark "Becker" Williams
St. Louis
Indigestible Ego
Call me cranky, not flaccid: It's bad enough that I can no longer read Ray Hartmann's comments on current events. I've just read your latest offering of Jill Posey-Smith's "review" of the Asian Grille, and, as a psychology major in college, what a telling review that was ["Planet Asia," August 14]. From the first sentence, she lays waste to dates (silent female appendages), middle-aged people exposing their flaccid flesh, white guys, Midwesterners, basically anyone without her far superior taste and background. Even tilapia, for God's sake! I have always found her "reviews" a sounding board to let the rest of us know how far superior she is, but either I'm getting crankier (I am middle-aged but not too flaccid) or she's just indulging herself more. A peppery review can often be entertaining, but hers have just become exercises in bloated egoism. Come on, give us some reviews that are both informative and a little fun to read.
Elizabeth Garner
via the Internet
Give that woman a column! Tell you what. Give Jill Posey-Smith her own column. Call it social commentary, call it fashion policing, call it diatribes against any-all thing. Label it whatever you want so that I can at least avoid her pompous prose and meandering logic. Just take her off of the food beat. I guess you guys are trying to kill the concept of the alternative newspaper and forcing us to read the Post-Dispatch by siccing Posey-Smith on us.
Peter Wung
via the Internet
Pubic Exposure
A hair-raiser: Are you intending that the Riverfront Times now be distributed in a plain brown wrapper? Adult content in publications for purchase by adults is fine, but when your cover photo shows the subject's pubic hair, you have crossed the line of propriety for a tabloid that is free for the taking in restaurants all around the area [August 14]. A judicious bit of cropping or retouching would not have detracted from the visual appeal of the image, and you could have printed the whole thing in the context of the article. Leave it off the front page, please!
Alan Ritter
St. Louis
Rebel Yell
Yankee brainwashers still hard at work: Your Speedloader column may be entirely correct with respect to the fact that St Louis is a racist city, affecting its politics, but your several points of reference to the Old South and Dixie as the epitome of racism are unfair, biased and show lack of knowledge of American history [Jim Nesbitt, "Dixie Chicken," August 14]. The only excuse I can give you is that we all have been purposely miseducated and brainwashed by the liberal media, press, textbook publishers and the entertainment industry for the past 150 years to point the finger at the white Southerner as representing racism. Ex-Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. has it backward when he explains our racism on St. Louis' being a "Southern city" -- [racism occurs here] because we are a Northern city, dense with late arrivals from Europe. The Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River are not magic curtains dividing white supremacists' attitudes in America. Actually, more racism exists in the North than in the South, always has and always will, in spite of what our teachers drum into our heads. Do you think that the major race riots in St Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit and New York of the early 1900s were all caused by Southerners?
Robert S. Arnold
St. Peters
