Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

April 24, 2026

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Continue reading → The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

June 17, 2015

An Unredeemable Removal: William Jennings Bryan as the Magnificent Loser

William Jennings Bryan — known as “The Great Commoner” and “Keeper of the Faith” — was a Populist, religious, conundrum. He was for the people. He was against big money. He fought, testified, and prosecuted via the Bible — in utter infamy — during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial and died five days after the trial ended. Defending his Faith killed him.

William Jennings Bryan was a good son of Nebraska who was nominated three times on the national Democrat ticket — and he lost each time — and his failure to find a national political footing beyond his deeply religious Nebraska grassroots haunted him until his death.

I was able to purchase this fascinating photo of William Jennings Bryan, dated September 18, 1924 — he would be dead 10 months later — the caption reads:

WITH THE COMMENDATION OF THE COMMONER

Photo shows William Jennings Bryan pinning a badge of allegiance (David-Bryan campaign stuff) to Rose Minto’s coat lapel. She is a popular motion picture star in Hollywood who is actively interested in politics.

What is most interesting about the photograph is the use of the black editorial pen on the image. You can see the crop indices, but there are also black ink pen “lines of emphasis” added to Ms. Minto’s hat, Bryan’s lapels and face. You can see the dullness the pen makes when you move the glossy photograph in your hand in and out of reflective light.

At first wink, those added lines look like marks of defamation until you realize, after scanning the photograph for publication here, they must have been an important part of newspaper publishing in 1924 to help the highlights and shadows be more discernable in ink on paper.