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      Jann Wenner Removed From Rock Hall Board After Times Interview

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      The Rolling Stone co-founder’s exit comes a day after The New York Times published an interview in which he made widely criticized comments.Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has been removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found, one day after an interview with him was published in The New York Times in which he made comments that were widely criticized as sexist and racist.The foundation — which inducts artists into the hall of fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the president and chief executive of the foundation, declined to comment further when reached by phone.But the dismissal of Mr. Wenner comes after an interview with The Times, published Friday and timed to the publication of his new book, called “The Masters,” which collects his decades of interviews with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono — all of them white and male.In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color.Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.”His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”Mr. Wenner’s comments drew an immediate reaction, with his quotes mocked on social media and past criticisms unearthed of Rolling Stone’s coverage of female artists under Mr. Wenner. Joe Hagan, who in 2017 wrote a harshly critical biography of Mr. Wenner, “Sticky Fingers,” cited a comment by the feminist critic Ellen Willis, who in 1970 called the magazine “viciously anti-woman.”Mr. Wenner did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday evening.Mr. Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 with the music critic Ralph J. Gleason and made it the pre-eminent music magazine of its time, with deep coverage of rock music as well as politics and current events. Much of it was written by stars of the “new journalism” movement of the 1960s and ’70s like Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Gleason died in 1975.Mr. Wenner sold the magazine over a series of transactions completed in 2020, and he officially left it in 2019. Last year, he published a memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone.”Mr. Wenner was also part of a group of music and media executives that founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983, and inducted its first class in 1986; its affiliated museum, in Cleveland, opened in 1995. Mr. Wenner himself was inducted in 2004 as a nonperformer.The Rock Hall has been criticized for the relative few women and minority artists who have been inducted over the years. According to one scholar, by 2019 just 7.7 percent of the individuals in the hall were women. But some critics have applauded recent changes, and the newest class of inductees includes Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow and Missy Elliott, along with George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners. More

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      How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World

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      The pop star’s record-breaking, career-spanning show has dominated the summer, commanding attention and whipping up demand at a level thought unachievable in a fragmented age.As Taylor Swift rolled into Los Angeles this week, the frenzy surrounding her record-breaking Eras Tour was already in high gear.Headlines gushed that she had given $100,000 bonuses to her crew. Politicians asked her to postpone her concerts in solidarity with striking hotel workers. Scalped tickets were going for $3,000 and up. And there were way, way too many friendship bracelets to count.These days, the center of an otherwise splintered music world can only be Taylor Swift.The pop superstar’s tour, which is now finishing its initial North American leg with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, has been a both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swift’s catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna — a dominance that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century.“The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and young daughters.In a summer of tours by stars like Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Wallen and Drake, Swift’s stands apart, in numbers and in media noise. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters do not publicly report box-office figures, the trade publication Pollstar estimated that she has been selling about $14 million in tickets each night. By the end of the full world tour, which is booked with 146 stadium dates well into 2024, Swift’s sales could reach $1.4 billion or more — exceeding Elton John’s $939 million for his multiyear farewell tour, the current record-holder.Swift has now had more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. With the tour lifting Swift’s entire body of work, she has placed 10 albums on that chart this year and is the first living artist since the trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert in 1966 to have four titles in the Top 10 at the same time.“It’s a pretty amazing feat,” Alpert, 88, said in a phone interview. “With the way radio is these days, and the way music is distributed, with streaming, I didn’t think anyone in this era could do it.”But how did a concert tour become so much more: fodder for gossip columns, the subject of weather reports, a boon for friendship-bracelet beads — the unofficial currency of Swiftie fandom — and the reason nobody could get a hotel room in Cincinnati at the end of June?“She is the best C.E.O., and best chief marketing officer, in the history of music,” said Nathan Hubbard, a longtime music and ticketing executive who co-hosts a Swift podcast. “She is following people like Bono, Jay-Z and Madonna, who were acutely aware of their brands. But of all of them, Taylor is the first one to be natively online.”Swift on the opening night of her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesSwifties have chronicled the stream of celebrity fans who have turned up each night: Julia Roberts, the New York Jets’ new quarterback Aaron Rodgers, even Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. But Swift has also made each show a news event by adding two “surprise songs,” often with headline-grabbing guests. On the July day that she put out a music video featuring Taylor Lautner, an ex-boyfriend, the actor backflipped across the stage in Kansas City, Mo., and paid Swift effusive tribute — “not just for the singer you are,” Lautner said, “but for the human you are.” The crowd registered its approval with an earsplitting roar.The Taylorpalooza extends to every level of the news media, which began the coverage cycle by chronicling Swift’s ticketing fiasco last November, when fans — and scalpers’ bots — crushed Ticketmaster’s systems, leading to a heated Senate Judiciary hearing. Since then, seemingly no nugget of Swift news has escaped coverage, from the stars in the stands to oddities like a Seattle concert that, according to one researcher, shook the ground with an intensity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake.Music critics have portrayed the Eras Tour as showing Swift at the top of her game as a media-savvy, big-tent talent, a pop star with a knack for grand spectacle as well as the polished artistry of a classic songwriter.Shania Twain, the country-pop star whose career in some ways prefigured Swift’s, caught the Las Vegas stop of the Eras Tour, a 44-plus song production that goes as long as three and a half hours. She praised Swift’s “beautiful balance” of high-tech stagecraft and intimate performance segments. “I have to applaud her,” Twain said in a telephone interview. “As a performer, I know that work that goes into it.”The power of Swift’s fan army — and fear of crossing the star, or even appearing to — has kept nearly all of the press about the tour sunny. Though some fans (and parents) balked at the ticket prices and challenges of securing seats, most frustration was directed squarely at Ticketmaster, not Swift. After a few weeks of headlines romantically linking Swift with a frontman some fans considered to be problematic, reports spread in the celebrity pages that they had split. (Swift’s representatives declined to comment for this article.)For fans, the shows are a pilgrimage, and a rediscovery of the joys of mass gatherings. Flights are packed with Swifties, and travelers trade stories and compare outfits — drawn from looks associated with Swift “eras” — in stadium corridors and parking lots. In Kansas City, the comedian Nikki Glaser was attending her eighth show, a commitment that she estimated has cost her $25,000.“This year I decided not to freeze my eggs,” Glaser said. “I’m going to put that money toward the thing I love most in the world, which is Taylor Swift.”Swift’s fans buy tour merchandise outside the stadium before a show in New Jersey.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesBefore Eras, Swift hadn’t been on tour since 2018. And her catalog has grown by seven No. 1 albums since then, fueled in part by three rerecorded “Taylor’s Versions” of her first LPs — a project hailed by Swift’s fans as a crusade to regain control of her music, though it is also an act of revenge after the sale of Swift’s former record label, a move that, she said, “stripped me of my life’s work.”“Folklore” and “Evermore” expanded her palate into fantastical indie-folk and brought new collaborators into the fold: Aaron Dessner from the band the National and Justin Vernon, a.k.a. Bon Iver, rock-world figures who helped attract new listeners.The other major tour this year that is enticing fans to book transcontinental flights, and to show up costumed and in rapture, is also by a woman: Beyoncé, 41, whose Renaissance tour is a fantasia of disco and retrofuturism. Like Swift, she is also a trailblazing artist-entrepreneur, maintaining tight control over her career and fostering a rich connection with fans online. Together with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a critique of the patriarchy told in hot pink, they are signs of powerful women ruling the discourse of pop culture.But in music, at least, the scale and success of Swift’s tour is without equal. Later this month, after completing 53 shows in the United States, she will kick off an international itinerary of at least 78 more before returning to North America next fall. Beyoncé’s full tour has 56 dates; Springsteen’s, 90. (Recently, Harry Styles wrapped a 173-date tour in arenas and stadiums, grossing about $590 million.)Outside Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, fans posed for selfies and shared their ticketing ordeals. Esmeralda Tinoco and Sami Cytron, 24-year-old former sorority sisters, said they had paid $645 for two seats. A stone’s throw away, Karlee Patrick and Emily DeGruson, both 18 and dressed as a pair in angel/devil costumes after a line in Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” sat “Taylorgating” at the edge of the parking lot; they said they had paid $100 for parking but couldn’t afford tickets.As Swift’s opening acts finished, the crowd rushed in. Glaser, the comedian, later said that of the eight shows she had been to, her favorites were the ones where she had brought her mother — and converted her to Swiftie fandom.“Everyone is in love with her,” Glaser said her mom told her after one show in Texas. “Now I get it.” More

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      ‘While We Watched’ Review: India on the Brink

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      This documentary about the veteran broadcast journalist Ravish Kumar is less an inspiring tale than a wake-up call for India.In the opening moments of Vinay Shukla’s documentary “While We Watched,” its subject, the veteran Indian news anchor Ravish Kumar, stands in a partly demolished building and wonders, “When you find yourself all alone, whom do you listen to?”For one of the few high-profile journalists in India who has dared to speak truth to power — undeterred by falling ratings, death threats and a government increasingly hostile to a free press — this is nothing less than an existential crisis. What, indeed, does a journalist committed to being the voice of the people do when it seems he might be talking just to himself?“While We Watched” follows Kumar at his job at NDTV, an influential cable TV station, from 2018 to 2021 (a year before it was acquired in a hostile takeover by a billionaire). The documentary is less an inspiring tale than a sobering wake-up call. The camera stays close to Kumar’s face, which wears a crumpled look of resignation as he and his underfunded team strive to reaffirm democratic ideals amid a storm of rabble-rousing rhetoric from competing media outlets that demonize dissent and stoke Islamophobia. The movie unfolds like an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” with brisk edits immersing us in the high-stakes, fast-paced and low-reward realm of independent news.Kumar is the voice of reason to many Indians; to see him so vulnerable is unsettling, though it makes his persistence all the more impressive. Shukla is a little too enamored of his subject, so that political and bureaucratic details fade into a somewhat monotonous, stylized tale of man against world. Yet Kumar’s humility and eloquence ensure that the film never slips into hagiography — instead, it lingers as a lament and a battle cry.While We WatchedNot rated. In English and Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ Review: Ukrainian City Under Siege

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      While the Ukrainian city was under siege by Russian forces, a team of journalists recorded the brutal war, resulting in this essential documentary.Everyone else was gone: the authorities, the aid workers, the other journalists too. One week into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was still in the port city of Mariupol, watching from a high floor of a hospital as a tank emblazoned with a white Z pulled up alongside. Smoke kept rising, bitter and black, from the shelled housing blocks a short distance away. There was no way out. Mariupol was surrounded now. Chernov kept his cameras rolling.“20 Days in Mariupol,” a relentless and truly important documentary, engulfs us in the initial ferocity of Russia’s siege of a city whose name has become a byword for this war’s inhumanity: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol. The A.P. journalists were the last from an international news organization in the city, and for three weeks they documented pregnant women fleeing a bombed maternity hospital, the elderly and the displaced boiling snow to obtain fresh water, the freshly dug ditches where children’s corpses were laid to rest. The reporting would win Chernov, along with his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinnant, this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service, but because internet connections were sparse to absent in the city, Chernov could only transmit a small fraction of his footage during the siege. It all comes out in “20 Days in Mariupol,” in which the battle to survive in southeast Ukraine becomes entwined with the struggle to tell the world what’s happening.This film is very hard to watch, and so it should be, though its episodic structure makes it somewhat easier to endure: Day 1 through Day 20, one at a time, from the first bombs to the team’s flight to safety. On the morning of Feb. 24, Chernov and his colleagues head toward Mariupol, a city of half a million people on the Sea of Azov, and drive by Ukrainian military bases whose antiaircraft systems are burning — the first Russian targets, to prepare the path of their war planes. Many residents doubted the violence would reach Mariupol, and evacuation trains were leaving the city half-empty. Now we follow them into improvised shelters: a cold cellar, a CrossFit gym. “I don’t want to die,” says one young boy. “I wish it would all end soon.”But by Day 4 the fighter jets are overhead, and Chernov is stationed at one of Mariupol’s remaining open hospitals, about a mile from the front line on the edge of the city. He’s there when an ambulance rushes up, and paramedics perform C.P.R. on a 4-year-old girl named Evangelina, severely injured after a Russian shell landed near her home. The medics race her to the modest emergency room, where her blood pools on the floor as they try, and fail, to resuscitate her. (Chernov blurs out her face here, though The A.P. published uncensored images at the time.) “Keep filming,” the head doctor insists — and a minute later, we see the same footage of the doctors at work in grainy reproduction on an MSNBC broadcast and Britain’s ITV News.This blending of high- and low-resolution video registers is a critical tool of Chernov and his editor, Michelle Mizner of “Frontline,” who in many chapters of “20 Days in Mariupol” suture together three kinds of imagery. First comes drone footage of the city — its Khrushchev-era housing blocks, its huge Azovstal steel plant — whose devastation becomes more visible as winter passes to spring. Then follows unique documentation of the war’s early atrocities, shot on high-definition video, but often askew or rocky as Chernov runs after a hospital gurney or flees from the aim of snipers. Finally, at the end of many days, the footage repeats as broadcasts on CBS News, France 24, Deutsche Welle and other AP clients.Even if they feel a touch self-congratulatory, these rebroadcasts underscore two things: the rarity of Chernov’s footage, and the immense challenge of getting it out of Mariupol. The port city’s internet is basically gone by Day 11, when the Russians blockade it from all three sides, and the A.P. journalists risk their lives to hunt for wireless connections after curfew. And there is the matter of Chernov’s nationality. Though he has covered wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, he is a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and as he whispers at the start of the film, “I have no illusions about what will happen to us if we are caught.”Day 20 comes, and with it a harrowing drive past a dozen Russian checkpoints, with the journalists hiding cameras and hard drives under the seats. One day later, on March 16, 2022, Russian forces bomb the city’s Drama Theater, where hundreds of adults and children have taken shelter. This documentary is more, therefore, than a unique record of particular crimes; it’s a synecdoche for a much larger atrocity, and a model of how we discover the larger truth of war in images of one hospital, one grave, one child.“With every new war, the ethics of war photography are debated again,” regretted the Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko in a recent essay on our self-serving doubt of depictions of horror, made acuter through Russia’s parallel disinformation campaigns. The only moral question before us is whether we take these images seriously, or whether, with a skepticism also known as cowardice, we turn away.20 Days in MariupolNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How MTV Broke News for a Generation

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      MTV News bridged a gap between news and pop culture without talking down to its young audience. As it prepares to shut down, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway Calloway and others reflect on its legacy.A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.Boxers or briefs?“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”SuChin Pak, left, an MTV News correspondent, with Fergie, of the rap group the Black Eyed Peas, and Snoop Dogg. Ms. Pak said of MTV News, “We were the kids elbowing in.”Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter that is preparing to file for bankruptcy, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.MTV was able to corner a young audience who could name the entire catalog of the band Flock of Seagulls but also had a curiosity about current events, he said.The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.” But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Mr. Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Mr. Thompson said.“It was live TV at its best, I suppose, for an awful event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “elevate the conversation” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do so with credibility.“MTV News took news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure that we kept integrity in what we did.”Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio program on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level when he was sitting in the Blue Room of the White House with President Barack Obama.“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would take it this far?’ I never thought that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we would be able to have a discussion through hip-hop culture that resonates on a global basis,” Mr. Calloway said. “That’s because of MTV News.”From its inception, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that first hand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” get-out-the-vote campaign, and in the White House.“People were very earnest and sincere in wanting young people to be educated voters, not just willy-nilly, get anybody to the ballot box,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were informed.”For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, being able to connect with a younger audience was made easier because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the intifada and going to Bosnia to follow American troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity most of the time lined up with what the audience wanted to hear about.”During a town hall-style forum on MTV in 1994, President Bill Clinton was famously asked about his preference in underwear.Diana Walker/Getty ImagesThat rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.“A lot of people were getting their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms. Pak said. “For all of us it was, OK, what is the audience, what’s our way in here that feels true? You do that by sitting down with them versus standing over them.” More

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      in Television

      John Roland, Durable Anchor at Fox Flagship in N.Y., Dies at 81

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      For a quarter-century, he was the face of the kinetic 10 p.m. news program that typically beat its rivals in the ratings.John Roland, the Emmy Award-winning anchor of the 10 p.m. newscast on Fox’s flagship station and a dependable fixture on local television news in New York for 35 years, died on Sunday in North Miami Beach, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of a stroke, his wife, Zayda Galasso, said.While Fox 5’s nightly newscast began with the ominous query, “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” Mr. Roland was a reassuring presence during the quarter-century that he anchored the weeknight program, from 1979, when he succeeded Bill Jorgensen, who was lured to WPIX-TV, until just before he retired in 2004. The program typically topped the ratings at that hour for TV news.“John was very likable, not a formidable presence like Bill Jorgensen,” Ted Kavanagh, the station’s news director from 1968 to 1974, said in an email. “He was more a Jimmy Stewart type. An American Everyman that somehow finds himself thrust into the limelight and makes a surprisingly strong impression.”One of Mr. Roland’s co-anchors, Judy Licht Della Femina, who described herself as “the first female anchor in Channel 5’s history,” said, “Back when it had a pretty gritty, testosterone-laden newsroom, John was there to protect me. He looked out for me.”John Roland Gingher Jr. was born in Pittsburgh on Nov. 25, 1941, to John and Marian Gingher. His father was a foundry inspector.After graduating from California State University at Long Beach in 1964, Mr. Roland began his career in broadcasting as a researcher for NBC News in Los Angeles in 1966 and abbreviated his name.As a reporter for KTTV, a Metromedia station there, he covered Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 and the trial of Charles Manson, who was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in 1971 for the deaths of seven people, including the film actress Sharon Tate.In 1969, Mr. Roland was hired as a political reporter by Metromedia’s sister station, WNEW in New York (now Fox’s WNYW). He also worked as a weekend anchor and produced a cooking feature before being promoted to weeknight anchor.In 1983, Mr. Roland made news when he disarmed one of three robbers who tried to hold up a restaurant on East 67th Street in Manhattan opposite Fox’s broadcast center. He shot one with the robber’s own gun, but was hit over the head with a pistol. He needed 36 stitches to close the wound.In 1986, he became a partner in an Upper East Side restaurant, Marcello, which was awarded two stars in a review by Bryan Miller of The New York Times.Mr. Roland was briefly suspended in 1988 after a heated on-air interview with Joyce Brown, a mentally ill homeless woman whose involuntary commitment to a mental hospital for treatment had been successfully challenged by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Roland had encountered Ms. Brown, who also went by the name Billie Boggs, before her incarceration; she had lived in front of a hot air vent near the television station.The interview grew combative when Mr. Roland challenged Ms. Brown’s assertion that she had never needed any hospital care; he cited her behavior in the streets that he had witnessed and found offensive. The station was flooded with complaints, as well as calls of support for Mr. Roland.He was suspended, a spokesman for the station said, because during the interview “his emotions prevailed over objectivity.” He later apologized on the air and in a phone call to Ms. Brown and said his interview had been “very insensitive.”Mr. Roland won two local Emmy Awards, in 1976-77 as a writer on the Sunday 10 p.m. news, and in 1981-82, which he shared with colleagues on the weeknight news broadcast.He appeared as an anchor in the films “Hero at Large” (1980), “Eyewitness” (1981) and “The Object of My Affection” (1998), and as himself in “The Scout” (1994).Mr. Roland was married four times. In addition to Ms. Galasso, he is survived by a brother, Ronald; a stepdaughter, Natasha; and a step-granddaughter.He left the 10 p.m. slot in 2003, anchoring newscasts at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. until he retired in 2004.“I want to thank you for inviting me into your home for all these years,” he said from the anchor desk on his last broadcast. “It’s an invitation I never took for granted and always considered an honor.” More

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      in Television

      King Charles’s Coronation: A British TV Spectacle for the Digital Age

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      King Charles III’s coronation will be disseminated across numerous platforms to a less sympathetic public than when his mother was crowned in 1953.The mystique around the British royal family — so essential to the nation’s acceptance of its hereditary and privileged first monarchy — has always drawn its power from a blend of secrecy and symbolism that combine in impeccably choreographed spectacle.On Saturday, the regal alchemy will be conjured anew at King Charles III’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in London. The spectacle has been years in the planning, not simply as an event in its own right, but also as a moment in history intimately entwined with its onscreen projection around Britain and across the globe.The coronation will be the first since Charles’s mother, Elizabeth II, who died in September, was crowned in June 1953. Hers was the first coronation to be transmitted live and in full at a time when televisual broadcasting was still a novelty, and it initiated a long era of increasingly close coordination between Buckingham Palace and the BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster.Areas for the media to use during Charles’s coronation have been erected in front of Buckingham Palace. The event will be projected around Britain and across the globe.Press Association via AP ImagesAnti-royalists have complained bitterly that, as Graham Smith, the head of a campaigning organization called Republic, said in a recent statement: “The BBC routinely misrepresents the monarchy and public opinion. They suggest the nation is celebrating major events when that simply isn’t the case.”While the BBC rejects these claims of partiality, there is little doubt that as digital technology has advanced over many years, the broadcaster’s royal coverage has become ever more sophisticated and comprehensive. The medium, in other words, has facilitated a kind of blanket coverage of a message that would not have been possible in the 1950s.In 1953, the queen’s coronation unfolded in a nation in thrall to a newfangled miracle called television. British baby boomers, many of them small children at the time, like to recall that television in those days meant a small black-and-white screen in a large wooden cabinet broadcasting a single channel. The British establishment — including its nobles and priests, as well as the BBC — wielded exclusive control of the monochrome footage that would mold a generation’s memory of the event.Makeshift antennae were thrown up on hilltops to link the various parts of the British Isles to the central broadcast unit in London. In the presatellite, predigital era, British Royal Air Force bombers flew raw film of the coronation across the Atlantic for broadcast on American networks.In New York in 1953, crowds gathered around televisions broadcasting the queen’s coronation. British Royal Air Force bombers flew raw film of the event across the Atlantic for American networks.Getty ImagesSome members of the British hierarchy wished to keep cameras out of the inner sanctum of Westminster Abbey, where the queen was crowned. “The world would have been a happier place if television had never been discovered,” the Most Rev. Geoffrey F. Fisher, then the archbishop of Canterbury, who presided over the queen’s coronation, was quoted as saying.Even today, King Charles has resolved to follow his mother’s example by banning cameras from what is considered the most sacred part of the coronation service, in which he is anointed with what is called the oil of chrism.But much else has changed. When Elizabeth was crowned, “Britain was marked by extreme deference,” Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional expert at King’s College, London, said in a recent interview. “The monarchy was thought to be magical and untouchable.”Since then, the royal House of Windsor has changed radically from “a magical monarchy to a public service monarchy,” Bogdanor said, and “is judged by whether it contributes to society, and if it doesn’t, people won’t have it.” King Charles, he added, seems “well aware of that.”For the king, a helter-skelter technological revolution has transformed every smartphone owner into a pocket cinematographer, hooked to a multiplex world of apps and platforms, uploads and downloads. Where his mother’s crowning bathed the monarchy in uncontested splendor, Charles’s challenge is to focus a much more diffuse spotlight.While Elizabeth’s coronation required only around 20 cameras, Charles’s crowning is set to be broadcast on the BBC’s hi-definition iPlayer streaming service, alongside television coverage. In advance of the coronation, other television offerings — including a soap opera, a sewing program and a show usually devoted to rural life — will be broadcast with coronation-themed episodes “to mark history with an unparalleled breadth of programs,” said Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s chief content officer. Regional affiliates of the BBC, its many radio channels and rival commercial television broadcasters will also have programming on regal matters.With her sparing television addresses and her tight adherence to the royal script, the queen seemed to generally balance the monarchy’s need for visibility with its enduring aversion to scrutiny. But the rest of her family has fared very differently onscreen.“The public eye is grown more unforgiving, its gaze, like its judgments, more relentless,” Catherine Mayer wrote in “Charles: The Heart of a King,” a biography updated last year after its initial publication in 2015. “Even so, if the Windsors wish to see the biggest dangers to the survival of the monarchy, they need only look in the mirror.”From left, Queen Mother Elizabeth, her grandson Prince Charles and his aunt Princess Margaret at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Charles was 4 at the time.Intercontinentale, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince the mid-1990s, when the estranged Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, gave television interviews to seek sympathy for their divergent versions of their marital woes, culminating in divorce in 1996, efforts by members of the royal family to advance their agendas on television have proved ambiguous at best.In 2019, Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth’s second son after Charles, gave a lengthy television interview to try to rebut accusations related to his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The interview set off a public relations disaster, leading to Prince Andrew’s withdrawal from public life.Then, in March 2021, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry appeared in a joint interview with Oprah Winfrey, screened in the United States and then in Britain, after their decision to live in California and step back from their roles as senior royals. The interview touched on a range of topics including mental health issues, intimations of racism in the House of Windsor, and the couple’s sense of dislocation, betrayal and vulnerability.But cumulatively, the airing of grievances, like Prince Andrew’s litany of self-exculpation before it, bolstered the sense of a dysfunctional and anachronistic institution held in place by a fickle mix of public tolerance, inherited privilege and fabled wealth. In the run-up to the coronation, one question eagerly pursued by British newspapers was whether Harry would attend the most important public event in his father’s life on May 6. The answer: he would, but without Meghan and their two children.For Charles, the recent redrawing of the media landscape and the public mood offer perils that were barely dreamed of when his mother was crowned.Charles and his son Prince Harry in 2019. After much speculation in the British press, it was announced that Harry would indeed attend the coronation, but without his wife, Meghan Markle, and their two children.Samir Hussein/WireImage, via Getty Images“Because the royals have ended up co-opted into the culture wars,”‌ Mayer, the author, said‌ in an interview, “one word out of place — and, let’s face it, that’s a family that specializes in words out of place ‌ — will have gone round the world and back in a way it never would have before.”‌ More

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      Drew Griffin, CNN Investigative Journalist, Dies at 60

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      His reporting on delayed care for military veterans at Veterans Affairs hospitals led to the resignation of the secretary of the department.Drew Griffin, an investigative journalist whose reporting for CNN on delayed care at Veterans Affairs hospitals prompted the resignation of the secretary of the department, died on Saturday at his home in the Atlanta area. He was 60.Chris Licht, CNN’s chief executive, announced the death in an email to staff members on Monday. The cause was not immediately made public, but Mr. Griffin had cancer.“Drew’s death is a devastating loss to CNN and our entire profession,” Mr. Licht said. “Drew’s work had incredible impact and embodied the mission of this organization in every way. He cared about seeking the truth and holding the powerful to account.”Mr. Griffin joined CNN in May 2004. During his time with the network, he covered a range of issues, including sexual assault allegations against Uber drivers, fraud claims against Trump University during Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol. His work on the Capitol attack was cited in court filings by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to CNN.Mr. Licht noted that Mr. Griffin “was even working on an investigation until the day he passed away.”In January 2014, Mr. Griffin led a team that investigated the deaths of at least 19 military veterans after their appointments at Veterans Affairs hospitals had been delayed. Thousands of other veterans were experiencing similar delays for treatment.After CNN’s report, Eric Shinseki resigned under pressure as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and other department officials were later fired.“We don’t have time for distractions,” President Barack Obama said at the time. “We need to fix the problem.”CNN’s report earned a Peabody Award, one of the most prestigious recognitions in television and radio, in 2014. The reporting also earned an Edward R. Murrow Award.“Our goal in this reporting wasn’t just to shed light on this problem,” Mr. Griffin said when accepting the Peabody Award. “We wanted to effect change, to hold these politicians and bureaucrats responsible.”Mr. Griffin also earned a National Press Foundation Award in 2007, and Emmy Awards in 2005, 2006 and 2007, according to CNN.Though Mr. Griffin’s work centered on investigations, he also volunteered to cover breaking news stories, CNN said.In 2017, Mr. Griffin was about to do a live report on Hurricane Harvey from Beaumont, Texas, when a man nearby drove a truck into floodwater. Mr. Griffin and a photojournalist ran to rescue the man from the truck as it began to sink, a moment that was aired live.Andrew Charles Griffin was born on Oct. 21, 1962. His father, Michael James Griffin, served in the Army and later worked as a civil engineer with the Cook County, Ill., Highway Department. His mother, Judith Anne Griffin, was a lawyer.Mr. Griffin earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and began his career in journalism as a reporter and cameraman for WICD-TV in Champaign, Ill. He went on to work in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Washington, according to CNN.In January 1994, Mr. Griffin joined CBS 2 News in Los Angeles, where he was a reporter and anchor, and helped create an investigative reporting team. While working for that organization, Mr. Griffin reported from New York City to cover the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and he earned a number of local awards for his investigative reporting.Mr. Griffin is survived by his wife, Margot; his children, Ele, Louis and Miles; his brothers Peter and Michael; and two grandchildren.Sheelagh McNeill More