"If you are the kind of person who would have loved owning a car in 1910, believing that the new worlds a vehicle would open outweighed the need to change a tire every 10 miles or crank the engine by hand, then HDTV is for you."
-Reporter Eric A. Taub in The New York Times, on the prospective installation troubles facing a consumer of digital TV.
"Fox has also acquired broadcast rights to The Sound of Music, which might require a short preamble explaining to the average America's Most Wanted viewer exactly who the Nazis were and why they are considered bad people."
-Brian Lowry, The Los Angeles Times.
"Watch CNN these days and you might as well be watching, well, the Chicken Noodle Network. The broth is thin, and there aren't many noodles."
-Monica Collins, Boston Herald, on the sparsely populated post-merger CNN.
"On The West Wing, it isn't likely that C.J., Ainsley or anyone else will be mistaken for the sex-obsessed women of Sports Night or Temptation Island. But there are other ways to degrade women without making them sex objects, and Sorkin seems to have embraced them all with the fervor of a man who resents it when women are allowed to have even the teensiest bit of control."
-John Levesque of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, charging that The West Wing's creator and executive producer, Aaron Sorkin, has taken a borderline misogynistic turn with the show's female characters.
"How could I possibly have forgotten that Vince McMahon is a great man, a patriot and a defender of the purity of athletic competition? Must be all these steroids I take."
-Steve Johnson, the Chicago Tribune, replying to an XFL fan's indignation at the columnist's criticism of the football league's flamboyant founder.
"The media elite think they're smarter than the rest of those stupid bastards, and they'll tell you what to think. To a working-class guy, that's bulls-t."
-Fox News chief Roger Ailes responding to charges that his network is promoting a GOP agenda, as reported in Newsweek.
"You had to figure if there was money to be made in reality television, it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump tried to cash in."
-E! Online's Emily Farache on the real-estate mogul's proposed Billionaire game show.
"We firmly believe that our viewers recognize that hunting and fishing as a means of sustenance have been acceptable since the dawn of time."
-CBS published statement as printed in Connecticut's Hartford Courant. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has charged the network with cruelty to animals after a a recent episode of Survivor: The Australian Outback featured the stabbing of a pig.
"The goal is to present regular people with regular problems a way to examine those things. Don't think this is going to be an 'I've been sleeping with my brother's girlfriend'kind of show. That is never going to happen."
-Iyanla Vanzant to The Philadelphia Inquirer's Annette John-Hall. This fall Vanzant's talk show, Iyanla, will be syndicated by Buena Vista.
Open Mike
Editor:
Your article "Expansion on hold" (Feb. 19, 2001) gave the incorrect impression that AT&T Broadband is losing interest in providing local phone service to consumers. In fact, as we said in January, when we announced our fourth-quarter results, we expect to add more phone customers this year than we did in 2000.- Daniel E. Somers, President & CEO, AT & T Broadband
