"In the real world, Mr. Trump is a former president who lost an election and has been denying it ever since."

"In the dock, he is a defendant required to submit to the proceedings of law. He is a courtroom sketch, rendered in two shaky dimensions, with hooded eyes and a glum look. But outside the court, he recasts himself as the defiant fighter. Appearing on camera at his own properties, arrayed in flags, he is in control. He is vested with authority. He is, the set dressing seems to suggest, still the president. His appearances may be inaccurate or irrelevant or unhelpful to his legal defense. But they are forceful, a perception he always sought...."

Writes James Poniewozik in "For Donald Trump, the Recriminations Will Be Televised/The former president’s trials aren’t being aired. That isn’t stopping him from turning them into a political reality show" (NYT).

If tomorrow all his things were gone he'd worked for all his life, and he had to start again, with just his children and his wife, he'd thank his lucky stars to be living here today, because the flag still stands for freedom, and they can't take that away....

"If a digital replica of you — without your bothersome need for money and the time to lead a life — can do the job, who needs you?"

Asks James Poniewozik in "We Are All Background Actors/Why should you care about the strikes in Hollywood? Because they are much more than a revolt of the privileged" (NYT). 

You could, I guess, make the argument that if someone is insignificant enough to be replaced by software, then they’re in the wrong business.... 

“We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” Fran Drescher, the actors’ guild president, said in announcing the strike.... 

You may think of Hollywood creatives as a privileged class, but if their employers think about them like this, are you sure yours thinks any differently of you?... 

You may never notice background actors... Yet they’re the difference between a sterile scene and a living one. They create the impression that... there is a full, complete universe....

Poniewozik, the TV critic for the NYT, interweaves 3 themes that I think are quite different and I'd like to separate: 

1. The work done by background actors — how valuable it is to us, the viewers, who ought to want movies and TV shows made with real actors filling out the scenes. 

2. The need to make acting a good enough career with a reliable income for a wide swath of human beings. They'd like to pay you for one day's work, while they scan your face, a face they could then use a million times, instead of hiring a thousand actors a thousand times.

3. The extent to which computers are coming to replace all human workers. Time for all of us to dig in and resist the threat?

Are any — or all — of these concerns enough to outlaw the face-scanning shortcut? Let's keep the 3 ideas separate:

1. If there is aesthetic value to using real background actors, then it's like other aesthetic choices — e.g., shooting on location — that increase the cost of a production. We, the viewers, make the ultimate choice. If we love and lavish money on expensive productions with more elaborate realism, then we might get more of them. But we might also love movies and TV shows that wouldn't be made at all if the costs weren't kept down. 

2. This is the real labor issue. The actors have a union and they are sticking together. And yet Poniewozik's argument is that they are us. How so? 

3. Here, maybe we are all doomed. Is it time to wake up?

Time columnist says James O'Keefe edited his NPR videos unfairly, but the firings speak for themselves.

This piece from James Poniewozik is quite lame:

[Ron] Schiller did say some bad things.... But the short video took them out of context, like a bad reality show, and made them sound worse....

The full video hardly clears Schiller....

O'Keefe did post the full video...

By the time anyone scrutinized his NPR video, O'Keefe had already claimed a scalp and framed the narrative....

Oh, bullshit. If O'Keefe is to blame, NPR should have defended Schiller. It didn't. The full video was there. If it undercut O'Keefe's edit, NPR could have reframed the narrative. Such an effort would have gotten plenty of play in the media. But NPR didn't even try. Of course, O'Keefe put his video together in a strong way to make his point, but he exposed himself to a powerful counterattack... that didn't happen. QED.