Glenn Kubish

Not all conversation bridges are built. Joe Strummer died 10 years ago today. He would have had something to say about Newtown. Maybe he already did.

Wow, things got ugly, and fast, when Piers Morgan interviewed Larry Pratt, the Gun Owners of America executive director, on CNN tonight. The general topic was where Newtown should point American society on the question of gun control. It turned into a yelling match, with Morgan calling Pratt a stupid man, a dangerous man, an idiot, and Pratt openly suggesting that Morgan shared responsibility for the Newtown murders. Those viewers who had clung to the belief that discussion in the electronic public square should be fuelled by opinion intelligently rendered, and respectfully clashed with, came loose and hit the ground during the segment. But, on a few fronts, it was, nonetheless, interesting and insightful. There is an anti-European animus, barely disguised, in Pratt's attack. In his first answer, he cites mass murders in Europe, where the violent crime rate is allegedly higher. Soon after, he mentions murder rates in Europe. Pratt then refers to Morgan's interrupt...

Charlton Heston knew the power of the image. He made his name and his fortune off that knowledge. Long after his marquee days were over, he was still trading on the power of the image. As top gunman in the NRA, he would famously punctuate speeches with the five words – from my cold, dead hands – that became his calling card. But calling card isn't the right term. It comes from the printed word world. Here, Heston is dealing at the more primitive level of the picture. At the end of his infamous 2000 speech to an NRA convention in South Carolina, he stepped back from the podium and was handed a replica Sharps rifle. We know the image. Heston named presidential candidate Al Gore as the enemy of freedom, delivered those five words and held the weapon up to spirited applause. As images go, it was crazy good. Of course, the image was nicely constructed. The weapon, an icon of the American Old West, smelled of nostalgia and freedom. We can ask how much different the image wou...

Let's start on a tight shot of a tweet posted today by CTV National producer Rosa Hwang, who is responding in words to the anger of those offended by some of the pictures and sound they see and hear in coverage of the Newtown murders. Here it is:  Rosa Hwang  ‏ @ RosaHwangCTV For those slamming media coverage of  # Newtown , most reporters are doing their best to be responsible and measured. Many are parents too. I don't know Rosa, but I enjoy her tweets and know where she is coming from. For years I worked in the conventional news media, most of that time in television, much of it helping decide if not exactly what to shoot, then what to air and what would be seen. And I have heard the anger and disbelief and sorrow of viewers who slam the media's coverage of disasters the core of which is human heartbreak. Over the years, I have been yelled at, sworn at, likened to a vulture, a ghoul, a piece of scum, and threatened with physical violence. And it never re...

Tonight on television are images from Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 26 people at an elementary school before killing himself. Most of the murdered are children. They are the unusually usual images. Police officers with leashed dogs. Parents running. Aerial shots of a school surrounded by police tape. The brush is being cleared down the path of familiar questions. Why did this happen? How did it happen? How did the killer get his hands on the guns? Who are the victims? Who are the heroes? Were there warning signs? What will be the damage to the little people who survived? Was the school locked? Is this our reality? Is this due to lack of empathy or a brain disorder? Can these disasters be prevented? What does the Second Amendment say? Will there be copycat crimes? And on and on into tangled arguments that admit of different perspectives. And our hearts are broken. And we are tired. And there are no words. But there have to be words, or else it's the grammar of t...