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Page 8 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN September-October 2012 Atlantan’s bar mitzvah project part of a continuum of giving By Jeanie Franco Marx Three years ago, when Jack Morgan, a rising 10th grader at Northview High, decided to train a yellow lab/golden retriever puppy as his bar mitzvah project, he knew he’d made a commitment: to love, teach, and bond with a pup named Tara for 14 months, then give her up to help someone with a disability. It would be a sacrifice, because he loves dogs so much, but if it would benefit someone else, he was ready to do it. Tara went to class twice a week for more than a year. “Every Thursday night, Jack was in charge of taking Tara to class,” reports his mother, Marci Morgan. The whole family participated in raising Tara, but Marci and Jack were the primary caregivers. After more than a year of getting attached to Jack and his family, Tara spent another year in training with Canine Companions for Independence—first in Orlando and then in Santa Rosa, California—to determine what type of person she would be best suited for. Eventually, the Morgans, of Johns Creek, Georgia, learned about filmmakers Tami Pivnick and Susan Broude, of Sedona, Arizona, who adopted Tara in January 2011. Tami is hearing impaired; she reads lips but cannot hear the phone or doorbell ring. But Tara can. She knows how to let Tami know whether it’s her cell phone or the doorbell; she also alerts Tami to emergency sirens, smoke detectors, and signal from appliances such as the microwave, washer, and dryer. “Tara responds to different sounds,” says Tami, as Tara rests on her feet. “She also lets me know when Susan is calling me from the other side of the house.” This dog is food-trained, Tami explains. “We withhold food, because she must be within a certain weight. She’s an athlete; she’s always working.” If someone knocks at the door, she’ll poke Tami. “She usually goes to the door first, then comes and gets me.” The couple was in town, at Atlanta’s Sophia Academy, to preview their powerful documentary, Bullied to Silence, a visual and emotional journey into the lives of teens who’ve been bullied and scarred for life. “It also presents the bully and goes beyond the tragedies of ruined lives to offer a message of hope,” says Susan. “This film offers the viewer a chance to be a catalyst for change, to stop the verbal and cyberbullying.” All film participants are willing to consult with any troubled teen. Some of those who did not survive their trials by bullies still live through stories told by family and friends. The filmmakers seek funding to give their film “legs,” so it can travel to schools everywhere. They hope to teach educators, parents, and students about the seriousness The Morgan family with Tara: (front, from left) Dick, Marci, and Michael; (back) Jack of bullying, in order to stop this continuum of pain. At the Atlanta screening, when the film ended, there was silence, then everyone applauded and many were emotional. Questioning hands went up all over the auditorium. “What do you do when a teacher allows bullying?” asked one student. Another admitted to being bullied at school. “Are any of these bullies in this room?” asked the filmmaker. “Yes,” he replied. “It’s never about you,” Susan explains. “It’s about the bully needing to feel good about himself or herself. Find a way to be heard,” she urges. “Take responsibility. Report it.” Full circle: Jack Morgan gets a long-awaited visit from Tara, the puppy he trained to be a service dog Susan Broude, Tami Pivnick, Tara, Jack Morgan, and Marci Morgan The duo finished the film in a year, working 16-hour days, seven days a week. “The worst kind of bullying is any bullying, if it hurts you inside,” says Susan. “The most important thing to do is not to stay silent. If you do, you start to disappear.” For information, visit www.bulliedtosilence.com. After the film’s preview, Tara’s two families finally met. There were hugs and thanks all around, and Tara sniffed and got excited, reacquainting herself with her first family. Jack Morgan’s bar mitzvah project had come full circle. Instead of just receiving gifts, he gave a gift—one that keeps on giving.
September-October 2012 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN Page 9 The news, then and now: a conversation with Bob Bahr BY George Jordan This Rosh Hashanah, when Bob Bahr looks out over the congregation at Shema Yisrael—The Open Synagogue, where he has led High Holidays services for the last five years, he’ll be speaking to a very different audience from the one he had for nearly 25 years as an award-winning writer, producer, and news executive at CBS News, in New York, and later at CNN, in Atlanta. As I learned when we sat down to talk, he’s seen a lot of changes. What were your impressions of CBS News when you worked there in the ‘70s? I had begun my career as a foreign correspondent in London, for Westinghouse Broadcasting, which owned an important chain of television and radio stations in the United States. When I returned to New York as a reporter and producer at CBS News, the three broadcast networks dominated what Americans saw and heard about America. CBS was at the top of the heap, with a nightly half hour newscast that was headed by what some considered, then, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite. Just how trusted he was is clearly outlined in an excellent new biography. He was surrounded by a team of experienced and capable journalists, many of them Jewish-Americans. They included Daniel Schor, Marvin Kalb, Bernard Kalb, Mike Wallace, Leslie Stahl, Morley Safer, Mort Dean, Robert Schakne, and Murray Fromson, to name just a few. Behind the scenes, the producer of “The Evening News” was Sanford Socolow, and the producer of “60 Minutes” was Don Hewitt. When I arrived there, William S. Paley, who had started the company in 1926 with the money his Russian Jewish immigrant parents had made in the cigar business, was still active in running the company. He had helped to guide CBS News to the influential role it had played for decades. A keen competitor in the business of commercial broadcasting, he was justifiably proud of what the press often called CBS in those years, the “Tiffany Network.” There was a special aura around the CBS Broadcast Center, at Tenth Avenue and 57th Street, where both the “CBS Evening News” and “60 Minutes” were produced. When I walked in there for the first time, it was like walking into a sacred shrine. Working alongside men who had become popular icons in everyday life and were shaping American public opinion every day was heady stuff for a 26-year-old journalist, like myself, just back from London. You worked for the national CBS News operation in Atlanta as well, didn’t you? When I moved to Atlanta to continue my career at the CBS News office here, in the mid-‘70s, Ted Turner was just beginning his rise as the owner of WTBS, a local Atlanta station, which had its office on West Peachtree Street, downtown. He was one of the first to realize the power that new technology held for popular entertainment generally and for broadcasting in particular. WTBS became the Superstation, as Turner renamed it, when he rebroadcast the station’s programs around the country by satellite. A few years afterward, he took advantage of the rapid growth of cable television and the new technologies that came with it, to start CNN in what had been the old Progessive Club, one of Atlanta’s Jewish country clubs, on Techwood Drive, just north of 10th Street. The old clubhouse, with not many changes, housed CNN’s first offices. Downstairs, they added a cheap steel building for studios and built an antenna farm for the many satellite transmissions that came in there. Today, Time- Warner, which bought out Turner several years ago, has built a huge production facility there. What has been the impact of new technology on the way we view the news? CBS didn’t take the new challenge of CNN very seriously at first, nor did many others. It was several years before CNN was granted full broadcast press privileges at the White House, for example. The Internet was still a few years off, and high-speed satellite and DSL cable to bring it all into the home were even farther off. But it was CNN’s Ted Turner, not CBS’s Bill Paley, who was the ultimate visionary of broadcasting’s future in the late decades of the 20th century. The days that I, a CBS News reporter, could stand in a cornfield in Iowa and know that the story I was working on that day might be seen by a hundred million people in America who had access to the CBS Evening News are long over. The three major broadcast networks helped to define us as Americans during much of the latter half of the 20th century. They helped to shape a national consensus on such crucial issues as our role in the world and our obligations to one another and to those who have not always been full partners in the American dream. Today, that’s all been scrambled and fragmented. How have news and journalism changed since then? News gradually has become not something you sit around watching only during the dinner hour but something you watch whenever you want. Sitting at a computer keyboard today, you can make the news yourself. There are said to be over seventy million blogs, reg- ularly written by people all over the world. Facebook, Google, and YouTube are literally responsible for revolutionary changes in the way people see themselves, as citizens of America and the world. The PR industry has gained an enormous influence. At the same time, as technological changes and changes in American life have contributed to the decline of the broadcast networks as unchallenged opinion makers, the corporations that own the networks are still a powerful economic force. CBS earnings in the first quarter of 2012 were up 80%. The head of CBS, Les Moonves, a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx, last year took home an astonishing paycheck of nearly $70 million dollars. Of course, it helps the bottom line when you leave most of the serious cultural and documentary production in America to public broadcasting and the people at CNN. The networks are working very hard to play technological catch-up. You may not watch the CBS News like you used to or pay much attention to the present anchor of the CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley, but CBS still dominates many of the hours we spend each day watching entertainment, whether on the Internet, smartphones, cable and satellite, or traditional broadcasting. CBS still owns a large group of very profitable local stations, including WUPA, channel 69, in Atlanta. It also owns Showtime, Movie Channel, and Bob Bahr another broadcast network, with Time- Warner, the CW Network. A few years ago, it spun off Viacom, which owns a long list of cable channels from MTV to Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. It owns a couple of dozen cable channels in all, as well as Paramount studios. NBC News has recently reorganized its news division to incorporate the cable channels it owns, MSNBC and CNBC. CNN is also a part of a vast media blockbuster. In his new memoir, Dan Rather lays out in stark detail just how deep these connections have become between huge modern corporations, individual politicians, and the political process. How people get their news, how news is shaped and defined, and how people use it is not nearly as simple as it once seemed to be. The bottom has fallen out of the newspaper business, and, according to the most recent surveys, so has our confidence in newspapers. Only 25% of us trust them; that’s half of what it was thirty years ago. Same thing with TV news—only 21% trust what we see on TV. As Americans, we’re probably less trusting of one another too. Where’s all this leading? Well, at one time, the broadcast networks’ news operations stood for authority. Today the greatest casualty of communication technology is authority, the hierarchies that support authority, and individual authority figures. In such diverse fields as medicine, religion, education, business, and politics, authority has been undermined. And because it’s happening so fast, it’s causing great turmoil. We just don’t seem to agree on how to reconstitute authority in our new age. In short, Walter Cronkite is gone, and he’s not coming back. Beryl H. Weiner is one of the early contributors to The Jewish Georgian. The following is a poem that he composed with the assistance of his wife, Eleanor Weiner, as a memorial to his friend Dr. Robert L. Bunnen. Much More I pray for my friend of seventy years awaiting an angel to soothe the pain, Relieve the suffering, which he bears with all the courage of any soldier. God, please let him enjoy another spring with its beauty - dogwoods, azaleas, gardenias, hydrangeas and much more. Bob is a friend and much more, as close as a family member, my brother, my cousin, my in-law. A mench? Much more. Much more than a dental specialist, a gentleman who always extends kindness and gentleness to everyone he meets, An athlete, like a tennis pro, who could teach much. Bob is a generous philanthropist and a man of impeccable integrity, always maintaining high standards in all of his endeavors. Much more than that, he is a father, a grandfather, a husband and a role model as a family man. God bless you, Bob Bunnen.
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