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From: Jasper
Date: Saturday, August 04, 2007
Time: 06:04:24 AM
Jean, … I hope you’re right. What I’ve seen with Greta over the last decade is more insidious, a slow transformation that she wasn’t aware of rather than a deliberate shift. …………Keep in mind what you said about repetition. Remember the old advertising slogan, “50 million Mexicans can’t be wrong!” Sure they can. But if you hear every day that you’re the only “Mexican” who thinks so – along with some that you know are lunatics, you WILL begin to doubt yourself, no matter how bright you are. It is just common sense that you can’t be the only member of a marching band marching in step, although the truth is, you can be. If you are, you have to change your step to conform unless the out-of-step band leader everyone else is following changes his. ………… When I think about what happened to Greta I think of what happens to frogs when they are put in a comfortable pan of water with the heat rising slowly. If they are tossed into a hot pan of water; they will jump right back out. But if they sit comfortably with the heat rising slowly, they will keep sitting there until they boil to death. Greta the legal analyst never had to sit in the pan while the heat built up. Greta the reporter did. …………. You could tell just by looking at her as a legal analyst during the O.J. criminal trial that her top priority was to lend her expertise to helping the audience sort out the legal substance from the legal show. She had more bad hair days than good ones. She often looked as though she picked her clothes and makeup at random and put them on in the dark. From time to time I could have sworn I saw dandruff on her shoulders. She didn’t always wrap up what she wanted to say neatly because she paid more attention to the subject than the clock. But at the end of the day, if you wanted to learn something significant about the law and the way it was applied in the O.J. case, you couldn’t find a better teacher than Greta. …..……… I never saw that kind of focus with her as a reporter. The fewer bad hair days she had the more superficial her reporting became. The “prettier” she got the more of a conformist she became. Her attention span shrunk to the level of a typical 5-year-old. She starting seeing and saying the obvious with greater and greater clarity while the important “little things” that used to pull her up short became road kill in her haste to get to the next point of superficial value in understanding the story. I didn’t see her caving in. I saw her fitting in by ignoring or forgetting whatever got in the way of her growing popularity.–Jasper