Tonight on The Daily Show,
Brian Williams, NBC nightly news.
William C Rhoden, author of
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete and NY Times sports columnist, is
Stephen Colbert's guest.
Plus, color! Too bad so many colors clash with orange...
Brian Williams, NBC news. Not, let me make clear, Brian Williams, Canadian sportscaster; Brian Williams, top-rated scrabble player; Brian Williams, rocket scientist; or any of the numerous Brian Williamses: athletes, artists (or "artisans"), academics or computer geeks with webpages. Most emphatically not Brian Williams, tarot renaissance man or Brian Williams, master brewer, because they're both dead. And at that point I stopped googling...
Brian Williams has been on TDS four times since his ascension to the anchor-ship was announced. It seems he's the dean of network news, good looking (despite a crooked nose), and a Taurus. Strangely, I didn't find him on any frivolous online "best smile" kind of lists, maybe because he's married -- or perhaps it's the gravitas (although there was that one site promising nude pictures...) He's got a collection of Emmys, a Peabody, and a blog (in today's entry, he calls the CT-Sen primary "the first real campaign of the Viral Video Age. This amounts to a film festival for the YouTube set," linking to slate. No spazeboy shout-out, though). Checking in with some of my favorite online resources, MediaMatters makes both positive and critical comments, but Jossip and The Onion have stronger views. From what I recall, he's no comedian, but he does seem to have a sense of humor. |
William C. Rhoden is a NYTimesSelect sports columnist and author (and he's shown up on ESPN) (I didn't find anyone sharing his name). Also a jazz fan. His second book, Forty Million Dollar Slavesoffers a charged assessment of the state of black athletes in America, using the pervasive metaphor of the plantation to describe a modern sports industry defined by white ownership and black labor. (Publishers Weekly, via Amazon) He's done a variety of interviews (PBS, NPR, CNN, Essence) on his book tour, and there have been quite a few reviews published (NYTimes, LATimes, wbur.org, SI, Dallasblack.com). While the reviews each have quibbles, they're all mainly respectful. I think it'll be fun to see Colbert going after this. I wonder if he'll become Stephen's New Black Friend (once it's pointed out to him that the guy's black. Because Stephen doesn't notice such things, of course).
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