Murray Fromson Blogs Again

One of my pet projects over the past few years has been to get Murray Fromson to blog again. I met Murray at USC, he was in his last year teaching journalism and even though I never had a class with him I spent time talking sports, politics, newspapers, Internet, and even broke fast at his place a few Yom Kippur’s ago.

A couple years ago I migrated his blogspot (blogger) blog to wordpress and retrained him for quick and easy posting, but it wasn’t until this week, after he took me to California Wok, that he’s finally kicked his blogging senses back into gear. Apparently he was busy traveling the world and finishing up a book on Lincoln or something. I encourage you to keep up with his posts — they’re great and insightful — and in the near future look for his entries to appear in the Huffington Post.

Check out this colorful intro to Fromson’s well-informed perception of where the Obama campaign stands now, tainted, most naturally, by the general bitterness in the Southern California air surrounding Sam Zell (and company)’s dramatic mismanagement of the LA Times. Then click on and read the rest of the post:

So Barack Obama’s early life was scrambled by his father’s abandonment. Haven’t all of us who endured a similar trauma? It takes years to get over. I know. But is that story worth frontpage treatment plus six columns across half of an inside page of Thursday’s Los Angeles Times? I’m not purposely feeding red meat to Sam Zell who wants to be rid of anything serious running in the diminishing quality of his newspaper. But, as they say, let’s get a life when it comes to campaign coverage. The nationwide decision to print or broadcast every morsel of information about Barack or his confused opponent in the midst of summer is just plain idiotic. Who really cares? Regardless of the bloated news cycle inflicted upon us, can’t we be given some relief? That’s the way things were done in the days of back room politics that I used to cover, and it worked pretty well. Barack should go on an extended vacation, preferably to one of the distant islands of the Pacific that would be deemed to be too far away and certainly too expensive for the cable suits to try and keep up with the erstwhile Democratic candidate.