Talk:Ed McMahon/Archives/2016

the Wikipedia effect produced a weird, misleading article

I was startled by this strange, morbid article, yet I couldn't say it was malicious intent. It wasn't inaccurate. The problem is that the subject was in his sad decline as Wikipedia emerged, so that the editors inevitably assembled a detailed chronicle of octogenarian misery. Compare McMahon's article with Joe Louis's. Since Wikipedia wasn't around during Joe Louis's decades of decline, the Joe Louis article is all about his fights and his prime. It gives the right feeling of his historical significance. For nearly 40 years, 1962-98, the era of 3-network television, Ed McMahon was a jovial presence in American lives-- a daily presence in a way no one can be now. During the worst years of the Vietnamese war, and the associated cultural upheaval, a lot of the country checked in with Carson and McMahon, unflappable representatives of the WWII generation, before falling asleep at night. Nothing in this gloomy article is untrue, it is simply so incomplete as to be misleading. Keep researching.Profhum (talk) 09:44, 1 January 2016 (UTC)