First-rate newspapering on a ukulele?

"Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer." -- Ben Bagdikian

Author of "The Media Monopoly" (1983) and emeritus dean of the journalism school at Berkley, Bagdikian has been a fierce critic of the corporate media for decades. Most local television news he characterizes as "giggle programs, where inane pleasantries bounced back and forth, in between which they say oh yes, there was an ax murder in San Jose." And overall, he told WGBH-TV in Boston, "what we're seeing in the media now is a decrease in hard reporting as a proportion of the whole, and an increase of soft entertainment features -- which are the least expensive to produce and the most revenue producing."

True enough about newspapers. But what about ukuleles? Let's see.

Roy Smeck, a vaudville artist known as the "wizard of strings," demonstrates here what a virtuoso ukulele player sounds like in an old film clip. Now, it is possible to play Bach on the uke. Here's a guy with the screen name "wookiefatcat" playing a Bach prelude in G on the uke. I admire wookiefatcat's, uh, showmanship and decication, so I won't say what I think of the performance, other than to say the ukulele is a very simple instrument. Bach's music isn't simple, though. A clip of the Thomaskirke boys' choir (the same choir Bach directed choir in Leipzig) singing an excerpt from the St. Matthew Passion gives you a better idea of what Leibling was trying to get at.

Later: A blogger named Howlin' Hobbit sends "a little something that might stop the snickering" ... links to YouTube clips of a ukulele player named John King playing "The Washington Post March" (a John Phillip Sousa standard) and, yes, Bach. King's rendition of the Prelude from the Cello Suite, No. 1 (BWV 1007). He made a believer out of me. King's playing is as intricate, to my ears, as classical guitar. Howlin' Hobbit, by the way, has a blog called Ukelele & All That Jazz