tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37277986633426482092024-02-20T04:35:46.610-06:00OneJournalistThe view from a life in mediaAyers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-19746367334483141872010-07-28T06:45:00.000-05:002010-07-28T06:45:54.988-05:0092,000 government secrets aren't secret any longerSomething there is that doesn't like secrecy in government.<br />
Democracy. That's what.<br />
Journalism in its moments of freedom can be the strong right arm of government by the people, for the people and of the people.<br />
The other strong arm is a standing army under civilian control.<br />
The result: Conflict, thy name is warrior vs. journalist.<br />
Soldiers have a fundamental right of secrecy to protect their own lives from disclosure of troop movements, tactical strikes before they happen and critical knowledge that would give aid and comfort to an enemy.<br />
Reporters have a fundamental need and right to transmit a broad picture of the battlefield so people will know what their citizen-soldiers are up to and up against.<br />
The proper balance between the competing values of a warring democracy seems intact after a huge test disclosing government secrets from the interminable war in Afghanistan. <br />
We are hearing the predictable screams about lack of patriotism by leakers of secrets.<br />
When values of military good order and the citizen right to know collide, however, you can make a case that it's honorable to publish -- as long as no one gets hurt. <br />
The publication of -- how many? -- 92,000 low-level classified documents from the war in Afghanistan makes me feel better about our balanced freedoms.<br />
The same act must set teeth on edge in the Pentagon.<br />
The price of democracy is bruxism by the generals.<br />
The military-political complex responded to the document disclosure by WikiLeaks in the predictable, quaint way of the past.<br />
"Nothing new...old stuff...threat to national security...could endanger soldiers."<br />
Yeah, well, if the information is obsolete, how can it endanger anyone?<br />
Disclosure provides the Taliban an enemies list, officials say.<br />
Pardon?<br />
You mean to tell me the enemy needs our help to list victims for ambush and assassination and roadside bombs all on its own?<br />
WikiLeaks withheld 15,000 documents until it could redact names of individuals whose lives really could be endangered. <br />
Critics also said the information didn't advance the public debate abut the war. Their point is the benefit didn't outweigh the danger of disclosing stolen secrets.<br />
Actually, we've never had as good a look at the war and the rationale for or against prolonging it still further. That's partly because disclosure coincided with a congressional vote on continued war funding. The leaked secrets proved their worth by that timing alone.<br />
The reporting lacked credibility, another complaint goes, because official sources didn't approve the release of information.<br />
Yeah, well, government never was going to reveal what the leakers did. And Washington itself doesn't enjoy credibility with the people. Too many secrets!<br />
The New York Times, which along with The Guardian in England and Der Spiegel in Germany had a head start on parsing over the secrecy archive, verified information in the trove with its own reporting for the sake of credibility. <br />
Still, a whistle-blowing competitor labeled WikiLeaks an "information vandal."<br />
That's a really nice phrase someone manufactured there. But "information rebel" seems more to the point.<br />
If we're to make our way democratically in this time of information revolution, we'll need more data patriots to do their jobs.<br />
"All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people," The Times quotes the WikiLeaks.org website.<br />
"We believe this scrutiny requires information."<br />
War ordinarily demands secrecy.<br />
But Afghanistan is our longest conflict ever without solid purpose, goals or resolution.<br />
We've waged it with both of our good, democratic arms tied behind our back: It's not the people's war they know enough to understand or to support, and their military mightily labors against treacherous allies who aid the furtive enemy on uncertain moral and geophysical terrain. <br />
We've been climbing the Hindu Kush with a backpack full of dead weight and an ammo pouch filled with rocks.<br />
The transparency WikiLeaks and the cooperating news media strive for should actually help the cause by opening the eyes of Americans. Their involvement then could aid the prosecution of the war or hasten withdrawal.<br />
Resolution at last! One way or another. <br />
Quit grinding your teeth, generals. The armed forces are better off either way. <br />
Oh, it's irksome to government for documents to be compromised -- possibly by a PFC under suspicion. A private first class? Really!<br />
Logic inquires who bears the greater blame -- the leaker or the officials who preside over such a readily compromised treasury of secrets.<br />
The degree of official pique over the publication is a measure of Washington's distance from its own democratic roots.<br />
We have a need to know, we the people do. And government has a need for our informed consent of its wars, if conflicts are to be won.<br />
"Beware the fury of an aroused democracy," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the Nazis in 1942. Ike presided over the secrecy of D-Day to our great joy and success in World War II. But he knew enough to cultivate media so the home front would fall in step behind the military push. <br />
Freedom feeds on disclosure. Oddly, so does war when waged by a people aroused by information.<br />
The equation of secrecy and disclosure balances itself out in a healthy democracy.Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-86882629794096864082010-07-26T07:54:00.000-05:002010-07-26T07:54:10.268-05:00Privacy in Wonderland: We all wonder where it wentShirley Sherrod could bring a libel suit against her tormentor.<br />
She suffered loss of reputation. She suffered job loss. She suffered.<br />
The African-American civil servant in the Georgia office of the U.S. Agriculture Department started a perfectly ordinary week in wonderful anonymity.<br />
But she tumbled into the blogosphere as innocently as Alice assailed by a Mad Hatter and the madding crowd of the right wing wonderland. <br />
Then she emerged with an apology from President Obama, a better job offer from Ag Secretary Vilsack and vilification as racist turned on its head into stoic civil-sainthood. She was never the person portrayed by a blogger.<br />
No wonder there's talk of libel.<br />
The whole case presents itself as a study in the politics of vilification abetted by the digital speed of the modern communication mode measured more by moments than calm reason.<br />
Too many tick-tock white rabbits running down too many media holes. <br />
No wonder lawyer talk is out and about.<br />
A defamation court, however, would have to deal with the fact Ms. Sherrod fell into a Georgia privy but emerged sweet-smelling and clutching the reward of a better job offer and notoriety transformed into celebrity. Where is the damage now? A judge must ask.<br />
How much better for her and for us if she were to bring a privacy suit for being dragged unwilling into false light.<br />
The invasion of her right to keep to herself, do her job and control her own destiny suffered permanent harm. She forever will endure indignity as victim-symbol of quick-trigger misinformation.<br />
Tremble, all you who enter the new world of communication. (That's all of us, if you wonder.)<br />
FOX news and its imitators -- collectively a causative factor in the media climate raining rabid cats and mad dogs all over Shirley Sherrod -- long ago cost us any expectation of fairness and accuracy in public affairs reporting.<br />
Truth is no longer an expectation. <br />
The one comfort any of us might retreat into had been the expectation of privacy: If we were not a public person, "they" couldn't get to us.<br />
The experience of a no-longer-private person in government service shows any of us could suffer the same loss of a basic right. <br />
"They" can get to a nameless, faceless bureaucrat. "They" can get to any of us.<br />
And who is "they?" Anyone with an Internet connection and a story to bait media attention.<br />
A judicial ruling to counter privacy invasion would do our New Media society far more good than libel damages, if any.<br />
We are all Alice, tip-toeing through the media mind-field of sinkholes leading to anguish, not tea parties. Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-75092974337794776402010-07-19T00:01:00.004-05:002010-07-19T06:32:30.466-05:00Get camera. Make documentary. Be a journalist.Documentary film is in.<br />
Reality storytelling is all over HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox.<br />
(What wonderful names we have for our new-style movie distributors! Makes you wonder what would happen if newspapers had catchy names more with the present media age!)<br />
Sundance and filmfests that wish they were Sundance feature documentaries alongside fictional films. The corollary is book publishing where houses are saying new taste turns to non-fiction over fiction.<br />
Narrative non-fiction in book length is some of the best journalism around. <br />
Documentarians who use film to produce journalism deserve the same respect.<br />
Michael Moore, the polemicist filmmaker, doesn't always get a lot of respect because of his ambush interview technique. He gets called names by the executive class of companies and government. They consider themselves his victim more than subject. In truth they make themselves into Moore's camera fodder.<br />
A lot of people chafe under the treatment they get from CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" too. But no denies Morley Safer and Mike Wallace are journalists.<br />
Ken Burns may look like a history documentarian. But his topics -- civil rights, baseball, the national parks -- have an edginess that comes with a point to be made by a journalist. <br />
One weird way to be sure if a media producer is a journalist is to look in federal court.<br />
Joe Berlinger thinks he won a First Amendment ruling on outtakes to his film, "Crude."<br />
Chevron wanted all his unused footage from the documentary about that company's legal fight with Ecuadoreans who allege an oilfield contaminated their water.<br />
Berlinger will have to give up some but not all his film Chevron originally sought from his cutting-room floor. He'll have to meet the legal standard all journalists can face of surrendering material necessary to administer justice in a court of law.<br />
The court by extension established this documentary filmmaker is an investigative journalist as surely as one employed by a newspaper or network in old media days.<br />
Berlinger won the courtroom concession to stand in journalism's ranks by the way he partially won and partially lost the case over what journalists want to think are sacred but are not necessarily -- their notes. <br />
The media industry likes to say it's hard to tell exactly who is a journalist in these new media days. People who believe they control or at least speak for the industry want to control who can be in it.<br />
Like an over-controlling parent, naturally, they are losing control. <br />
With an implied journalism license issued by central-control figures such as media execs and narrow minded journalism practitioners, perhaps not everyone deserves the benefit of the First Amendment, goes that unfortunate logic.<br />
But every citizen does deserve the protection of freedom of expression.<br />
This digital age makes any person with a camera and a computer into a citizen journalist with equal opportunity to be discovered on YouTube if not HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox via Sundance and all the rest.<br />
We all may become documentarians in this ComRev as I call the communication revolution. <br />
In that case we will all be journalists with the same right of free of expression some would reserve only to themselves.<br />
The whole concept sounds as though it would make a good documentary film.<br />
Documentaries are in, you know.Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-13472715959775195602010-07-13T00:01:00.011-05:002010-07-18T16:28:13.016-05:00Fill all the shadowlands with public access sunshineThe export-import trade in First Amendment freedom thrives as an issue, not a sure thing.<br />
Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, went a little beyond his Middle America territory. Al got press and governments in Zambia and Botswana debating the merit of public access to government records.<br />
Funny thing: The Anniston, Ala. schools reporter lamented to me at the same time how handicapped she is by the board of education she covers. Superintendent and elected school officials won't let her see the documents they are working from until after they vote on an issue.<br />
She is unable to alert her online and print audience of the problems under discussion until it's too late.<br />
Her state enacted one of the earliest and best -- on paper -- open records and open meeting laws. She has a supporting attorney general's opinion to wave under the noses of the poobahs of old-school think. Yet the free press values Al Cross promoted in Africa constantly need tending right here all the time, as the education reporter re-discovered.<br />
Maybe Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of expression, as the Bill of Rights states, but local high-pockets work all the time to stymie reporters.<br />
Yes, it's much worse abroad.<br />
As a Fulbright Professor at American University in Bulgaria, I taught journalism in Blagoevgrad at a Stalinist building that previously housed the Communist Party, which was founded on that spot.<br />
My eastern European and near-Asian students included Serbs and Croats, Muslims and Christians from throughout the Balkans and beyond not long after the last war just over the Bulgarian border with Macedonia.<br />
Those journalism students would have loved to struggle against our school board problems instead of contending for their lives in that rough neighborhood.<br />
Tell me I was wrong. The message I taught was to make sure it's worth your own life or personal freedom before you perform American-style journalism in the barely post-communist world as we do in the U.S.<br />
National life is much more what Al Cross had in mind.<br />
He's a friend and colleague. I advise his Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. And we worked together at the old Courier-Journal in Louisville, where Al as chief political writer was always causing the sun to shine in on furtive government and politics.<br />
With an election coming up in Zambia, the current University of Kentucky professor picked the ideal time and the ideal message to propose a U.S.-style Freedom of Information Act.<br />
Not that our FOIA is perfect in every instance of execution.<br />
But it's a good starting point for the ruling-party officials and journalists Al addressed as a guest of the Media Institute of Southern Africa-Botswana.<br />
He was denounced as an outsider, of course, by a lieutenant general who also is the official Zambia spokesperson. That was so expectable as to be ho-hum.<br />
I say there is no "outside" where liberty is concerned. <br />
And Al's message was supported publicly by a leader of the Press Council of Botswana. The gentleman got his point that everyone stands to gain from open records -- not just reporters. <br />
People generally and mistakenly believe press freedom exists only to benefit not average citizens but the relatively few who make their living in media.<br />
Al seems to have spoken over the heads of journalists and public officials to the African public: Plain folk are the ones who always benefit from openness.<br />
That was the whole point of the Alabama education reporter who merely wanted to tell her audience what's going on with the schools they finance for the elected but clandestine school board to run.<br />
Al Cross is a former president of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is quite right to call on American journalists to promote the role of news media in democratic -- and I would add "other" -- societies.<br />
I merely stop short of sending reporters to pointless deaths, Al.<br />
But I am proud to be a part of the freedom export business.<br />
Now, let's talk about importing the value of press access to shadowlands such as the local school board.Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-2947755233356458692010-07-12T00:00:00.007-05:002010-07-12T00:00:04.976-05:00Enlightened journalism feeds the soul and the body"You don't go into a bar to get sober," said Larry Werner.<br />
He wasn't just a common sense drinker.<br />
Larry surfed the wave of consumer reporting that rose in the 1960s and 70s at enlightened newspapers. He developed the beat for The Courier-Journal, which in those days never saw a rising tide in journalism it didn't want to crest from its Kentucky seaside of distinguished publishing.<br />
The separation between news and advertising at papers sliced through media waters sharper than fins on a surfboard. So it was only natural to create a reporting beat that actually worked against advertiser interests.<br />
Today's media have made an, ahem, accommodation.<br />
Always true has been that journalism enjoyed all the ethics it could afford. As publishers and broadcasters and Internet entrepreneurs quest for an elusive, new business model for themselves, the balance shifts from consumer interests to commercial interests.<br />
Truth in advertising, truth in labeling, truth in contracts used to create targets for consumer reporters who honed in on abusive practices like sharks on a surfer's toes.<br />
Their movement reversed the old <i>caveat emptor</i> into "let the huckster beware."<br />
The spirit is willing in broadcast, print and online newsrooms. But the flesh is weakened along with all beat reporting. The economy, you know. And the com-revolt. It's remaking reporter-made news into audience participation news.<br />
Still, the cycles of media attention (let's not put them down as mere fads, shall we?) still function to expand the topics of journalism.<br />
Food journalists are the new consumer reporters. Not recipe writers. Food journalists. Real food. Real journalism.<br />
And the guy at the top of his form is Michael Pollan, author of five books and the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.<br />
Now, he <i>is</i> a common sense drinker. And eater.<br />
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," is the mantra of Pollan's In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto. (Penguin Books, 2008, ppb., $15).<br />
The way he parses those three ideas in 244 pages creates a stylist's model for journalists in developing their ideas. As in The Omnivore's Dilemma and especially The Botany of Desire, the writer's wit is the sucrose that makes the fiber go down. <br />
And the plain talking trinity of concepts -- true food, not much, mostly plants -- hands everybody a flashlight in the grocery gloom of our plentiful but unhealthful eating habits.<br />
If a package says "nutritional," it probably isn't. If a single serving size could feed a half dozen, let those other six people have it. If processed food is the way you get your veggies, roll your grocery cart over to the produce section or better yet to the local farmers market.<br />
Pollan proves we have industrialized and marketed our food chain until it's wrapped around our obese and diabetic necks. What we eat in the way we eat and in the amount we eat it is killing us.<br />
You can't say, "Listen to your Mom," Pollan warns, because corporatization of our corporeal-ty goes back so far it sucked the old girl in too. <br />
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm turned off by the goody-two-shoes admonitions of consumer-ites about "read your insurance contracts" and "mind your peas" and fast food queues.<br />
I don't need baleful finger-wagging or excited arm-waving.<br />
Give me common sense. Pollan does.<br />
He makes my wife's spinach gently braised in olive oil and tossed with mushrooms and chevre with a nice glass of Cabernet on the side go down smoothly because of -- not in spite of -- his scientific reporting. <br />
News organizations rattle their chains, locked into ethical conflicts of interest with grocery ads and cereal commercials and spots for the food web of restaurants -- scene of our crimes against the nourishment of our own bodies.<br />
So Pollan and other food journalists have an impact in counter-intuitive stories that promote healthful eating. Student journalists show an interest in taking up the cause.<br />
Oh, contrarian journalism looks like a drop in the bucket of greasy fried chicken, reprocessed potatoes layered with hydrogenated fats and 20 secret chemical and synthetic additives.<br />
But the history of movements in media is that crusading journalism works when the facts are right, the message is simple and the warning is commonsense.<br />
You don't go into supermarkets and fast food restaurants to get healthy, you know. <br />
<br />
Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-14271452876640411662010-07-09T00:01:00.015-05:002010-07-09T05:33:53.037-05:00Classic lit for soldiers, football players and journalistsBritish boys schools and American military academies assign Homer as must-reading for plebs.<br />
Soft young minds need the bloody joint-crunching of the Trojan War to juice up the impulse to wage war for queen and country or for flag and country.<br />
Classical literature stands as the best military field manual ever written. How violent is the species human. Always has been.<br />
Hand-to-hand combat starts in the mind that transforms what otherwise would be the anti-romantic, organized maiming of enemies into socially acceptable pretense of civility.<br />
War is what Carl von Clausewitz called diplomacy by other means. How politically correct-sounding.<br />
The NFL is gladiator society that will do until we next demonize another foreign enemy and set upon him with spear or pike or bayonet.<br />
We have to be taught to hate, says a line in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.<br />
Nah.<br />
We have to be taught to transform hatred into battle and to settle between wars for their somewhat milder alternative, American football.<br />
All the tactics and strategy and attempts to intellectualize the game -- or the battlefield -- cover up the effort to hurt the other guy before he can hurt you.<br />
So I'd simply give freshmen and cadets chapter one of The Blind Side by narrative journalist Michael Lewis.<br />
Journalists should read the passage to see the less banal side of sports and to envy the style of the writer. His timing and controlled release of information condenses the violence of pay-for-view bone-breaking into 12 white-knuckle pages.<br />
They begin: "From the snap of the ball to the snap of of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five."<br />
And the opening is prelude only -- a back story of how the left tackle position evolved to fend off the bonecrusher Lawrence Taylor and his imitators coming after quarterbacks. By extension the account explains how Michael Oher rose from impoverished obscurity to protect the blind side of his own Achilles every Sunday.<br />
Everyone knows the book, because they saw Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock in the soft and sweet movie.<br />
The flick is good. But the more serious, blood-spurting book is great narrative journalism (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, ppb., 339 pages, $13.95), the kind that explains what you didn't know enough to ask about.<br />
Oh, the ancient Homer is stick-to-the-ribs more filling as a writer.<br />
But for bustin' up those ribs and teaching soldiers to soldier and players to play and writers to narrate, Michael Lewis produces a modern classic in war, uh, ahem, sports journalismAyers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-32242247017500148912010-07-08T00:01:00.005-05:002010-07-08T13:09:49.454-05:00Bias behind the gusher in the Gulf is the people's callLook out for the language. The spoken tongue ends in a sharp point.<br />
Listen to what we call the environmental catastrophe of our time.<br />
We might have had "The Gulf Oil Spill."<br />
Or we could have named it "The Deepwater Horizon Spill."<br />
I'm wistful about "The Dick Cheney Oil De-reg Spill."<br />
Based on a recent book, there's the "Why We Hate Oil Companies Spill."<br />
But the judge-and-jury vernacular favors "The BP Oil Spill" over alternative, generalized, non-directed names.<br />
Why raise the issue? Because with the name goes the liability. All of it.<br />
Other terms recede. Increasingly the company that bears the blame also bears the label like a smear of crude.<br />
You can't merely and evenhandedly suggest BP "may" be the responsible party, because British Petroleum lends its name to reckless ir-responsibility. That pointedly is as mild as descriptions get.<br />
So "BP Oil Spill" pronounces accusation like an indictment from a grand jury composed of the whole country.<br />
Lawyers will coat those waters like a five-state oil slick the BP Spill has become.<br />
Court cases aplenty will try to escape spending the last farthing on clean-up.<br />
PR image manipulators will try to convince reporters to find an alternative to the virtual trademark with its informal corporate logo, the oil-covered pelican.<br />
Media will profess lack of bias.<br />
But there is a prejudice, undeniably. The public made up its mind and rendered a verdict journalism conveys in what we call this disaster: "The BP Oil Spill." <br />
It's not merely a plain and simple accident. Not an industry mishap. Not a failure by the consortium at the wellhead. Not the fault of negligent regulators -- although ironically it's all those things too.<br />
"The BP Oil Spill." That's what it is.<br />
The people speak.Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-27746199976180786032010-07-07T07:26:00.001-05:002010-07-07T09:35:08.036-05:00The untold story of this GD economyThe first rough-draft of history can't read the picture of our times.<br />
You didn't have to live through the Great Depression to write a chronicle of repetition.<br />
First there was the financial crisis as President Obama entered office. And by "crisis" I don't mean a market downturn. The system failed. Completely.<br />
As in 1929 we were so-o-o-o close to losing the nation.<br />
The Hoover-like Bush-Cheney administration set us up: Regulation went big bye-bye, tax policy transformed surplus into deficit with the rich getting richer and the rest getting poorer and the oil industry, the most subsidized business in America, received corporate freedom to slash and burn for profit -- greed in the name of capitalism.<br />
Hoover lives!<br />
The new administration strives mightily in the Spirit of FDR. But the White House is up against the same throwback forces that made the GD (Great Depression) economy worse than it had to be.<br />
Republican Party and Libertarian ideology prevail to prevent stimulus spending.<br />
The one time a government should spend money it doesn't have is during an economy as slow to move as a politician in an election year.<br />
But the conservatives who want Obama and Democrats out for partisan reasons are saving our way into deeper financial disaster.<br />
It all happened before. We never learn.<br />
No wonder this emotional nation feels a world class downer of frustration trending to grief -- the blues, a second, essential, psychological part of an economic depression.<br />
Element three is the reflection in nature.<br />
The 1930s had the Dust Bowl.<br />
We have the BP Oil Spill.<br />
Don't you dare dismiss the Gulf crisis as a regional problem. The biblical plague of our times trashes lives, finances and well-being directly or indirectly in a threat to life as we know it from sea to shining.<br />
The impact may be less obvious in circles farther from the epicenter. But energy policy, environmental policy, economic policy, public policy, political palaver will all reflect the humanitarian catastrophe.<br />
Americans who don't have out-of-pocket losses nevertheless will experience a looser grip on nationhood.<br />
Black humor, itself an oil pun, may chortle about high-test seafood but is really a cry from the heart. <br />
That's Great Depression material.<br />
How amazing journalism hasn't pieced the picture together.<br />
Too busy covering press conferences, placing anchors on oily beaches and covering the trivia of a BP executive's yacht race and other PR gaffes.<br />
Charter boat captains, coastal politicians and washaterias for pelicans get some coverage.<br />
Yet no one covering the Fed in Washington, the markets in New York or the boom shortage in Biloxi has taken the holistic view of economic life from shore to board room to living room.<br />
Maybe when the out-migration of Gulfies matches the Grapes of Wrath era of Okies we'll see the Dorothea Lange images and the John Steinbeck narratives and the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. reminders of the cycles of history in endless repetition.<br />
Artists and historians again will have to compensate for journalism's failure. Another missed opportunity.<br />
And that's too GD bad.Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-81186781031787791382010-07-05T00:01:00.005-05:002010-07-05T00:01:01.180-05:00Bitter pills and magazine journalismMaybe it's not the most popular thing to say. Heck, I'll say it anyway.<br />
I actually like The Economist.<br />
I emerge bleary from its Brit grayness -- or is it greyness? -- as though from a Treasury, State Department, White House, Downing Street briefing.<br />
Not every college course entertained me. That doesn't mean I didn't learn.<br />
Oh, it's a slog between witticisms that are British journalism.<br />
But The Economist falls into a class of media with PBS's The News Hour, world's most boring broadcast.<br />
Yeah, I'm hopeless. I watch Jim Lehrer and his gang for the same reason I read The Economist. After the superficial news treatment on the commercial networks, I need some depth to balance the froth.<br />
I don't need any more of the News Hour-Economist's sugarless medicine, however.<br />
So when Newsweek went to a quasi-Economist makeover, I missed the fun, the elan, the immediacy of the old book I had read and enjoyed since before Ben Bradlee left it to run The Washington Post.<br />
The magazine reformulation didn't work for me nor apparently for a lot of others.<br />
And more bad luck: The recent remake of Newsweek hit newsstands along with the economic downturn.<br />
I hate that.<br />
Yet I love a national newspaper that comes out once a week -- one description of Newsweek's former personality.<br />
It's a tough formula. Years ago a weekly, newsprint, full-size National Observer went broke trying the prescription.<br />
See here, though: Features editors at lots of daily newspapers reverse the method successfully all the time -- publishing a magazine-style section on a daily basis. <br />
What I'm describing is originality, a good fit with the audience and balance between news as info and news as fun.<br />
Media sort themselves out according to the right set of ingredients all the time.<br />
The apothecaries at Newsweek simply didn't get the mix right. I think it was too imitative of The Economist. One of those is enough.<br />
So now Newsweek's bitter pill to swallow is named Doomsday. The magazine will be sold or closed.<br />
No publication wants a dose of imitating that.<br />
<br />
<br />
Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-41829159628186587242010-07-03T00:01:00.007-05:002010-07-03T00:01:00.272-05:00Who stole my holiday?!?Anyone can be an editor or producer when news breaks.<br />
The trick is to communicate brilliantly when there is no news. As on holidays.<br />
NBC's Today Show broadcast a brief but pretty good report Friday before the long weekend about the impending Independence Day amid a depressing economy.<br />
Matt Lauer, a good interviewer any day, had a really eye-opening conversation with the equally good Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC economic head-turner.<br />
Now, if only we'll see and hear lots of follow-up in depth.<br />
More likely the Marine band and news stale-from-the-can will parade across screen and newspaper page.<br />
Put enough features in City Desk hold files and the TV video bank, and everyone can have a nice holiday.<br />
Judge by Matt and Maria's interview: Many Americans without work, without a mortgage payment, without good retirement prospects and with BP oil lapping at their security or with health and other bills weighing on their minds are going to have a not-so-nice Fourth of July.<br />
So why wouldn't journalists work longer, harder to report the national misery index doesn't take a holiday.<br />
If terrorists or tornadoes attack, every newsperson will rush in from picnic and park to cover the disaster.<br />
Why don't media work during the slow-motion catastrophe of this holiday in the dumps?<br />
What's with the cancellation of all those municipal fireworks shows?<br />
How come we're actually glad the markets are closed so they can't plummet farther?<br />
Where's the hopefulness without hype out of state and national capitals and city halls?<br />
So many questions. So little time. <br />
Journalism should never take a holiday.<br />
Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-91343015642836405842010-07-02T00:01:00.017-05:002010-07-02T08:48:14.696-05:00Excuse me! I seem to have misplaced my guillotine.Remember the media panic when this communication revolution began?<br />
The bloggers are coming! The bloggers are coming!<br />
Well, it turned out to be less of a quick-hit rebellion and more of an extended Reign of Terror for conventional publishers.<br />
Eat any cake lately, Marie?<br />
Now the first wave of attack is fading.<br />
Nielsen and others report a significant decline in blog traffic, according to The Economist.<br />
Twitter and Facebook are up substantially, however. So don't harbor any wistful dreams of a return to legacy media.<br />
Thank you BTW for coming to my own blog for this information and commentary. Better than bakery goods, I say, Your Highness!<br />
Look here, the rebels' underlying cause remains the same: People and especially the youth demographic prefer to publish information and exchange comments at little if any expense, at a time of their own choosing and in a manner of their personal convenience such as with a cell phone.<br />
Maybe the iPad will grandly unify the multimedia experience. More likely, we're going to experiment quite a bit more for quite a while longer.<br />
The Economist points out the geopolitical significance of the Internet in real civil unrest such as Iran's.<br />
There's more to going online than sex texting.<br />
So we're not going back. The com-revolt is real. It's here to stay.<br />
And the biggest evidence is the evolution to new forms and their globalization of ideas about freedom.<br />
That's exactly what happens in a revolutionAyers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-26752684754743094922010-07-01T07:43:00.007-05:002010-07-01T08:50:50.303-05:00The streetcar that carried the general away<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>We journalists are Blanche DuBois, forever depending on the kindness of strangers.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>People figure no public official will ever follow Gen. Stanley McChrystal's model of allowing a reporter into his candid inner circle. The general ended up fired for his barracks room candor.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Yet I believe journalistic history will repeat itself. Often. Like Blanche's signature line from A Streetcar Named Desire.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Kindness is another way of expressing openness or even naivete. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>We haven't seen the end of opening up, even or especially by star-encrusted bravado.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>And the public will be the better for it -- as always.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The career mistake of Gen. McChrystal turned into his ultimate service to the nation: Government and public both refocused on the war in Afghanistan, which we are losing or at least not winning.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Miss DuBois will return. We share her perpetual dependency on strangers.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The literary metaphor of Tennessee Williams's character in his 1947 play strikes my mind like a controlled nuclear event.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Blanche's nemesis was another Stanley -- the brutish Kowalski, antithesis of her dowdy, loopy world view and romanticism that drew out the beast in Stanley.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Excuse me, Gen. McChrystal, have you read the play?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings, who did the live-in interview with McChrystal, might not remind anyone of a DuBois or of the southern playwright who wrote Streetcar.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Yet the reporter and the general acted out the archetypes of clash between brutishness and soft persistence that spin off beneficial journalism like a newly discovered molecule from an atom smasher named Desire.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Oh, yes. Journalism will replicate the explosion, because that's what journalism does.</div><div><br /></div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-35054155003509743772010-06-30T12:57:00.005-05:002010-06-30T13:36:01.250-05:00Not too fond a farewell for Helen and Larry<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Am I the only one in America who thinks it's perfectly okay for Larry King to sit at home instead of sitting on his set at CNN?<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I have nothing against the gentleman.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But I have nothing especially for him either.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>He's not a journalist. He's a habit.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>And let's don't confuse the status of endurance with national icon. Larry King is no Cronkite or even a Brokaw.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>He simply spent a long time in TV. He talked with a lot of people. Isn't that nice?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Nancy Reagan called him on the air to say she'd miss him. Sweet. They threw on-air kisses to each other.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>At least he's going out on his own terms, although with declining popularity.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>That's better for him than Helen Thomas's hasty retirement amid catcalls for something she said.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It's hard to imagine Larry King saying anything that could offend in that degree. But I almost wish he would go out in rage rather than smoochiness with any former First Lady.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Oh, I'm not saying a journalist is not a journalist unless he or she is a contrarian. That didn't work for Ms. Thomas, the fixture at the White House.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But I am saying journalism and journalists ought to reinvent themselves several times before we let them get away from us.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Fifty years in a Executive Branch briefing chair with your name on it and 50,000 broadcast interviews are exercises in longevity, not in themselves evidence of journalistic contribution.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Goodbye, Helen! Goodbye, Larry!</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It was nice to know you.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Yet not so nice we can't let you slip away so the innovators can take your places.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-88471937661127142012009-02-19T11:59:00.004-06:002009-02-19T11:59:00.970-06:00Writers take note of desperate times when government becomes noble and necessary<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEd_hHS-Xdo8Uwo8xVzFT3pxlvUKPimlHuKLwo8twXbeHhm4mMwNIFDuE7A05VtiPSQO0rgqfhzATcmq1vVtNCDyhPTMkYrph7jRuBQLqq4T-md4Qa6Gah2q9vYBcTf78mTVMKmSuqic/s1600-h/Forgotten+Man.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 266px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEd_hHS-Xdo8Uwo8xVzFT3pxlvUKPimlHuKLwo8twXbeHhm4mMwNIFDuE7A05VtiPSQO0rgqfhzATcmq1vVtNCDyhPTMkYrph7jRuBQLqq4T-md4Qa6Gah2q9vYBcTf78mTVMKmSuqic/s400/Forgotten+Man.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304554932819752114" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression</span> By Amity Shlaes; Harper, New York, 2008, 468 pages, $15.95.<div><br />Granddaddy fell off a two-story house and broke both feet in the Depression.<br />It was the era of The Forgotten Man. Before workmen's comp. Before Social Security. Before government cared about occupational safety or about family or, really, about the common man — grandfather or not.<br />The natural wisdom of Americans elected a leader in 1932 for the most desperate of times. They chose a government to preserve ordinary, everyday folk.<br />We're testing the limits of economic endurance again today.<br />Back then no one held the safety net for my Grandpa Jay. He was a big, loving-in-his-own-way, rough-laughing workingman in the tough prairie town of Lawton, Okla. Frontier rules still prevailed — make your own way.<br />Buffalo nibbled grass around ruts left by horse caissons out on Fort Sill. If it hadn't been for the artillery garrison, the U.S. government would have had no presence at all in my grandparents' lives.<br />Military demand for housing gave granddaddy work as a housepainter — until he couldn't climb a ladder. Yet he was the sole support of a wife and three school children of his own and two others taken in from family down on their luck.<br />Grandma Essie had spooned the last cornmeal into the cast iron skillet. Her children were going hungry.<br />What happened next was the defining story of my family. Manna fell from heaven. Well, potatoes actually.<br />My Daddy was tall and skinny but didn't miss a stride as he scooped up the bulging, burlap bag on the railroad siding as though he was paid to unload the boxcar.<br />You do what you have to do for family, when you literally are "The Forgotten Man."<br />The original use of the phrase meant the worker who never went on the dole. The person struggled but somehow made it with no more help than a providential sack of spuds the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe never would miss anyway.<br />Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked the name up like stolen taters for his presidential campaign to use about every common American. God love them, heaven made so many who needed a handout or a hand up.<br />FDR's brain trust got to work. The president's and wife Eleanor's skillful use of media cranked up. And the specter of a nation going under created a social experiment out of every working class American, forgotten no more.<br />The Amity Shlaes account is revisionist history — not original, but well-told: The line has it that FDR didn't end the Great Depression with the New Deal; that his anti-business vigor and monetary policy vacillation made things worse; and that only World War II ended the country's worst downturn ever.<br />The trouble with her view is the nation did sense a rescue mission and regain hope as a result. The government sun did come up again every day. The light around FDR's jaunty visage and sparky effort did counter the dark economy.<br />The vigor of Roosevelt's government dispelled even fear itself. His fireside chats made the White House a comfortable home for the nation to visit on the air. Lasting institutions such as deposit insurance reformed and protected banking.<br />Shlaes is right to remind us government can get in the way as FDR's did, creating a depression within the Depression. She is right about politics too easily diverting public works spending from its mission to rebuild the economy. And she is right that government takes steps in a national emergency we don't want from it all the time —— such as the current nationalization of industries.<br />But heroic measures electrified rural America. Americans went to work building roads and bridges and schools. Government organized writers and artists to make us sensitive to the desperate times, represented by Dorothea Lange's photograph of a migrant mother.<br />Those were noble and necessary acts of government we should not forget.<br />To say otherwise is like telling President-elect Barack Obama to stay in Chicago. Yet our once again fearful nation counts on him to avoid another Great Depression in the unforgettable FDR-style.<br />Sometimes you just have to scoop up the potatoes.</div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-22547431997311527422009-02-19T11:58:00.000-06:002009-02-19T11:58:00.759-06:00Sketches of grandeur: Why journalists should dip into Middle Earth and other fantasy literature to come down to this earth<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDkzxnyTfwsuWfmO0ouIEjyyek7q_mjNlAB9HaSD_CEp6DytbwifE_KB1zWo11ptexbmPeEengo8Tl6ltOipPQSKEzrqggEt6Jj4y5e9tVxJWEcbE7d_aJxnhBhAOOy4n83Q9GhWs1NwU/s1600-h/Hurin.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDkzxnyTfwsuWfmO0ouIEjyyek7q_mjNlAB9HaSD_CEp6DytbwifE_KB1zWo11ptexbmPeEengo8Tl6ltOipPQSKEzrqggEt6Jj4y5e9tVxJWEcbE7d_aJxnhBhAOOy4n83Q9GhWs1NwU/s400/Hurin.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304537587243011794" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Children of Húrin</span> By J. R. R. Tolkien with illustrations by Alan Lee; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2008 pbk. edition, 313 pages, $14.95.<br /><br />We have an Ent living in our meadow.<br />Why not?<br />We are of the generation who popularized J. R. R. Tolkien in this land. We read The Hobbit to our children. We gave them The Lord of the Rings trilogy when they were ready.<br />Why wouldn't one of the ancient race of walking, talking tree giants take up residence with us?<br />Fantasy is serious business. Even for journalists. Lighten up, gang. You'll be more conversant with real people.<div>There's the Hollywood version of fantasy. But even bigger are the motion pictures of the mind that inspire us, steady us between good and evil on our personal quests and endear otherworld creatures to us as a comfort of the imagination.<br />Middle-earth is far less comfortable since the passing of Tolkien and the co-opting of his creation by movie moguls and the electronic gaming set who owe their pastime to literary fantasy.<br />So posthumous works by the master become bestsellers. His son Christopher Tolkien edited the squibs and scraps and notes that became The Children of Húrin.<br />You take what you can get. Isn't endurance the message of Middle-earth?<br />This is a dark and bloody work without much redemption, though. It's like sitting down to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is at least majestic in its cosmic tragedy, and discovering you picked up the grisly Titus Andronicus by earthbound error.<br />First you wade through genealogies and set-up. Think of all the begats in the Bible. Or the penance Tolstoy exacts before getting you to the action in War and Peace.<br />At last you strike storyline like a vein of gold. But the ore plays out when Morgoth, the First Dark Lord, captures Húrin to crush the hero's spirit of rebellion in the First Age.<br />So attention shifts to the nobleman's children, Túrin and his sister Niënor. But they live lives of unquiet desperation, dismay and disaster that lead ever downward.<br />Finally comes closing confrontation with Glaurung, the worm-dragon of fire sent to fulfill hellish curse.<br />Just another day at the office in Middle-earth. Or perhaps where you work.<br />Túrin is no Ranger destined for the kingly triumph of the later works. His sister is no princess royal. Not yet on scene are Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf the Grey and, of course, Treebeard the Ent living in the woods of Fangorn during the Third Age of Tolkien's more popular works.<br />His son and literary executor opened a view into his father's mind as it sorted out the world that would become the Hobbit's and ours by extension. It's like seeing Michelangelo's chalky sketches for the Sistine Chapel instead of the finished work.<br />Read it to see how the grandeur came to be.<br />How grand?<br />Ask any of us who have an Ent living in our meadow.<br /><br /></div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-15108031142298321492009-02-19T11:50:00.001-06:002009-02-19T11:50:00.473-06:00Journalists love to find the special places, such as going to France in our deepest South<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZYmy3CIekaizWfspmHsmCJ8zmHqsphZY_xqbikxOZOUm3DSGMLX64eXYuKmz0-K-iwvIx543O__ekmkMCHNkyG7TasOnWEUzTo_9iZxQqDik5c9bWll9clNxIOAfNW5Yb4L2qSI-Aavg/s1600-h/Poor+Man%27s+Provence.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 257px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZYmy3CIekaizWfspmHsmCJ8zmHqsphZY_xqbikxOZOUm3DSGMLX64eXYuKmz0-K-iwvIx543O__ekmkMCHNkyG7TasOnWEUzTo_9iZxQqDik5c9bWll9clNxIOAfNW5Yb4L2qSI-Aavg/s400/Poor+Man%27s+Provence.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304552803187045314" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Poor Man's Provence — Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana</span> By Rheta Grimsley Johnson, New South Books, 2008, 221 pages, $23.95<div><br />Crawfish. Always the crawfish. And zydeco music, which is different from Cajun.<br />It's all special.<br />The language too, which is regionally accented English for us outsiders. Among the residents of 22 parishes — one-third of the state — however, the lingua franca really is Franca, except you'd hear the distinctive patois more often in similarly rural Provençal France than in urban Paris.<br />Cigarettes hang from lips like cantilevered bridges to Acadiana, named after the French Canadian exiles of the Maritime Provinces who settled this corner of the American South in the 18th century.<br />So much makes the cultural landscape so special. So much provokes fascination.<br />Along with the houseboats and pirogues. And gumbo, étoufée and boudin — that rice dressing stuffed in pork casings. And tiny, juicy little round satsumas that give oranges a good name.<br />And the lilting mon cher and mais oui that sound like a verbal two-step version of the breakfast dance steps we bravely tried after Bloody Maries, garnished with pickled green beans alongside early morning whisky shots for braver dancers in an antebellum cotton warehouse turned hotel turned cultural icon in downtown Breaux Bridge — "Crawfish Capital of the World" — which you'd call quaint except such trite adjectives sound too touristy and you'd rather project something better for this c'est la vie Brigadoon of lower Louisiana.<br />Down the road is the Tabasco-famous McIlhenny Island, actually a salt dome in the distinctive oil and mineral rich Louisiana coastline. Up the road is Angola, the infamous prison and site of a legendary inmate rodeo. And over yonder a piece, past the drive-thru margarita bars and truck stop casinos, is Lafayette, home of the possibly misnamed Ragin' Cajuns at a laid back university that works just enough to keep the music, language and cultural treasures on life support in America's bubbling social pot of jambalaya.<br />Just over the 20 miles of causeway on an Interstate west out of New Orleans and past Baton Rouge and through the visually lyrical Atchafalaya Swamp — pronounced "Ah-CHA-fah-lie-a"— which is the largest tract of forested wetland in the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain, is the heart of this most distinct of French outposts.<br />There lies Henderson, a town so truck-on-cinder-blocks homely that Rheta Grimsley Johnson finds it charming enough in reverse to make it a second home. She and her husband are Alabama-Mississippi-Georgia journalists, and her book of Cajun discovery actually is a collection of newspaper columns.<br />Frankly they are poorly gathered and edited for continuity and seamless reading compared to most narrative journalism. But she's a good and familiar Southern writer, introduced in a foreword by the NPR-famous storyteller Bailey White.<br />If the jammed-up collection is flawed, well, "What the hell!" would be the attitude down on the Bayou Teche. You oughta read this book to satisfy curiosity, they'd say on the levee, not for great literature. Get yourself another beer, Thibodeaux! Slice off a piece of that deep-fat-fried turducken, Boudreaux!<br />For me it's a matter of learning about this place our son recently moved to with his family, including our first grandbaby, to be embraced by warm-hearted folk with names right out of the original Provence.<br />Cajuns never meet an infant they don't love, turns out, calling them "cha" with a preciousness from the French cher.<br />That's enough to make me love their special place even without a Bloody Marie. Even without crawfish.</div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-77271586520465456432009-02-19T11:30:00.001-06:002009-02-19T11:30:01.183-06:00This news is not exactly just in: The latest word in the trees is all about this good earth<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCrKIn0UPcrwnv_PekO1j8EqkixADiHhhbFchfUEA6ZyTpuGowWEkqBviygv2XGbK115pBUkTyu89emtz3GHQL3R9aCjS-3K1lAKX4bRx_EkLrGZzsQMob9vi45KR4Vs6hVJ7L6L1KBOE/s1600-h/green-bible.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 295px; height: 350px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCrKIn0UPcrwnv_PekO1j8EqkixADiHhhbFchfUEA6ZyTpuGowWEkqBviygv2XGbK115pBUkTyu89emtz3GHQL3R9aCjS-3K1lAKX4bRx_EkLrGZzsQMob9vi45KR4Vs6hVJ7L6L1KBOE/s400/green-bible.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304560548843873202" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The Green Bible</span> HarperCollins, New York; 2008; 1,311 pp.<div><br />Earth is a Holy Bible. Her trees are the chapters, each leaf a page of scripture. Water is living theology. And every breath of air is a reminder of the love of God who made us.<br />I speak no idolatry.<br />Symbiosis is the biological term for two living organisms so entwined with one another they become one. There's no separating creation from the holy word.<br />The Green Bible affirms that simple truth. Journalists, who love the truth, should be at least a little familiar with scripture. </div><div>This green version in this age of ecology gives them a reason to delve regardless of religious skepticism.<br />Curiosity after a change in family lifestyle sent me to the environment-friendly New Revised Standard Version published last year. The cotton-linen cover over recycled paper, soy-based ink and water-based coating is stamped with a spreading oak.<br />My wife and dog and I moved out to the edge of town for the acreage, for the semi-rural peace, for the trees. Always the trees.<br />They make me wonder why many religious folk cannot see their mission to renew, refresh, rehabilitate the planet.<br />God created humankind in his image, turned creation over and asked us to be good caretakers. From that start of civilization, we have God's very own word — this is the good earth (Genesis 1:31): "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good."<br />A lot went wrong.<br />We live now in environmental crisis. You may count the ways for yourself, unless you live in denial as even some churchgoers do.<br />The solution lies with us. God swore off interference when he promised Noah he wouldn't send another flood. Damage to the planet comes from humankind.<br />People of the earth will reclaim our eternal stewardship one family at a time and one society at a time.<br />At our new house we built a compost bin before we moved in. A kitchen pail collects all the green-making stuff.<br />Sunday's ritual is a trip to recycle newspaper, plastic and cardboard collected all week in garage bins.<br />Energy efficient light fixtures brighten the house. The thermostat stays on a moderate setting. Brrrrrr. Cars are high mileage.<br />Blessed with trees, we planted more — an entire orchard.<br />The garden fed us all summer. We give away preserved food. And we contributed a squash casserole from our plenty when we sat down to a potluck Thanksgiving with friends.<br />But I'm brought up short by a quote from then-President-elect Barack Obama. We're not going to save the planet just by changing light fixtures, he said.<br />We need community change on a continental scale to meet our spiritual duty to God's good earth. Science matters, as Al Gore reminds us, but equally comes faith.<br />The Green Bible can inspire the movement person-by-person, congregation-by-congregation. Clearly it's designed for individual study and Sunday school, temple and parish hall study groups.<br />Evangelical, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, Jewish thinkers and ministers, ethical scientists — all have essays between those ecologically correct covers, including useful concordances, study guides and proposed action plans for discussion.<br />My favorite section — besides the Bible text itself with pertinent passages literally printed in green — is a collection of short "Teachings on Creation through the Ages." The compiler of quotes and aphorisms is J. Matthew Sleeth, M.D. He reminds us of the great commissioning when Jesus last spoke to his disciples (Mark 16:15): "Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation."<br />There's material aplenty for a church revival themed on earth and grace. There's need aplenty for another historic Great Awakening in America and beyond.<br />I'd let the trees preach. And harmonize. As in Psalm 96: "Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy."<br />The tree of life in the midst of the garden is the religious symbol at the center of our being. It is the spine that keeps us erect, the dream we share with Nebuchadnezzar of reaching to heaven, the story we believe of life everlasting despite the crucifixion of a worker with wood and with our world soul on, of all things, a tree.<br />The tree of life opens The Green Bible in Genesis 2:9 and closes it in Revelation 22:2 — "And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations."<br />I can't speak for others who see the need for saving the planet. But as for me and mine, we listen when we hear the trees call us to grace.</div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-36193824153724938582008-11-17T06:00:00.003-06:002008-11-17T06:00:01.249-06:00Ever on Sunday: Talk shows are not immune from the expectation of good journalism<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> <blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">It is simply good journalism to give viewers relevant </span></span></span></span></blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">background about a news source before awarding </span></span></span></span></blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">that talking head access to the national ear.</span></span></span></span></blockquote></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"></span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'times new roman';font-size:18px;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Sunday is the day of rest. But if you're gonna do journalism, you darn well can stir yourself to do it right. That means background, perspective, needed information to parse what those guest talking heads are saying on the talk shows.</span></span><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">First it was NBC's Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw as host. Then it was CBS's Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Finally it was a replay by CNN's Wolf Blitzer with "the last word in Sunday talk."</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">All brought U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., onto their languid, day-of-rest airtime to oppose a bailout for the Big 3 automakers in Detroit. None of the talk show hosts apparently did their homework about the ax-grinding Mr. Shelby. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Maybe the senator is right. Maybe he's wrong. It's an important national debate regardless.<br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">So is knowing that Sen. Shelby represents the state that calls itself the "New Detroit" with a foreign accent thicker than his Southern drawl.<br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Shelby's home base is Tuscaloosa, Ala. –– just up the road a piece from the new Mercedes M Class plant. <br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Follow Interstate 20 east past Birmingham, and you come upon the Honda plant for Odyssey and its other vehicles manufactured in Lincoln, Ala.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Or turn south onto Interstate 65 to see the new Hyundai plant outside Montgomery.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Cruise those Interstate corridors for the supply firms, the sub-contractors and enhanced dealer showrooms that complete the Dixie-Detroit manufacturing base that would benefit from a decline in the economic prospects of the original car-building capital.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Alabama achieved its status by opposing union work forces with Right to Work Laws and providing generous financial bonuses to the overseas carmakers for locating inside its borders. <br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Is Sen. Shelby so parochial as to adopt a position just to protect, enhance and extend his own state's economy? Well, let's save that discussion for a day when we also want to decide whether the pope is a Roman Catholic.<br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">But I'll do what the network journalists did not: I will divulge in fairness that Shelby is being consistent with his opposition to bailouts generally and voted against the original $700 billion legislation to come to the aid of Wall Street.<br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I am not, however, debating his consistency. <br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">I am declaring it is simply good journalism to give viewers relevant background about a news source before awarding that talking head access to the national ear.<br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">At stake is the franchise for the whole Sunday morning talk phenomenon.<br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> <br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span></span></div></div></div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-60683205029168499642008-11-14T06:00:00.002-06:002008-11-14T06:00:01.336-06:00They can pull media's leg until it falls off<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;">Every bunko artist counts </span></span></span></span></blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;">on the victim to help make the con.</span></span></span></span></blockquote></div><div>The hoax as a media phenomenon has been around a long time.<br /></div> Damn MSNBC for falling for an election campaign scam. But don’t guilt the cable guys into thinking such things have never been done before.<br /> A guy came into a newsroom where I once worked. He had some highly credible story. It relied on every newspaper’s drive to break a big news story.<br /> In other words our own newshound tendency outweighed the actual facts.<br />Every bunko artist counts on the victim to help make the con.<br /> His tale relied on him and him alone. He nimbly turned aside every attempt to identify someone who could collaborate. But we could trust him, he said, and wasn’t he standing right there in front of us?<br /> He’d even be willing to stay in town — at our expense — until we published the expose. That way we could hold him accountable.<br /> Asking for financial backing of course was his undoing.<br /> All I had to do was Xerox his fake driver license and fax it to “the authorities,” I told him. That convinced our confidence man to skedaddle.<br /> Election facts and myths flew helter-skelter before the Barack Obama election punctuated it all. A blog and false identity were behind a wavelet of deception about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She supposedly didn’t know Africa is a continent, according to a claimed leak inside the John McCain presidential camp.<br /> When so much was being said bizarrely and so much being supposed imaginatively about the VP candidate to nowhere, you can palpably feel the drive to go on air without verification.<br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">The New York Time</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">s</span> parsed the fraud ever so gingerly a week later. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Times</span> wasn’t so absolutely sure the explanation of the prank wasn’t a deception too. Remember the old <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Mad Magazine</span>’s spy vs. spy?<br /> If it’s to be believed, two “obscure filmmakers,” the newspaper said, concocted the ruse with a Web site connected to a fictitious think tank.<br /> The tricksters earlier had gulled <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span>.<br /> In another exercise in sophomore humor, someone printed a spoof of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The New York Times</span> announcing the end of the war in Iraq.<br /> Ask it. You’re already thinking it: Is truth no longer sacred?<br /> Never was. Never will be. That’s the answer to that.<br /> The ruse we have with us always.<br />The age of the blog, of the hack, of the wannabe triply guarantee it.<br /> Sometimes it’s for laughs. Sometimes it’s for ego. Sometimes it’s for money.<br /> The continental Palin sting was supposed to help pitch a television script concept.<br /> But I suspect there’s something in the head of some people who’d find an excuse to put one over on media types anyway.<br /> We’re asking for it all the time. Because we value an exclusive break on a big story more than we do waiting for the driver i.d. on the swindler to show up bogus.<br /> The only antidote to the practical joke is fact checking every item broadcast, published and digitalized.<br /> Do I think the media will adopt the absolute cure absolutely?<br /> Nope. That you can bank on.<br /></span></span>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-40740752924094188672008-11-12T06:00:00.001-06:002008-11-12T06:00:01.303-06:00A license to dance<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers. </span></span></span></blockquote><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><div>The First Amendment makes a lovely invitation to the journalism ball.<br /></div>Ask any dancer in the professional news business.<br />Trouble is, that same person can be a positive busybody about anyone else’s call to be a self-styled journalist.<br />I’m a constitutional purist about free expression, declared retired <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span> Executive Editor Leonard Downie last week. He said government shouldn’t license journalists.<br />But it was no more than a few minutes later in his speech at the Nieman Foundation for Journalists at Harvard. Downie said Lou Dobbs shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast his CNN news program because of his notorious stand against immigration.<br />Time and again prominent news executives do this two-step. No one can tell them how to behave journalistically. But they would deny symbolic licenses to other practitioners.<br />Hypocrisy trips merrily at a faster pace in the current splintering of the information industry. Print, cable, online and broadcast standards dance to different sheet music in which a main step is finger pointing at the professional practices of other dancers on the floor.<br />The boogie beat of citizen journalism especially drives the foxtrot crowd of mainstream media into digital harrumph.<br />Look, it’s like this: Journalism is either free of interference or it isn’t.<br />I prefer free.<br />If you enforce standards of practice for the street dancers, you have to do the same in the ornate ballrooms of news too.<br />It happens that quite a few amateurs trip themselves up in their own private Roselands. That stumblebum effect is supposed to lower the public’s opinion of all journalists. Such bad ethics shouldn’t be allowed, sniff the slow-dancers.<br />Yes, well, their disdain takes for granted public opinion of journalism could get much lower.<br />It’s just as likely the public will award the trophy to seasoned, sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.<br />The marketplace of public opinion is licenser enough.<br />Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Not when you play the constitutional music of the law of the land.<br />You’ve got to open the floor to the trip-foot amateur and the rowdy intruder if they want to go dancing with the stars.<br /><br /></span></span>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-60190232857438832512008-11-07T06:00:00.001-06:002008-11-07T06:00:02.236-06:00When are the Middle Ages relevant to our own times? When a journalist presents them<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCqqH59E5b_haHipBfaO4AZy0QT7FuXNz3U3hKK4a63XqhrwvOOYiS0F4Dxy847S6xIQXFTmyOkUMFPbtyh72jBq7_Eo4CLm40oeTua7rCnwZEozVXtv8d2u-iUzWq3EdnAenPY3di_Jk/s1600-h/51jmL8ryY7L._SS500_.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCqqH59E5b_haHipBfaO4AZy0QT7FuXNz3U3hKK4a63XqhrwvOOYiS0F4Dxy847S6xIQXFTmyOkUMFPbtyh72jBq7_Eo4CLm40oeTua7rCnwZEozVXtv8d2u-iUzWq3EdnAenPY3di_Jk/s400/51jmL8ryY7L._SS500_.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5264858244279911778" /></a><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">World Without End</span></span> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">A book by Ken Follett</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">New American Library, 2008, 1,014 pages, $22 paperback</span><br /><br />There’s something about the Middle Ages.<br />Think about our time. Think about their time. You can recognize the people, know them, feel with them.<br />The peopling inside the literary construction of World Without End, though, is not done with your neat beginning-middle-end storyline. The plot sprawls from England to the Battle of Crecy to Florence and back via Avignon, Chartres and Paris.<br />Ken Follett is a former journalist with a journalist’s mindset. Journalists should read him even as a writer of fiction.<br />A storyteller is a storyteller.<br />He’s an international writer of modern suspense thriller-dillers. Except when he isn’t.<br />His previous exception is the renowned Pillars of the Earth. That epic sends a wonder-of-the-age cathedral soaring skyward in countryside England during the 12th century, because a prior and his monastery peer wonderfully out from medieval gloom<br />Religious and most other institutions two centuries later lose the light or can’t yet find their way forward in this sequel.<br />But a hodgepodge of children in the World grow up around a secret and come into their own by their mature years, each in his or her own way. Well, some do fall by the wayside.<br />The characters remind you of the All Saints’ Day hymn brightening this time of year: “I sing a song of the saints of God…and one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green...and one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast…for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”<br />Can’t identify with the 14th century? Picture yourself in a Brueghel painting. You see a familiar populated-landscape, not a distant portrait<br />Fall in line with Chaucer’s pilgrims marching off to Canterbury. You’ll know the way figuratively.<br />Or share stories while hiding from the plague with Boccaccio’s characters in The Decameron. Even the ribaldry will seem familiar.<br />Expect to compare the economic threat of our time, the lack of confidence in government and the demand for creative self-reliance.<br />Examine the peril of infants, the challenges of childhood and the sometime brutishness of old age. <br />Notice both eras are super-religious and steadfastly profane at the same time. Churches ever seek reformation while the irreligious constantly stimulate a renascence in art, science and trade.<br />We hold in common our foreign wars, more appealing to heads of state than to us plain folk. Then and now, government can grow overbearing.<br />And there’s the Black Death, the great antagonist in World Without End. We have AIDS but also cancer, heart disease and diabetes –– more pronounced because of our life span and life habit.<br />Technology sets us apart from our ancestors, not our daily and mortal lives. Even so the engineering solutions in the cathedral town of Follett’s Knightsbridge inspire us.<br />At its length this is a lifestyle more than a book. So it should be.<br />We’re not reading about a distant time, a distant place, a distant folk. We’re experiencing ourselves through a novel.<br />So easily could we be medieval.<br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-86464490121029477082008-11-04T11:11:00.007-06:002008-11-04T11:27:48.514-06:00Yes! Okay. Joe's more sure now than before<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixUFW38XjQ_Gmdr9-DnUOISRLMHTZkPB66jMz4Q7y0x8y-a1HwLcK-UqZSs5O25d2LWKWo_ZsDcL_AhSjaItKugM5oe9LoqzXS292I-huIHmfX9O-WyLsyirlaWp5dd3frcwHPpS1R6Ls/s1600-h/51R1boqESyL._SS500_.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixUFW38XjQ_Gmdr9-DnUOISRLMHTZkPB66jMz4Q7y0x8y-a1HwLcK-UqZSs5O25d2LWKWo_ZsDcL_AhSjaItKugM5oe9LoqzXS292I-huIHmfX9O-WyLsyirlaWp5dd3frcwHPpS1R6Ls/s400/51R1boqESyL._SS500_.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5264854257907437922" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><div><br /></div>Promises to Keep, On Life and Politics</span><br />A book by Joe Biden<br />Random House, 2007, 365 pages</span></span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span>“Are we going to be okay?”<br />A woman in Dubuque asks Joe Biden the question on all our minds.<br />He surely has been hearing the country’s anxiety a lot on the campaign trail. Biden is the running mate of Barack Obama on the Democratic presidential ticket leading as the nation goes to vote today.</span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Say what you will about the always angry, fearful, extended campaigns. They expose our next officeholders to the national mood, the mind of the nation, the emotions we all feel.<br />But we need a book such as <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Promises</span> to peer through political feelings into personal poetry within our collective fate. Even so public a figure as Biden otherwise gets eclipsed as a real person by White House elections.<br />This time around we are united in apprehension but not much else.<br />Without economic security, we have no national security –– at home or abroad.<br />Without confidence, we are not America. Not really. Not as we all know and love her.<br />Sen. Biden’s personal and political autobiography couldn’t come at a better time. Clearly the original intent is support of his own presidential campaign. No matter. We still need to know the heart of the likely next vice president.<br />It’s sound.<br />We know this man. Oh, he’s from Delaware, not necessarily the center of our universe.<br />Still, he’s made of our kind of stuff –– a good student when he applies himself, not a great one. A good thinker with strong feelings, not an arrogant and cold person. A self-made middle class product of genteel poverty, not a rich man’s son.<br />And he earns our respect for national legislation to support cops and protect women.<br />He’s the guy who stops Bork-like mistakes on the Supreme Court and green lights good judge nominees.<br />He’s the conscience behind stopping the Balkan bloodbath. He’s the guy who stands in line with GIs for a turn at a bucket bath in Afghanistan when there’s no running water. He’s the origin of good ideas about bad futures in Iraq.<br />Joe Biden also is a man of tragedy. Word comes of his first wife’s death and of their daughter’s and of the fearful injuries to two sons in a car wreck while he is not yet sworn in as one of the youngest U.S. Senators ever elected.<br />He is the survivor of aneurisms.<br />Politically he is the survivor of his own mistakes, misjudgments and misstatements.<br />The thing about survivors is not what happens to them or what they do wrong. It’s how they press on, how they learn from their past and –– as with Joe Biden –– how they build a new family life and a fresh public life.<br />This book’s title is a Robert Frost line ideal for a politician. The next two lines are perfect for a nation pausing in mid-destiny as we are: “And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.”<br />Biden poetically reminds us we hold dear the values of compassion, honesty, integrity of thought, generosity, freedom and hope on our national journey.<br />So the very last words<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> Promises to Keep</span> addresses to us and to the woman in Dubuque is, “We’ll be okay.”</span></span><br /></div></div>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-28215109647113414072008-09-17T06:00:00.001-05:002008-09-17T06:00:00.964-05:00The incurious rush to save mortgages<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions. . .Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.</span></span></span></span><br /></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><div><br /></div>What’s the point of journalism, if not to ask questions?<br /> The Media delved into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaskan past. Her Republican presidential running mate complained about the background check. And that political tactic now seems stronger than journalistic curiosity.<br /> The reportage wanes as the Palin phenomenon waxes stronger.<br /> Reporters also seem to have used up their quota of inquiry on politics just when we need answers about economic issues..<br /> They need to ask if Americans really want Uncle Sam as a landlord.<br /> The case for Treasury takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sure seems compelling.<br /> The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation are a mess. Heads had to roll along with any other cliché that would clean up the government-sponsored secondary home mortgage market.<br /> We don’t yet know for sure if the debacle in the total pubic and private securitized loan market will bring down the American economy.<br /> So the government had to reform the two federally backed agencies that own half the mortgages in the nation.<br /> But insuring the market is different from owning it.<br /> We have just socialized mortgages in this country.<br /> And the Press is asking fewer questions than about The Bridge to Nowhere that connects falsehood with Gov. Palin’s claim to reform public works.<br /> For decades we’ve resisted socialized medicine.<br /> Even now Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, campaigns against letting a federal bureaucrat stand between my doctor and me.<br /> So why would I want a government clerk overseeing where I lay me down to sleep?<br /> That’s neither a conservative nor a liberal question. It’s something sensible for The Press to ask as surrogate for ordinary, everyday folk.<br /> Yes. Something had to be done about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. And quick.<br /> The swift and sure government action, however, has the look of forever about it.<br /> Why isn’t there a sunset provision built into the takeover? Then the government could fix the problem and get out of the mortgage business, returning it to private or quasi-private enterprise.<br /> But the business pages and Wall Street programs on TV aren’t asking that question.<br /> Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions.<br />Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.<br /></span></span>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-18247982735803490922008-09-15T06:00:00.003-05:002008-09-15T06:00:00.171-05:00Words can be a poor path to remembrance<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 102, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">I’m afraid I don’t know what point the military officer was trying to make.</span></span></span></span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Symbols communicate better then words.<br />The barrel-down M-16 topped with helmet and dangling dog tags has become the universal soldier’s memorial.<br />Add GI boots and a fireman’s helmet and a peace officer’s Smokey Bear hat. You’ve created the War on Terror altar saluted and prayed over and flag-decorated all over the land on Sept. 11<br />The display is affecting.<br />I went to a ceremony on a college campus where the ROTC brigade prepared the parade field. So effective were the symbols, silence would have been better than the words that were spoken.<br />The cadet commander read remarks badly in need of a copyeditor. I wanted to tell him it’s okay for student soldiers to use good grammar.<br />Then spoke the Army lieutenant colonel who is professor of military science. Nestled among the platitudes was a statement that no foreign power had occupied American soil.<br />He must not have known about the War of 1812 – its Battle of New Orleans. . . the burning of the White House. . .Dolley Madison.<br />Francis Scott Key wrote one of our enduring symbols during that war, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The anthem describes the British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor.<br />I’d be inclined to include Pancho Villa’s Mexican incursion in the American Southwest as an invasion. Our Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing thought so, sharpening his troops before World War I.<br />The colonel might have recalled the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in our era’s World War II.<br />Or German U-boat forays into our territorial waters.<br />And Pearl Harbor wasn’t an occupation but might as well have been.<br />Like our 9/11 it was nation changing.<br />I’m afraid I don’t know what point the military officer was trying to make.<br />There’s no shame in being invaded or even occupied – only, perhaps, in failing to repulse.<br />Actions speak loudly and clearly and unambiguously.<br />Like symbols.<br /></span></span>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3727798663342648209.post-63070729047305281502008-09-12T06:00:00.002-05:002008-09-12T06:00:01.609-05:00Narrative journalism can make some sense of humanity's senseless disasters<span style="font-family:arial;"><strong>F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century</strong><br />By Mark Levine<br />Hyperion, 2007, 307 pp., $25.95<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;">We know storms, we Southerners. Violent weather writes large in family Bibles.<br />Hurricane Gustav bears down on Breaux Bridge, La. as I write these words. We wait word our son’s family is safe there.<br />Our storm child once lived through the worst tornado outbreak in memory. He was 18 months old on that date, April 3, 1974 – in Hillsboro, Ala. for his doting grandmother’s birthday.<br />Today we’re swapping text messages to stay in touch. But 34 years ago I have to wait hours to learn the safety of my child and his mother, visiting the Lawrence County farmhouse she grew up in.<br />I suffer separation guilt even now, stuck as I was in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent. Finally I learn Granddaddy covers my little family with mattresses and pillows and stands watch as tornadoes dance their deadly hoedown.<br />Before the twisted ballet finishes 17 hours later, 148 funnels click their heels in 13 states and a province of Canada. Their paths add up to 2,584 miles. The dead number 335 souls, the injured 6,000 people and the damaged property $600 million for 25,000 families.<br />It all starts over my own family. But the most devastated Alabama region lies just to their north, across the Tennessee River, in Limestone County.<br />Mark Levine describes the devastation like a novelist. Or with the quality of Sebastian Junger’s <em>Perfect Storm</em>. Or Mark Bowden’s <em>Black Hawk Down</em>. Narrative journalism makes sense of disaster, roughly a Greek derivation for “losing your lucky star,” Levine writes.<br />He pursues his story of the “superoutbreak” through the memories of survivors: In a moment your life changes. It’s that sudden…You don’t know why it happened to you and not someone else. And since it happened to you, why did you survive it? Others didn’t.<br />The Alabamians who fill his book are people you know. They are people you care about. They are people of the whole family of humankind, more subject to disaster than we care to think about.<br />The science of severe weather grounds the narrative, told through the quirky tale of a Japanese physicist, Tatsuya Fujita. As an immigrant to the young science of meteorology in America, “Mr. Tornado” creates our “Richter Scale” for storms. So “F5” means winds above 261 miles per hour on “The Fujita Scale” of intensity.<br />Fujita determines Limestone suffered “incredible” winds up to 318 mph.<br />The year 1974, Levine reminds us, produces streaking at the Oscars when The Sting wins. Evel Knievel plans a rocket ride across a mile-wide canyon in Idaho. A French daredevil crosses twin towers of the new World Trade Center on a cable.<br />It’s odd the author omits the context of legislation the storm system inspires. Since I covered Kentucky issues for <em>The Courier-Journal</em>, I stand in the Oval Office when the also star-crossed President Nixon signs the Disaster Relief Act of 1974.<br />Louisville took terrible hits from nature’s April 4 attack, backgrounding my story.<br />My own family stories of storm survival still ground me as a Southerner. As an American. As a human.</span>Ayers Chair of Communicationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17982028863552626711noreply@blogger.com0