Fill all the shadowlands with public access sunshine

The export-import trade in First Amendment freedom thrives as an issue, not a sure thing.
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.
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.
She is unable to alert her online and print audience of the problems under discussion until it's too late.
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.
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.
Yes, it's much worse abroad.
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.
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.
Those journalism students would have loved to struggle against our school board problems instead of contending for their lives in that rough neighborhood.
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.
National life is much more what Al Cross had in mind.
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.
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.
Not that our FOIA is perfect in every instance of execution.
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.
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.
I say there is no "outside" where liberty is concerned.
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.
People generally and mistakenly believe press freedom exists only to benefit not average citizens but the relatively few who make their living in media.
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.
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.
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.
I merely stop short of sending reporters to pointless deaths, Al.
But I am proud to be a part of the freedom export business.
Now, let's talk about importing the value of press access to shadowlands such as the local school board.

A license to dance

Sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.

The First Amendment makes a lovely invitation to the journalism ball.

Ask any dancer in the professional news business.
Trouble is, that same person can be a positive busybody about anyone else’s call to be a self-styled journalist.
I’m a constitutional purist about free expression, declared retired Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie last week. He said government shouldn’t license journalists.
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.
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.
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.
The boogie beat of citizen journalism especially drives the foxtrot crowd of mainstream media into digital harrumph.
Look, it’s like this: Journalism is either free of interference or it isn’t.
I prefer free.
If you enforce standards of practice for the street dancers, you have to do the same in the ornate ballrooms of news too.
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.
Yes, well, their disdain takes for granted public opinion of journalism could get much lower.
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.
The marketplace of public opinion is licenser enough.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Not when you play the constitutional music of the law of the land.
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.

George Carlin: A journalist appreciated

We all laughed with George Carlin. Journalists should have taken him more seriously. He had better instincts than many.
Carlin had an ear for usage. Write for the ear, we teach, not the eye. But too few do, producing a stilted tone instead of conversation.
And he thought. He thought about society. He started in radio. He ended in books.
His mastery of words and how to use them rose to the level of philosophy or at least of philology, the love of language and its meaning.
That’s because Carlin always sought the underlying sense and not just superficial correctness, the level where most users of the language stop drilling.
“Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway,” he asked.
That equals my favorite conundrum of how a vacuum bottle knows to keep hot things hot and cold things cold.
Comedians play a special role in our society. They are court jesters where the republic is monarch. They tell us what we need to hear in a way that overcomes our reluctance to listen.
Carlin will receive the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for humor posthumously to underscore his specialness.
Now there’s a pair to tickle St. Peter’s funny bone, Carlin and Twain. Add Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers to the circle. They all represent the poetic truth: “Scratch a humorist, and you’ll find a bitter man.”
Carlin put the thought differently: “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
So, Carlin said about Ronald Reagan’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras: “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”
I am not alone in my respect for the ability to assess others’ use, abuse and misuse of language. The official wordsmith of The New York Times Magazine, William Safire, paid tribute after Carlin died at 71.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06wwln-safire-t.html?ex=1372824000&en=5757a8a4aded95b1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Safire saw a perverse value in “the seven words you can’t use on television” routine by Carlin. By devaluing the shock value of those adolescent obscenities, Safire thought, the performer had done a service to the language.
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html

It took 98 years after his death to get the coverage.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.

The view of freedom from where it wasn't

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Ex-patriot journalists can get very patriotic. They can see no reason to hide it for someone else's imagined allegiance to objectivity over allegiance to country. Try teaching the tenets of western journalism to students from throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, their countries still thawing out from the Cold War and the frigid embrace of Stalinism. Look at the faces of Kosovo refugees, of Albanians worried about home and family, of ethnic minorities in a time of ethnic cleansing.The American University in Bulgaria held classes in an old communist headquarters. The idea was to spread free thinking where none had been allowed. Yet the region was not very much advanced from the time of the gulag. Bulgaria had still locked political rebels away in secret places even after Russia had stopped. American journalists-turned-teachers built a distressing reputation for themselves when first allowed into Eastern European classrooms. Students had them pegged as preachers of do-as-we-do, who would go back home after giving no real, pragmatic advice for coping with governments that had no sense of our First Amendment. There can be no American-style press without basic press freedom. So it's useless to tell new journalists to copy us. That reality travelled with me to American University as a Fulbright professor in the secondary city of Blagoevgrad, named for the founder of the Bulgarian communist movement. I looked out on my multi-ethnic, multi-national class in a setting that made 1958 look modern. And I said to the students' relief, "All right, let's figure out how you can do the best journalism you can without getting killed. Even if you merely get thrown into jail, you're still not going to be able to publish the closest approximation to truth all journalists seek." The students loved my American practicality. And I had a renewed appreciation for the press freedom they lacked and we take for granted in the United States. The final exam consisted of 9/11, which occurred during my Bulgarian semester, 2001. Weeping Muslim and Christian and the pro-American and the nominally anti-American students and people embraced my family and me. My students in particular felt an evil blow fell on a people who understood freedom better than any. An ex-pat looking homeward at a time of tragedy from a vantage of the freedom-deprived can see patriotism quite clearly. It's a foolish journalist who pretends not to be affected by feelings for country, whose Constitution makes our profession possible.