Monthly Archives: July 2018

I’ve reported about fakes but I’ve never done fake news

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Some friends think I should post a little speech I gave last month at the Missouri Broadcasters Association Convention.  The MBA has paid your faithful scribe its highest compliment by making me the first news director in its Hall of Fame.

Understand that a lot of people worked with me to report the news on the Missourinet for forty years.  And several helped me develop whatever talent I possess that let me be a reporter, which I think is about the greatest job in the world.  To spend a lifetime on the front line of events that affect the way all of us live and being paid to tell others about those things—well, I can’t think of anything I would rather have done. And it’s something I decided I wanted to do in the fourth or fifth grade.

Here’s the speech that several people say they liked (I deviated from the script from time to time):

Thank you for this recognition of a life’s efforts that have been achieved with the hard work, inspiration, support, cooperation, and—at times—the protection of many, many others.

Dr. Ed Lambert was my first broadcast professor at the University of Missouri, and Mahlon Aldridge of KFRU was my first general manager, a man who let many young people find out if they really wanted to be in this business by working at the radio station there. And Ray Rouse, who put me on the air for my first newscast in February of 1963.  And then there’s Clyde, who has been such a good friend for a long time.

These are people who taught me and who exemplified for me the very concept that radio should be of a community, not just in a community. They taught me these things and I continue to carry those thoughts and ideas—and ideals—through my life.

They taught me that the words in the old phrase, “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” especially the last word, are vitally important and should be important to radio. They speak of an obligation beyond ourselves and our bottom lines.

I want to single out one person worthy of great gratitude from me—-and probably great sympathy from all of you:

My wife, Nancy, has tolerated a husband whose work week usually reached 70 or 80 hours, who sometimes brought dinner to me at the Capitol in a covered plate.  She now knows the challenges of having me in the house at lunch time. We are dealing with that crisis one day at a time.

In forty years at the Missourinet we had a lot of outstanding reporters in an aggressive newsroom that could not be intimidated, or bought, or persuaded to ignore issues and people who deserved the spotlight. We were protected by the founder of our company, Clyde Lear, himself a journalist who understood the importance of a free, unafraid, press, and the necessity in a free society of an informed public—informed by that free and responsible press.

Long ago, while a student being shaped as a Journalist at the University of Missouri, I first heard the words of Walter Williams, the founder of the world’s first School of Journalism, who wrote, “I believe in the profession of Journalism.  I believe that the public journal is a public trust, that all connected with it are to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust.”

Those words were the touchstones of our Missourinet newsroom and they are the unspoken aims of free journalists everywhere. Unfortunately, they seem to mean much less to many of those who control our stations today.

I had The Journalist’s Creed translated into the Romanian and Polish languages when I was sent to those countries to run seminars on developing independent news operations after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And I distributed those words to the young, idealistic journalists who were then starting to emerge in those now, free, countries.

This is a good time, I think, for the first news director in your Hall of Fame to make a very strong point or two—and in doing so I hope not to be considered ungrateful for this honor.

In my half-century plus as a journalist first—a broadcast journalist, second—I have never—ever—-broadcast “fake news.” The Missourinet never once did “fake news.” We worked with hundreds of news people at dozens of stations throughout Missouri, some of whom are in this room tonight, and not once did any of them ever give us a story that was “fake news.”

Those who accuse people like me of doing fake news are accusing people like me of being liars.  I don’t lie.  We didn’t lie. The Missourinet today doesn’t lie. And our affiliate news people who fed us thousands of stories never lied.

When it comes to integrity, I will stack the people I worked with in my newsroom or people in the newsrooms throughout the state that we worked with against the claimed integrity of those seeking or holding positions of power any day of the week on any standard of integrity.

It might seem to some that those who accuse people in my profession of doing “fake news” are only painting the national news organizations with that brush. But there is a splatter that taints all journalists, and I do not believe it is unintentional.

My good friend Dan Shelley, who has gone from sending us stories from KTTS in Springfield to being the Executive Director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, recently observed that, “In today’s divisive, vitriolic environment, journalists should watch their backs but not back down. The only antidote to attacks on responsible journalism is more and better journalism.”

So let me put it plainly: Wherever in our industry there is fake news, it is not likely to be in newsrooms that are free from political, economic, and corporate pressure.  But to the misfortune of our communities, to our state, and to our nation, our increasingly corporate-dominated industry has—in too many places—eliminated that independent, local, voice entirely—has reduced it to insignificance, or has turned the independent local news departments into corporate mouthpieces.

It might be argued—perhaps SHOULD be argued—that our industry is complicit in undermining the work of the shrinking number of people in our newsrooms because of the constant and badly imbalanced drum beat of division, derision, denigration, and distrust that goes forth on our airwaves hour after hour, convincing people they are victims of—rather than partners in—the American system of government..

In effect, we splatter ourselves, and in doing so, we do a disservice to the people of integrity— the reporters, news directors, and editors, the photojournalists in whose programs candidates and special interests might buy time but should never control content. , and in those stories that are insulated from those who seek to make journalists only their partisan public relations tools.

This is a time for all of us to find courage, the courage to build public trust in ourselves by taking more seriously our roles as trustees of for the public, and being more of a “necessity” than the furniture store in the next block, the clothing store at the mall, the  yogurt shop up the street.

It is time for less manipulative talk, and time for a commitment to more significant news that helps our public think for itself.

I am intensely grateful to the Missouri Broadcasters Association for this wonderful recognition. What I have said tonight is what I have been and what I still am, and the hopes I have that our industry can be more of a necessity for more people than that furniture store in the next block.

It is a great honor to be in company with so many people for whom I have such great regard.  Thank you for this recognition.

If reading these remarks is not enough for you, you can watch them being delivered (with some additional material ad-libbed and some nice things others said—including from the first two reporters we hired at the network, Jeff Smith and Charles Morris) at https://www.mbaweb.org/bob-priddy/.  It is nice of people to say those things while I’m still on the green side of the grass.  I think we could do a better job of saying things like these to each other before they are said around a box while soft organ music is playing.

The reference to “public interest, convenience and necessity” originally was in the federal public utility law and was written into the Federal Radio Act of 1927, the first law setting operational standards for the new medium of radio. It was carried over into the 1934 Federal Communications Act.  There are those who think the phrase, often criticized for vagueness, became a dead phrase after deregulation of broadcasting in the Reagan years.  I believe it called for a certain amount of industry responsibility that is lacking today.

One of the lines I had in the speech that I left out was “I have never done fake news but I have done news about fakes.”   This event was held on June 2 and I thought it best to leave some things unsaid that would otherwise have diverted attention from the points of the speech.

So there it is.  Some people stood up and clapped afterwards.  That was pretty nice.

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A pithy observation

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Saw something I hadn’t seen in about fifty years a few weeks ago.

(I wonder if I’ll ever be comfortable saying I remember things that happened fifty or sixty years ago?  Probably not the only old coot who thinks about that.)

A fellow named Bill Powers of Martinsville, Indiana, was wearing what appeared to be a pith helmet.

Bill was one of the hundreds of people who don yellow shirts every year and volunteer to help hundreds of thousands of people find their way peacefully and safely at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  He’s been one of those volunteers for twenty-seven years.  His wife was another “yellow shirt” as we call them in another part of the track.  Twenty-seven years.  That’s probably pretty close to the average.  A lot of folks take a lot of pride in being part of the logistical force behind The Greatest Spectacle in Racing, year after year.

Bill was one of those checking the credentials of folks entering the pits or the garage area at the Speedway.

It was the pith helmet that stopped me as I headed to the garages from the pits on the last practice day before the race.  Not a real pith helmet. It’s a modern reproduction, painted yellow with Speedway insignia attached.  He told me that he and Eric Sample, who was working in the parking area, had them.  I hope they catch on.

A check with Speedway historian Donald Davidson confirmed the pith helmets were replaced with caps about 1966 or 1967.

Real pith helmets are made of pith, a material from an Indian swamp plant called the Sola. It also can be made of cork or other fibrous material. It’s light weight and is intended to shade the head and the face of the wearer from the sun. The first ones were worn by Spanish forces in the East Indies and then adapted by the French when they became involved in what was called Indochina (now Vietnam), where the weather is humid.  In time, it was seen, for good or ill, as symbolizing colonial rule as more and more European countries took control of areas of the Far East.  It became standard headgear for people living in tropical climates and is still worn by soldiers and civilians in Vietnam and is ceremonial dress for some military units in Britain, Canada, and Monaco. Some of our mail carriers still use them and some U. S. Marine instructors still use them.

They haven’t been at the Speedway in a long time. But maybe Eric and Bill have re-started something.  Frankly, this reporter thinks Bill looks pretty distinguished in his. Didn’t get a chance to talk to Eric.  Finding him would have been kind of a needle/haystack proposition.  The attendance on race day was estimated at about 300,000.

The Indianapolis 500 is called the single largest one-day sporting event in the world.

Think about the logistics of a Missouri Tiger football game when the team is really good and drawing 75,000 fans to Memorial Stadium in Columbia.  People are needed to direct fans to parking places, to collect money for tickets or parking fees, to run concession stands, to clean up spilled food and drink, to treat those overcome by heat, steep stairs, and booze, to usher people to the right seats—it goes on and on.

Now imagine a crowd four times that size on a 93-degree day, some of them there to just party, not to pay much attention to the amazing displays of skill that are happening on the track.  Imagine pre-game ceremonies that involve hundreds of marching band performers, thousands of fans on the track before the start-engines command is given, parades of vehicles with honored guests, singers, a military flyover—sometimes by a plane from our own Whiteman Air Force Base, and finally the start of the race.

You need a lot of people to herd a lot of folks in and out of various venues, numerous grandstand sections, restrooms, a big museum, food and drink concessions, souvenir stands, inspection stations where large coolers, backpacks and purses are checked—just getting through the “in” and “out” gates.

A large percentage of those helpful people are the volunteers in the yellow shirts like Bill Powers.  And they are unfailingly nice—at least we’ve never run into one who was anything but courteous and helpful (and firm when necessary).  I’m not sure I could keep my cool on a hot, congested day as these folks do year after year.

Go here, not there.  You’ll find what you’re looking for over there.  You’re not allowed beyond this point, sorry.  If you hear one blow a whistle, look around. Something might be coming—a tractor pulling a race car, a crew member with a stack of tires, an ambulance, a truck, maybe even a race car by itself—and they move pretty fast sometimes even when not on the track.  You are in the way and maybe in harm’s way if you don’t move.  Nothing personal, just be aware.

We’ve said it before. It’s too bad we don’t have people in yellow shirts like Bill keeping order at a disorderly time in our politics.  Somebody in a yellow shirt and a pith helmet could do a lot of good there.

(photo credits: Rick Gevers, Bob Priddy)

Let’s just end it

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Bought something on the internet the other day.  Clicked on an icon that said, “calculate sales tax.”   It was optional, but I clicked on it and was told my purchase would entail $1.79 in sales tax.

Did I regret clicking on that icon?   Not at all.  Just a half-hour earlier I had shopped for a similar item at a brick-and-mortar store and hadn’t seen anything I liked.  If I had bought that item at that store, I would have paid about that much in sales tax anyway.  So by clicking on the internet icon, I—to use a cliché—levelled the playing field.  And I remained a law-abiding citizen.

Please don’t congratulate me for my fairness.  I’m sure I could have found something better to do with that $1.79 than give it to the government which—to use another cliché recently spoken—doesn’t know how to spend my money as well as I do.  I just felt that since the U. S. Supreme Court has said states can collect sales taxes from out-of-state internet vendors I should respect the majority opinion of our highest court.

It has not been a surprise that a member of the legislature quickly has come to my rescue. And his reasoning is no surprise, either.  This legislator considers imposition of the Missouri sales tax on internet purchases made by Missourians to be a sales tax increase and thinks the state needs to provide some relief for such an onerous imposition.

Pardon us, however, if we have trouble understanding how the state collection of sales taxes on internet purchases is a tax increase. But if we accept that line of thinking, why accept the  convoluted solution that goes with it?   We have a far better one and one that without doubt would be much more politically popular.

The idea put forth in the proposed legislation is to cut individual income tax rates even more to offset the internet sales taxes that income taxpayers might soon have to start paying. The idea seems premature because it’s going to take some time to make it legally and mechanically possible to collect those sales taxes. Then it will take some time to get a consistent measurement of how much those collections will be and how Hancock limits affect them.  A little less enthusiasm for immediate remedies to the “problem” of collecting internet sales tax might be advisable because there are other issues to be considered.

Think of all of the Missourians who shop locally and pay the state sales tax.  They are good citizens. They follow the law.  The law says those Missourians will pay sales taxes.  They obey the law.

Where is their outrage or political outrage on their behalf—the good citizens—when other citizens avoid following the law by using the internet to avoid paying the sales tax on the things they buy?   Tax avoidance often lands some people in the pokey—unless its sales tax avoidance by using the internet.  It seems this early legislative proposal legitimizes their tax avoidance.

I’d be willing to bet that many Missourians intentionally avoid paying state sales taxes at felony levels each year.  They keep their $1.79 and are never prosecuted for avoiding the sales tax law.

Let it be clearly stated:  Requiring citizens to pay a tax they have avoided paying is NOT a tax increase.  It is a matter of fairness.  It is requiring the sales tax scofflaws to live by the same standards with which their shop-local fellow citizens live.

Here is an idea that is eminently fairer:  Eliminate the sales tax for everybody.

Clearly, there is within the philosophy that the state should not recognize additional funds by collecting taxes from people who should have been paying them anyway, an implied acknowledgement that adequate funding for state programs and services and bureaucrat salaries is not a matter of concern.

So let’s just level the playing field by eliminating the sales tax on everything.  That puts our local businesses on an equal footing with internet sellers—in fact, it might give them an advantage because they don’t charge shipping fees for local purchasers.

To carry out contemporary political thinking: Eliminating the sales tax will trigger a boom in local retail sales, thus providing more jobs that generate more income taxes that will offset the loss of sales tax revenue.

Let’s not make this thing more complicated than it is.  There’s no reason to start calculating income tax cuts.  Just get rid of all sales taxes, period.   That makes everybody equal.

After all, I could have done a lot of good things with that $1.79 if I hadn’t been honest enough to pay a sales tax.

Notes from a quiet street (July, 2018)

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(being a collection of anecdotes that are not bloggity enough to merit their own entry)

That big red brick house a couple of blocks east of the Capitol is being given a new name by some political observers.  You know, the Executive Mansion?

Or, as they call it now, the Parsonage?

—

Jut shootin’ the breeze with some friends the other day when the talk turned to politics. This was back before the governor resigned and before the separation of children at the southern border became a dominant issue in the news.

One of the participants at the table suggested a way President Trump could get congressional approval of the money he wants to build a border wall. The answer, said the keen observer to my right was, “Since he promised in his campaign and has said repeatedly since his election that Mexico would pay for the wall, why doesn’t Congress agree to let him have that money—-as soon as the President of Mexico transfers it to the United States Treasury?  He keeps his campaign promise; money isn’t taken away from other programs; and congress can move on to other things.”

There were several noticeable nods of agreement from the folks at the table who, by the way, were from various parts of the political spectrum.

—

One of the joys of the tedious hours of searching through old newspapers for one article or even one line of one story for an article or a book is the little surprises that pop up.  Here’s one of those little surprises, a story about why husbands should let their wives know they’re appreciated.

University Missourian (before it became The Columbia Missourian), Thursday, September 24, 1914:  LEAVES HIM A BED AND ROOM.

She evidently was tired of supporting her husband—was Mrs. Anna Hickam, who died at her home six miles southwest of Columbia day before yesterday.  Anyway, her will reads like it.  Here is what it says:

“I have contributed largely to the support of my husband for a number of years, and I now give to him the bed-stead, bed and bedding now used by him in my home, and a room in the frame house just south of my residence so long as he desires to occupy the same, feeling that he has already received his full share of my property, and as he draws a pension from the government he should be able to take care of himself.”

Mrs. Hickam left all of her property to her daughter, Mary E. Morris.”

—

There are at least three women named “Nancy” at the YMCA where your correspondent goes three times a week to remain fit, a place where one of the computer screens says, “You’re only one workout away from a good mood”—and I agree that I was in a better mood before my first workout.  I am married to a Nancy.  Two other fellows I talked to at the “Y” have wives named Nancy.

The Nancy inundation has led yours truly to see if all of these ladies are from a generation where Nancy was one of the most popular names for new babies.  Nancy, by the way, is a diminutive of the Hebrew “Ann,” a word for “Grace,” according to one source.  So if you know of anybody named Nancy Grace, you know a walking redundancy.

Well, it turns out that Nancy suddenly became a very popular name in the 1930s.  It cracked the top ten in popular girls’ names in 1934, was seventh from 1944-49, topped out at number 6 on the charts in 1950 and then started a decline that saw it fall from the top ten in 1956.  The Behind the Name website says Nancy was the 900th most popular name for girls in 2016.

The Social Security Administration says there were 18,303 babies named Nancy per each million baby names in 1947, more than ten times the number in 1909.  But you won’t find many new Nancys now.  The rate dropped to 80 per million last year.

So, yes, all those Nancys (Nancies?) are part of the twenty-year long Nancy explosion.

Grace be unto all of them.

Remember the document

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Tomorrow is Independence Day. But in too many places, it will be just a Fourth of July holiday.  Some places have events honoring veterans—although it is likely few, if any, of these events will remember to mention the veterans who should be recognized on Independence Day—the Revolutionary War veterans who might be buried in their community’s oldest cemeteries.

The Woodland Cemetery in Jefferson City, for instance, has the graves of Christopher Casey and John Gordon.  Casey also was a veteran of the War of 1812. They were young men when they likely heard one of the first readings of the Declaration of Independence.  And they fought to make that independence come true.

They are two of more than 350 Revolutionary War figures believed to be buried in Missouri.

Rather than make the ceremonies of this day another day to honor contemporary veterans, this should be the day to celebrate the document that declared our independence and proclaimed that the thirteen British colonies were equal partners in the formation of a new nation deserving equal rank with all other nations, the document that men like Christopher Casey and John Gordon defended in a revolution underway before the Declaration was written.

Princeton University Professor Danielle Allen, to whom we have referred in earlier entries, suggests in her book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, that all of us need to read the Declaration slowly and in detail and think about why it was written, what it meant then, and what it means today.  She maintains it’s far more than a 240-year old statement of reasons for breaking away from England.

We class the Declaration in the same category as the Lord’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a lot of church hymns—things we read, sing, or say (often in the wrong way) by rote, without giving any consideration to what we’re really saying.

Allen concludes, “There are no silver bullets for the problem of civility in our political life.  There are no panaceas for educational reform. But if I were to pretend to offer either, it would be this:  all adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high school…It would nourish everyone’s capacity for moral reflection.  It would prepare us all for citizenship.  Together we would learn the democratic arts….The time has come to reclaim our patrimony and also to pass it on—to learn how to read this text again—and to bring back to life our national commitment to equality. It is time to let the Declaration once more be ours, as it was always meant to be.”

Allen’s book, in fact, explains line-by-line and sometimes word-for-word why the Declaration says what it says. Reading the document is one thing; understanding it is another.  And Independence Day is a time to do both.

In this era of ego-driven, selfish, and hurtful politics, it is time to seriously ponder the last sentence of the document’s text.  “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

There are those who will see only the words “divine Providence” and start making divisive proclamations about a Christian nation.  But they miss the entire point of the sentence and, indeed, the entire point of the Declaration if that is all that they recognize because, in doing so, they avoid acknowledging the commitments these men made to one another and to us—and a commitment we should be renewing on this day.

Some will see that last sentence in sharp contrast to today’s politics of mutual destruction.  Professor Allen makes it clear in her book that the Declaration was heatedly debated by strong personalities who, in the end, found the powerful words proclaiming the birth of a new nation.  In comparison, the hours of debates we have heard in the legislature and watched in the Congress are insignificant.  And at the end of those modern debates, the participants walk away without a thought to their lives, their fortunes, and whatever honor they might still have.

Those men in Philadelphia knew this nation would not be independent just because they said it would be.  Their final sentence committed each of them to stand with the others to fight for that independence, no matter the cost, no matter their differences.  As Allen puts it, “They are building their new country, their peoplehood, on a notion of shared sacrifice.”

Allen thinks the pledge that united these passionate, disparate, individuals was based on the understanding that each of them was equal to the others. “They all pledged everything to each other.  Since the signers made their pledges as representatives of their states, they were also pledging their states and everything in them.  They staked their claim to independence on the bedrock of equality,” she wrote.

Their pledge to one another of everything of value to them, she says, is an understanding that this diverse group recognized all were equal in creating this new system and, “They do so under conditions of mutual respect and accountability by sharing intelligence, sacrifice, and ownership.  The point of political equality, then, is not merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to engage all members of a community equally in the work of creating and constantly re-creating that community.”

Equality is the foundation of freedom because from a commitment to equality emerges the people itself—we, the people—with the power both to create a shared world in which all can flourish and to defend it from encroachers…Equality & Freedom.  The colonists judged them worth all they had.

Would that we in this era, when the focus is on achieving and defending power over others, could have leaders and candidates with the courage to rally all of us to equally share the sacrifices and the responsibilities of being a whole people.

It is time for us go beyond the Fourth of July and pledge to one another on Independence Day that we are, as they were, bound together equally in constantly re-creating better communities and a better nation, pledging

OUR lives.

OUR fortunes.

OUR sacred honors.