Author Archives: bpriddy

See it before it’s too late

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Sunrise.  Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. 6:55 a.m. July 23, 2018. It is a winter day in Kenya, according to the animals who float above the animals below.

There is no time in nature; there is only light and darkness.  There are no calendars, no seasons in nature; there is only instinctive behavior driven by heat and cold, dry and wet. There is no war in nature; there is only those who eat and those who are eaten—and all ultimately fall into the latter category.

But it is not the lion or the leopard, the angry elephant or hippo or rhino that is the most dangerous animal in those places. Only the most intelligent of nature’s creations—and therefore the most dangerous of nature’s creations—divide the world into measurable segments called time.  Only the most intelligent—and most dangerous of nature’s creations—apply names to places, to the cycles of heat and cold, dry and wet, define the world around them in terms of beauty, and declare war on each other and sometimes on nature itself.

There are a few places in the world that prompt such reflections by the most intelligent and dangerous species. And those places are endangered by these most intelligent creatures who long ago abandoned an understanding that nature is a place for living and have accepted the idea that it is, instead, a place for having.

We have returned from places to which our fellow species have bestowed names: Aberdares, Naivasha, Nakuru, Masai Mara, Amboseli, Tarangire, Ngorongora, and Serengeti and in this and succeeding and perhaps irregular entries we propose to tell you about them.

But being part of the most intelligent and most dangerous species imposes a challenge because these places must be absorbed as much as seen. In the end, we suppose, there is a desperate hope that our species will—before it is too late—understand that we need places where there is no time, no seasons, no names.

There were times when we realized we were seeing some things reminiscent of what the a-westering pioneers in our own country might have witnessed when crossing the Great Plains and its high, tan, grass more than 150 years ago.  The wildebeest migration was under way, their numbers blackening the horizon as the American Bison must have blackened our horizon then.

In our recent travels, we have gone from cities so crowded, so deadlocked by social and economic structures, so stifling of life itself, places with no horizons, to places where the heart may expand in a seemingly limitless world.  Our species needs places where we are not forced to live inwardly but where we are free to fill national lungs (a phrase that originated with former Missouri Senator George Graham Vest when he defended Yellowstone from a plan by the federal government to let private commercial interests develop the area).

One of our group asked one of our guides in Tanzania if the country had natural resources it could exploit to build its economy.  “We have oil,” said the guide. “But we prefer to leave it underground where it belongs because refining oil causes wars.”  Tanzania uses hydropower, which supplies a lot, but not enough, of its electrical needs. It is extensively exploring development of biomass, particularly in agricultural areas, and it is aggressively moving toward the use of solar power, not surprising in a country with 2,800 to 3,500 hours of sunshine every year. 

We stayed in lodges with limited hours of electric lights and limited hours of hot water because generators are used; no power lines are constructed across these lands. But these lodges had seemingly unlimited numbers of employees who walked with us between the main building and our rooms to keep us from crossing the paths of the animals who freely roamed the area: the giraffe along the walkway, the zebras and the antelope and the monkeys that roamed freely in our presence.  And especially the hippos that came out of the water late at night to graze near our rooms.

In Tanzania and in Kenya, at least, there are some who realize some places are more important to the national character and to the future well-being of all species than what is beneath the soil.  All of us need to see these places. And if our arrogant intelligence will let us learn from these places, perhaps we will learn there is an innate value to us in them that once lost can never be regained.

We are the smartest and therefore the most dangerous of all animals because we can think in abstract terms.  Instead of communicating to others of our species, as the wild creatures we saw communicate to their own species, “Lion, run!” we are able to think, “Lion. What a great trophy,” or “Rhino. Horn.  Better Sex.”  Or “Land. Resources beneath it. Lions and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeest are dispensable. There is money here.”

The ancient scriptures tell us that God gave man dominion over the earth and all of the creatures created earlier. And they tell us that man and woman lived in harmony with those creatures—until they ate from the tree of knowledge and in doing so destroyed Eden.  But they became the smartest animals.

There are too many who do not understand there is a difference between “dominion” and “domination.”

Domination is an excuse.  Dominion is an obligation.  Domination is a rationale for selfish and uncaring consumption. Dominion is a responsibility to save, to preserve, to create that which is lasting and which touches the spirit. Domination is short-sighted.  Dominion is a long-term understanding that we, the smartest animals, cannot survive in ignorance of and disrespect for the land that give us life.

Domination is a destructive narrowness of immediate gratification. Dominion is an understanding that there are, as Aldo Leopold wrote, “things in this world more important than dollar signs and ciphers.”

If you trust your fellow intelligent species to accept Leopold’s words, you have no worries.  Otherwise, do what we have done.   See it before it is too late.

Banned for insulting the president

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Some (maybe many) people have never trusted me.  Some people have been afraid of me.  Some people dislike me.

Because I am a reporter.  I am a journalist.

I am an enemy of the people.

Some people.

They are most often people in power.  And their strongest supporters.

Even now, when I do not daily roam the halls of political power, some consider me an enemy because of what I write.

I am an enemy of SOME people.

And because they think I am their enemy, they do their best to convince a general public that I am its enemy, too.

And their constant efforts to undermine the institutions of democracy—not just the press—are paying off, it seems.

Sam Stein, who writes for the politics and popular culture website The Daily Beast, wrote a few days ago of a new public opinion poll done by the Ipsos marketing and opinion research group that says almost half of self-identified Republicans think “the news media is the enemy of the American people.”   Only about one-fourth of that group disagreed.  And almost eighty percent of those surveyed think the mainstream media is unfair to President Trump.

Further, says the poll, forty-three percent of those self-identified Republicans think President Trump should be given authority to shut down news outlets “engaged in bad behavior.”

Whatever that means.

Almost one-fourth of those folks agreed that the President should be able to close The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations that apparently don’t willingly accept the Trump world view.

It’s no surprise that the poll found Democrats sharply disagree.  But twelve percent of Democrats and one-fourth of the Independents surveyed feel that people like me are enemies of the American people.

Twelve percent of self-identified D’s and twenty percent of the I’s agree that President Trump should be able to stop the presses and turn off the cameras for newspapers and television networks he doesn’t like.

People like me have not felt so honored since Spiro Agnew referred to us as “nattering nabobs of negativity” in the Watergate days of the Nixon administration.  But yesterday’s “nattering nabobs” continued to natter and history records who was more truthful about what had been going on.

This survey brings to mind an article discovered in The Guardian, an eastern African newspaper I picked up in Arusha, Tanzania a few days ago.  The Tanzanian deputy minister for information, culture, arts and sports, Anastazia Wambura, had banned publication of the weekly paper MwanaHalisi last September for two years because of government-claimed “unethical reporting, the publishing of fabricated and inciting articles, and endangering national security.”

It seems the newspaper was accused of sedition for asking, “Whom should Tanzanians pray for, the President, or Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian lawyer and opposition politician” who had been arrested a half-dozen times last year including the final time—a year ago this month—for “insulting the President.”   He had been shot eight times in the stomach and legs nine days before the newspaper was banned for “unethical reporting,” etc.

But the High Court in Dar es Salaam threw out the ban on July 24. The government information ministry did not report the reversal. But The Guardian let readers known the government had crossed a line in banning the newspaper. The editor of MwanaHalisi announced the shutdown had cost the newspaper 2.2 billion shillings (not quite one-million US dollars), and the newspaper was going to sue Wambura for damages.

So there’s an example of what happens in a country where the government defines “enemy of the people” and thinks it has the power to do something about them.

Enemies of the people spreading fake news.  That, apparently, is people like me.

Richard Nixon had his list of enemies of the people spreading fake news.  We know that didn’t turn out well for him.

Government officials and government in general prefer not to be held accountable, not to be questioned either about their motivations, the legitimacy of their implied or emplaced policies, or held accountable for the results of their statements and actions. And it gets worse as they climb higher up the political food chain.  As they rise, they find it more expedient and more politically advantageous to attack the integrity of those who ask the questions rather than explain their possible lack of integrity that has generated those questions.  And the bigger megaphone they get as they rise higher, the more people are inclined to accept what they say or do as unquestionable gospel or as unquestionable action.  So it is that a segment of the public willingly forfeits one of its greatest responsibilities of citizenship—holding accountable those they place in high position—and accepts the idea that those who seek that accountability on their behalf are in some way liars and even traitors.  

Questioning the statements or actions of those in authority is a healthy virtue of citizenship. And there’s no harm in questioning the fairness of those who have the most direct access to those who need to be questioned. 

But to advocate keeping those with the most direct access—the press—from asking the questions is tragic.  We might ask questions you would prefer not be asked.  But those in high leadership positions have their own mouthpieces. It is not the role of the press to be another one.

One of the penalties of freedom as well as one of the great virtues of freedom is the ability to question authority. Because it NEEDS to be questioned.  Always.

And it’s the press that has the access to ask those questions.

The Ipsos survey does have some reassuring results for people like me, we suppose.  Almost sixty percent of ALL respondents believe journalists are “necessary to keep the Trump administration honest.”  The percentage of Republicans agreeing with that idea slightly outweighed those who disagreed—39-35 percent.  And eighty-five percent of all respondents think “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy.”

The survey says almost three-fourths of all respondents think it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information (eighty-five percent Republicans, sixty-three percent Democrats).

Folks, we’ve got (real) news for you.  Laws on libel and slander provide that right, although people in high public places are limited—and the shutdown of the newspaper in Africa is an example of why those with the power to control information should be limited although we do have instances where people, and companies with power, file libel and slander suits to bankrupt people who have told the truth or who have sought it.

The United States Constitution’s guarantees of First Amendment freedoms establishes a sometimes-awkward confrontation of rights.  The news media are free to publish and presidents as well as private citizens of all stripes are free to talk.  Whether we like it or not, irresponsible speech and irresponsible comments are a price we have to bear so that we might speak our own minds and think our own thoughts whether we buy ink by the barrel, use a microphone to magnify our voices, or make disparaging comments about each other at the coffee shop.

The media structure of our nation is in great flux today because of the rise of personal information devices that can isolate people within their own opinions and protect them from considering ideas of others that might change their thinking.  But advocating a system that prohibits and punishes those whose opinions differ from yours is extremely dangerous, or could be if the political winds change direction.

The journalist, the reporter rather than the commentator, is the one most likely to ferret out the truth.  Scripture tells us that the truth will make us free.  Perhaps it is better to say in these times that the freedom to search for the truth is what keeps us free.

In a time when so many are encouraged not to search, those who are unafraid to light a lantern against the darkness are sometimes considered enemies. We should always pray that there are always those with the courage to turn on that lantern.  Limiting or endangering their freedom is the surest way to limit or endanger the freedoms we all must sustain.

Call us all the names you wish, people like me will not give up our lanterns.

Finally, we have a group photo

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Nancy and I returned last week from a trip to Africa.  We’ll be writing a lot about that in future entries but we saw and did so much that it is taking some time to sort things out and go through all the pictures we took (thank Heaven for digital cameras).   Today, we want to do some reminiscing about some old friends who are together this week for the first time in, probably, forty years.

It will be 44 years ago this December that three young men began to work together on what became The Missourinet.

Jeff Smith, Chuck Morris, and me.

We never had our picture taken together. Until this week.

The story of The Missourinet goes back several years before 1974, however, and it begins on the top floor of a rickety old building now long-gone at 410 East Capitol Avenue.  It was the home of a radio station that no longer operates in Jefferson City and the building was so old and unstable that anyone who slammed the front door down on the first floor (which I think was originally the basement of a century-old—and more—house was likely to cause the needle to jump on a record in a second-floor studio.

The production studio of the station was in the living room of the old house. The fireplace was still there and occasionally a bird would fall down the fireplace and go batting around the room frantically trying to get out.   Once, a bird got through the ventilation system and into the adjoining news booth, a cubicle about four by five feet or so, where it rested in the comfortable near-darkness until I walked in and turned on the light for the first newscast of the morning. The bird really went nuts and I stepped back and held the door open until it could go nuts in another part of the building while I went on with the newscast.

Later, when the station added an FM station, a small studio was built inside the living room/production room.  A bird got into the FM studio one day and in its excitement delivered a deposit onto a record that was being played.  I don’t think the announcer ever explained why the broadcast was briefly interrupted; I don’t think there was a way he could have explained it.

Well, anyway, a year or so after I became news director, a young fellow came to work as my assistant. His name was Clyde Lear, a really sharp fresh graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, the first Plan B master’s degree student.

Plan B was something new at the school. It was for people who didn’t want to go on for a doctorate and found the strong research part of the original master’s program not real useful to someone who wanted to get out and report.  So Plan B was created and it involved writing a paper rather than a thesis.

Clyde’s paper was about the creation of a state radio network.   We sometimes talked about the idea when things got slow in the newsroom.

Just down the hall, in another decrepit room, was the office for the farm director and the program director.  This was all on the third, top, floor of the old building, a room where (I swear), you could raise the windows and the sash would go up but the glass would stay in place.

The farm director was Derry Brownfield and he had a dream, too, for a statewide agriculture network. Before too long, Clyde and Derry started talking.

Clyde was a terrific reporter.  Didn’t know beans about sports, which the news staff sometimes had to do.  He sold Bibles and other religious books during the summer vacations from college and he sold a ton of them.  Frankly, Bible-selling was more lucrative than radio journalism, and Clyde decided after a time that he and his growing family just couldn’t make it on $95 a week (I think I was making 125).   So he left to sell pavement sealer for a local lumber dealer, Buel Baclesse—whose wife ran a fabric shop next to the lumberyard on Dunklin Street.   He and Derry kept in touch.

They finally decided to do the network thing.  Agriculture first and then news.   They talked to some folks and got some other folks to co-sign bank notes to get started. The first studio was in the now-former fabric shop.   Clyde did all the wiring, all the commercial-selling, all the affiliate sign-ups, and Derry did the news and the markets.  They started, I think with about nine stations.

They had planned to take their idea to the radio station manager and ask to use something called the sub-carrier frequency on the FM station’s antenna to distribute the programs.  The frequency was not something people got on the regular radios but was sometimes used to distribute elevator music to department stores or offices through special receivers.  You have to be kind of along in years to remember hearing that music while you shopped or, uh, rode the elevator.    But the manager got wind of their network idea before they could meet with him and he summoned Clyde one night to a meeting under a street light near both of their homes and in the ensuing heated discussion announce he was going to fire Derry Brownfield.

Which he did.

Which was the best thing that could have happened to The Missouri Network, Inc., as the company began.  It meant that the network would be completely independent of the programming demands of any particular radio station and would have to arrange hard-wire connections with affiliates.  That worked until technology made it possible for us to eliminate the expensive telephone line hookups with stations and became the first radio network anywhere in American that was 100% satellite-delivered.

The concept worked really well and about a year or so after the network began on January 2, 1973, Clyde and Derry decided the cash flow was good enough to pay their salaries, make payments on the loans, and start the news network.

So Clyde called me. We met. He offered me a job.

And I put him off because I had been the capitol correspondent for KMOX in St. Louis (an impressive title that amounted to little more than doing a sixty-second wrapup piece about what had happened in Jefferson City during the week. It was broadcast on a Saturday morning show in St. Louis.   KMOX’s general manager and broadcasting god Bob Hyland had told me a few months earlier that the station was impressed by my work and wanted to “bring me in” as soon as there was an opening.   I later learned I was not the first person he said that to and by the time Clyde called me I was about to give up on the dream of working for CBS in St. Louis.  Finally it was clear that wasn’t going to happen so I told Clyde I’d work for him.

I was going to stay with the station through the November elections but the manager, upon learning I was going to be the fourth person from the station to work for the network, told me that I should consider October 31 my last day.

So on November 1, 1974, I started helping Clyde make his dream of a news network come true.  We would debut on January 2, 1975.  Two other reporters would be the first staff members.  Jeff Smith, who had worked with me at the radio station before he went to more lucrative pastures, was the first choice.   And shortly after that we got an application and an audition tape from a young man in Albuquerque named Charles Morris.  They were extraordinary reporters and even more extraordinary people.

I think the addition of the three of us raised the total company employment to eight.

We started working together on December 1, 1974.  One of our first jobs was to move the furniture in to the first studios, a two-room efficiency apartment on the top floor of a former funeral home at 216 E. McCarty.  KWOS was on the bottom floor (I think the employee kitchen was in the former embalming room).   Our offices were in the apartment that was used by families of the recently-departed who needed a place to stay for a few days.

Gray metal desks, heavy and ungainly, were among the first things we moved in.  We had to hoist those suckers up a narrow stairway, make a little jog to the left and then another one to the right and fit the desks through a standard-sized (narrow) door opening.  That was the easy part.

The desk for the studio was a former wood, u-shaped circulation desk from the old city library that we wrestled with for an entire day and finally took apart, even breaking glue joints, to get it inside the office.   The whole day!  We were exhausted when we called it a day.  But it made for an impressive operations center for the network.

And on January 2, 1975 we went on the air with a congratulatory greeting from Governor Bond and some stories about Missourians (and Americans) being allowed to own gold coins for the first time in about four decades. Somewhere we have recordings of the first newscasts.

Not long afterwards, the Missouri Network, Inc., changed its name.  The farm network had signed up its first affiliates outside the state so it needed a name that didn’t have “Missouri” in it.  That’s when it became the Brownfield Network.  And later, Missouri Network, Inc., became inadequate.  We had a staff meeting at the corporate headquarters across the street at 217 (now a law office) and somebody suggested the company get a name that recognized the founders. And that’s how Learfield was born.

By then, Charles Morris was gone. I think by then he was working for United Press International and later was an owner of an Oklahoma radio station. Jeff Smith had become a part of the company sales force and became General Manager of the Missourinet.  He later became the President and COO  of the Minnesota News Network (which Learfield later bought) and moved on to become a communications director for Northwest Airlines before it disappeared into Delta in 2008. He can still fly free, although on standby, with Delta and now is the Communications Director for Volunteers of America of Minnesota and Wisconsin, one of the country’s largest health and human services organizations.

Charles, who often came into the newsroom toting the latest book on positive thinking by the televangelist and motivational speaker Rev. Robert Schuller, later went to seminary and is the president of California-based Haven Ministries, Inc., a radio ministry that began in 1934.

Both were invited to the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame induction in June of the guy who brought them to the Missourinet so we could together provide Missourians with political and government news they never before had a chance to hear. Neither Jeff nor Chuck could make it. But schedules seemed to match up for the visit this week.

We started something good.  We made Clyde’s dream come true.  And now the four of us—Clyde, Jeff, Chuck, and me—are together again.   We’ve been telling stories, recalling people we dealt with all those years ago, remembering how we provided a product that Clyde and our friend Jim Lipsey—another colleague at that Jefferson City radio station—could convince stations to take (we started with 36 affiliates, most of which were farm network affiliated stations that had learned the company could be trusted).

And we’re finally getting our picture taken together.

We were blessed by the opportunity we had to start something good.  We were blessed by working for Clyde.  We were blessed because we were able to work with each other.

We visited today’s Learfield building where Jeff and Chuck were amazed by the empire the company has grown to from the days when we were employees 6-7-8, setting out to change the way Missourians got news about their state government and politics.  Only one person working in the building has been around long enough to remember us. Afterwards we went back downtown to the Missouri Bar Annex, the former ex-funeral home where we visited our original newsroom and studio.  They are now divided into two offices.

News and Ag broadcasting are just a small part of Learfield Communications today, a billion-dollar-plus enterprise that Clyde and I sometimes visit although more and more people wonder who we are. A lot of people work for Learfield now.  There are offices throughout the nation.  But once there were eight of us in two buildings.  And we were three of them.  We were The Missourinet.

(That Chuck on the far left, Jeff, me, and Clyde having a good time in today’s Missourinet newsroom.)

We still look enough like we did all those years ago that we didn’t have any trouble recognizing each other.  It was a special time back in the mid and late 1970s when we started the Missourinet.  It was a REALLY special time, those 21 hours we had together more than four decades later.

 

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.

A tax gift, if we want it

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The U. S. Supreme Court has shown it can change its mind and a new ruling that lets states collect sales taxes from out-of-state internet retailers gives Missouri government a new opportunity as well as some new issues to confront.

All reasons for NOT collecting taxes on out-of-state internet sales seem to have been eliminated by the court’s narrow decision to throw out a 1992 ruling saying out-of-state internet merchants would not have to collect state sales taxes and pay them to the purchaser’s state unless the company had a substantial presence in a state.

That ruling in the early days of internet commerce put brick and mortar businesses in Missouri and other states at a disadvantage and they’ve been aggravated for years that the legislature hasn’t corrected the problem.  The legislature has said its hands have been tied by the 1992 ruling.

The ropes are off now.  We’ll be interested to see if state leaders next year call for passage of a law requiring collection of that sales tax.  There is no doubt the state could use the money.

The legislation will not be easy to write although the court ruling does provide some hints about what will work.

It would not be surprising to hear some voices claim—as they have in the past—that imposing sales taxes on internet merchants would be a tax increase on purchasers and therefore not something the state should lay upon the shoulders of taxpayers who have avoided sales taxes on certain purchases up to now.  We’ll have to see if that lame argument still has any legs in a state that continues to rank in various studies in the lower third of all states for overall tax burden.

The court ruling makes it harder to justify saying, “We’re pro business” while maintaining a sales tax policy that puts our home-town merchants at a sales disadvantage to businesses that exist on our computer screens.

And where do we get the idea that the computers on our desks or in our pockets are not some kind of a “physical presence” in our state? Let’s be honest and admit that the internet long ago became more a physical presence in our lives than Wal-Mart. We don’t have to drive across town to buy something on the internet, after all.

Checking out through Paypal is no different from checking out at the local counter.  The buyer doesn’t  physically stick a credit card into a slot at a cash register with Paypal.  But internet merchants do have a cash register right in front of us—the computer that is a very real physical presence. My brick and mortar house becomes an internet merchant’s physical presence in my town and my state every time I check out with Paypal or some similar system.  (Ohio tried to address the issue with a law saying the use of cookies on consumer’s computers by internet retailers constitutes a “presence.” The retailers are fighting the idea in court.)

The danger, as some might see it, to requiring sales taxes to be collected on internet purchases is that state revenue might increase to the point that some lawmakers will decide to once again ease the overall tax burden on Missourians again.

That idea is getting pretty old. And shaky.

Political commentator Josh Barro, a former staffer at the Tax Foundation (considered a conservative think tank) who contributes to Business Insider, observes in a new article that the court decision reminds states of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause that says states cannot unduly burden or discriminate against businesses from other states.

South Dakota, which brought the lawsuit, avoids that pitfall by providing those retailers with computer software that makes it easier for them to pay sales taxes.  It does not require those retailers to deal with the state and every political subdivision within it that charges sales taxes.  The money goes to a central state agency.  Our Department of Revenue, which collects sales taxes collected by our local businesses and then sends proper amounts to local governments, would fill that role with internet sales taxes.

Missouri has not joined the twenty-or-so states that have signed on to the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement.  Those states have agreed to some common rules dealing with their sales taxes.  This ruling might encourage a new legislature (The 2019 General Assembly will have new leadership and several dozen new members) to take a new look at the SSUTA as it considers what to do to capitalize on the ruling.

One of Barro’s former colleagues at the Tax Foundation, Joe Henchman, says, “If you want to be absolutely sure that your statute is valid under these rules, you should try to emulate South Dakota as much as possible.”  So that’s a starting point.

Barro makes an important observation that some Missouri leaders seem to have been going against for some time: “It is important for a tax system to be adequate—that is, revenues should grow on pace with the economy, so the government can keep pace with the demand for services as the economy grows.”

He notes tax-free purchases from internet retailers distorts the behavior of purchasers by encouraging them to buy online when they otherwise would buy at a local store, thus reducing local tax collections and that means “the government either has to cut back on services or it has to raise taxes on something else.”   The resulting erosion of sales tax income at the state level has put a heavier burden on property taxes and “taxpayers have revolted against increases in this inflexible tax, voting to impose caps that have in some states kept revenue growth well below economic growth.”

Add to that the penchant government has to lower various taxes under the philosophy that lower taxes will mean more jobs that will stimulate the economy and you can get a state that reduces services that industries and employers would like to see before they commit to creating jobs.

So Missouri has an opportunity because of the court ruling.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in the Supreme Court decision, estimates the ruling could mean eight to thirty-three Billion dollars in annual tax revenues for the states.  The federal Government Accountability Office thinks Missouri’s share would be $180-275-million a year in state and local sales taxes.

Missouri could do a lot with that amount of money at the state and local levels.  Except—

We have the crippling Hancock Amendments.

Those parts of our state constitution put a ceiling on how much new taxes can be collected without a statewide vote.  State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a little more than a year ago, estimated that taxes at the statewide level could not increase by more than $94-million without such a vote. We’re not sure how much of the figure from the GAO would go to the state and how much would go into local government revenue accounts, but Hancock appears to put a cloud over the issue at the state level.

Before the passage of what was called Hancock II, the state had to make refunds to income tax payers if state revenue growth exceeded the original Hancock limits. The state did make those refunds for a couple of years before adopting the first of a series of tax cuts to make sure the state did not to go to the inconvenience of mailing out checks.  The state hasn’t come close to hitting the refund threshold since Hancock II. In fact, Auditor Galloway says Missouri is four BILLION dollars under that limit now.

Will voters support the new authority given Missouri by the U. S. Supreme Court to collect more than $94-million in internet sales taxes?  Will collecting six or seven or eight cents per dollar from an out-of-state internet seller increase state revenue so much that a statewide vote will be required, giving Missourians a chance to reject the proposal?  The GAO and the state auditor have put forth figures indicating that vote might be needed.

We have had about two decades of leadership telling voters their taxes are too high. We’ve seen voters who travel to the polls on increasingly bad roads that go across increasingly crumbling bridges refuse to support gas tax increases to make their journey smoother and safer. And the legislature has taken steps year after year to reduce the state’s financial ability to “keep pace with the demand for services as the economy grows.”

The court has presented Missouri with a gift.  Will Missourians decide to leave it unopened?

(You can read Josh Barro’s article at https://amp.businessinsider.com/supreme-court-wayfair-internet-sales-tax-decision-good-for-consumers-2018-6)

Missouri, the Seuss State, and the importance of “no”

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“I call them Thing One and Thing Two…                                                                             Then those things ran about                                                                                               with big bumps, jumps and kicks                                                                                        and with hops and big thumps                                                                                             and all kinds of…tricks.”

Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat gave us two Things and they have become part of our conversation in various ways through the years. The story comes to mind because history has never given Missouri a Governor-Lieutenant Governor combination with the same first names. Until now. Mike 1 and Mike 2.  Governor Mike Parson and Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe.

Missouri has had five governors and three lieutenant-governors named John, but the state capitol has never had two Johns at the same time.  We’ve had three Josephs as governor and one Joseph as lieutenant-governor.  But never together.

But on June 1, 2018, Missouri began to enter the Seussical Era. And now we have a couple of cats wearing a couple of new hats. Mike 1 and Mike 2.

As the good doctor wrote in another of his other best-selling ruminations on life:

“Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. There are games to be won…
Fame! You’ll be as famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t
Because, sometimes they won’t.”

We wish Mike 1 and Mike 2 a service without big bumps, jumps and kicks or tricks.  However:

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There is another issue beyond the legality of the appointment that piques our interest about the twoship of state government.

Article 4, Section 10. There shall be a lieutenant governor who shall have the same qualifications as the governor and shall be ex officio president of the senate. In committee of the whole he may debate all questions, and shall cast the deciding vote on equal division in the senate and on joint vote of both houses.

The Missouri Constitution carries over language written in 1875.

Today we pick a philosophical fight that suggests the lieutenant governor should always break ties in the senate and on those occasions when there is a joint vote by both the House and the Senate (the provision was written at a time when Missouri’s U. S. Senators were elected by the legislature) with a “no.”

Our argument is certainly open to discussion and we would welcome it in the comment area at the end.

Under our Constitution, the lieutenant governor is both fish and fowl, both legislative and executive in nature, the successor to the chief executive if something befalls the chief executive, and the presiding officer in the upper house of the legislative branch.

To test this idea, let’s suggest a circumstance in which the presiding officer in the upper legislative house breaks a tie with a “yes” vote on a bill.  Before the bill is truly agreed to and finally passed, the chief executive becomes unable to perform the duties of that office, thus elevating the person who broke a tie on a piece of legislation into a position of signing the bill into law.  The situation is at best awkward.  Under certain circumstances, signing the bill could create a conflict of interest because a vote cast to keep an issue alive during the legislative process might conflict with a new governor’s obligation to serve all of the people of Missouri.

So, let’s argue, the tie should always be broken in the negative.  Why?

Because it is the responsibility of those chosen by the people in the legislative districts to represent those constituents in finding agreement on a proposed law affecting all Missourians.  The Executive Branch, which is not chosen to specifically balance the rights of specific constituents, should not take legislators off the hook.

If the legislature, which is entrusted with enacting statutory policy that one should expect to be fair to all, cannot draft a policy that draws majority support, then its failure should not be excused.  And the lieutenant governor should not excuse that failure by voting “yes.”

Please note that we began by referring to this as a philosophical fight. In the real world, of course, there is partisanship and special interest favors to be considered, which is why a lieutenant governor who happens to be of the same party as the majority in the state senate is likely to let the majority party off the hook by turning a failure into a partisan success.

A “yes” vote to break a tie dismisses the value of half of the state’s population.  A “no” vote recognizes the place of both sides in the system of government, and demands that the people’s representatives work harder on an equitable policy for all.

A “yes” vote is politics.  A “no” vote is statesmanship.