Category Archives: government

“Two roads diverged—”

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“In a yellow wood,” wrote Robert Frost

“And sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth.”

Two years ago, Missourians elected a charismatic young man who promised to make his state office something special, something different, something clean.

Two years ago, Missourians elected another charismatic young man who promised to make his state office something special, something different, something clean.

One of those young men took a road that has led him downhill into the darkness of the undergrowth, out of sight, and probably away from his dream of much bigger things—although there have been reports of some sounds coming out of that darkness that he’d like to come back for another trip.

The second young man last Tuesday took a road that is leading him up, to a sunny future, and perhaps an opportunity to reach the destination the first man thought he was going toward.

Poetry can take some interesting political turns.

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Two roads.  One paved, one gravel.  One that would have been important to maintaining and bringing jobs.  One that is paved now but facing reduction to gravel in the future. Missourians have chosen the gravel road into uncertainty’s undergrowth with their rejection of the latest gas tax increase.  Our state legislators and other state leaders who have made economic development a constant theme of their work have failed to convince voters that a tax increase would result in the good roads necessary to encourage economic growth.

They have sewn the wind by preaching the evils of taxes and the blessings of tax cuts and tax breaks, particularly for businesses that presumably will create more jobs.  But industry wants good roads to ship in manufacturing materials and equipment and good roads to ship products out.

“The people know better how to spend their money than government does,” we have heard them say repeatedly.  Again, the people have decided to keep their money and spend it for things better than building roads and bridges and interchanges to companies that might have provided jobs to those same people and their relatives and friends.

The people have decided they want a higher minimum wage, meaning many of those who might benefit from better roads and the better jobs they could help create will have more money for themselves.

Two roads.  Two men.  Two political philosophies.  But we travel with them and we are the ones who often decide which road they, and we, take—a road rising to the future or a gravel road descending into the dark undergrowth.

“And that has made all the difference.”

—or will, perhaps.

The loyal opposition

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The makeup of our congressional and legislative representation was defined yesterday.  Come January, a new political chemistry will be brewed in Washington and in Jefferson City because of the decisions made in thousands of ballot boxes.

Your respectful observer wants to talk about a loser today and what that loser said many years ago about the role of the losing side.

Lynne Olson’s book, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 triggered this interest that was increased by a Kansas City Star editorial found while researching the 1940 election in Missouri.

The loser was Wendell Willkie, a name that rings only faint bells is the minds of most political observers today other than those who know he lost the presidency to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won his third term.

A week after the election, Willke went on the radio for a nationwide address. In his speech he borrowed from a phrase created in Britain in 1826—the loyal opposition—and defined it for Americans.

That speech is worth considering in these times because of what opposition has become.

Willkie’s grandson, Wendell Willkie II, wrote of his grandfather in The Atlantic earlier this year that some people have compared his grandfather’s Republican nomination for president to Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016. Both had been Democrats. Both were/are prominent business executives. Neither had held public office. “Each substantially challenged and redefined then-prevailing Republican Party doctrine,” he wrote.  But after that, the two men have profoundly different worldviews:

Willkie is remembered for his optimistic, inspiring vision of America. A thoughtful student of history and economics, he powerfully articulated classically liberal ideals of political and economic freedom.  For all of our nation’s faults, he passionately believed in American exceptionalism. He took on unpopular causes, and battled discrimination and intolerance. But he also believed the world would be a far more dangerous place without American leadership.

Willke was a Republican who fought the New Deal while favoring America’s active support of Britain against Germany—at a time when American isolationism, with Charles Lindbergh as its most prominent advocate and presidential contenders Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft speaking for it, was powerful.

His position in the Republican Party rose when Germany invaded France and other countries and isolationism began to lose public favor. He was nominated on the sixth ballot of the GOP convention.

Republicans were split on intervention in Europe with the America First movement strongly involved with the party.  As Willkie’s grandson put it, “Today, many politicians insist they put country over party, but do little to prove their ultimate loyalties. Willkie was different.”

Britain was in desperate condition and Roosevelt faced stern public opposition to sending military aid to the island and laws forbidding sending military vessels built for Britain’s defense. But this country had some old destroyers not built for that reason that could be transferred.

The plan gained public support but Roosevelt knew it could become a problem for him in the campaign. So he asked Willkie to do something extraordinary.

Olson recounts that Roosevelt sent emissaries to ask Willkie to forego making the destroyer deal a part of his campaign. Willke said he could not make a public statement of support that would deepen splits within his own party but he promised he would not attack the deal after Roosevelt announced it.  “It was astonishing thing to ask of an opponent—to turn his back on a controversial issue that almost certainly would help him politically,” says Olson.

But that’s not all.  The nation was divided despite the obviously growing threat of war on whether the draft should be re-instituted. If Willkie opposed it, isolationist Democrats would join Republicans to block it.   But in August, 1940, Willke announced support for “some form of selective service.”   He later said he would continue to support the draft even if it cost him the election.

Roosevelt won with 27.3 million votes. Willkie had 22.3 million. The Electoral College numbers made the race look like a runaway.  Sam Pryor, Willkie’s Eastern campaign manager, told him afterward, “You could have been president if you had worked with the party organization.”

The Kansas City Star said a day after his Armistice Day radio address a week after the election that it  contained “no bitterness…no narrow partisanship…The main principle that Mr. Willkie desired to impress upon his audience was the high function of a loyal opposition in the American system…It showed…the quality of constructive criticism that the President, as a patriotic American, would do well to take into account in meeting the difficult problems that confront the nation.”

The Star characterized the speech as “an appeal to reason, not to emotion.” We offer his speech to you in these much different times with little hope that recalling it will change the daily rhetorical tragedies that now befall our system, but with some hope that it might mean something useful to somebody, a sad observation of how far our leaders have sunk.

Cooperation but Loyal Opposition

DISCORD AND DISUNITY WILL ARISE IF OPPOSITION IS SUPPRESSED

By WENDELL L. WILLKIE, Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 1940

Delivered over the radio, November 11, 1940

Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol VII, pp. 103-106

PEOPLE of America: Twenty-two years ago today a great conflict raging on the battlefields of Europe came to an end. The guns were silent. A new era of peace began and for that era the people of our Western World—our democratic world—held the highest hopes.

Those hopes have not been fulfilled. The democratic way of life did not become stronger—it became weaker. The spirit of constitutional government flickered like a dying lamp. And within the last year or so the light from that lamp has disappeared entirely upon the Continent of Europe.

We in America watched darkness fall upon Europe. And as we watched there approached an important time for us—the national election of 1940.

In that election, and in our attitudes after that election, the rest of the world would see an example of democracy in action, an example of a great people faithful to their Constitution and to their elected representatives.

The campaign preceding this election stirred us deeply. Millions upon millions of us who had never been active in politics took part in it. The people flocked to the polling places in greater numbers than ever before in history.

Nearly fifty million people exercised on November 5 the right of the franchise—the precious right which we inherited from our forefathers, and which we must cherish and pass on to future generations.

Thus it came about that although constitutional government had been blotted out elsewhere, here in America men and women kept it triumphantly alive.

No matter which side you were on, on that day, remember that this great, free expression of our faith in the free system of government must have given hope to millions upon millions of others—on the heroic island of Britain—in the ruined cities of France and Belgium—yes, perhaps even to people in Germany and Italy. It has given hope wherever man hopes to be free.

In the campaign preceding this election serious issues were at stake. People became bitter. Many things were said which, in calmer moments, might have been left unsaid or might have been worded more thoughtfully.

But we Americans know that the bitterness is a distortion, not a true reflection, of what is in our hearts. I can truthfully say that there is no bitterness in mine. I hope there is none in yours.

We have elected Franklin Roosevelt President. He is your President. He is my President. We all of us owe him the respect due to his high office. We give him that respect. We will support him with our best efforts for our country. And we pray that God may guide his hand during the next four years in the supreme task of administering the affairs of the people.

It is a fundamental principle of the democratic system that the majority rules. The function of the minority, however, is equally fundamental. It is about the function of that minority—22,000,000 people, nearly half of our electorate— that I wish to talk to you tonight.

A vital element in the balanced operation of democracy is a strong, alert and watchful opposition. That is our task for the next four years. We must constitute ourselves a vigorous, loyal and public-spirited opposition party.

It has been suggested that in order to present a united front to a threatening world the minority should now surrender its convictions and join the majority. This would mean that in the United States of America there would be only one dominant party—only one economic philosophy—only one political philosophy of life. This is a totalitarian idea—it is a slave idea—it must be rejected utterly.

The British people are unified with a unity almost unexampled in history for its endurance and its valor. Yet that unity coexists with an unimpaired freedom of criticism and of suggestion.

In the continual debates of the House of Commons and the House of Lords all of the government’s policies, its taxation, its expenditures, its military and naval policies, its basic economic policies are brought under steady, friendly, loyal critical review. Britain survives free. Let us Americans choose no lesser freedom.

In Britain some opposition party leaders are members of the government and some say that a similar device should be adopted here. That is a false conception of our government. When a leader of the British Liberal party or a member of the British Labor party becomes a member of the Churchill Cabinet he becomes—from the British parliamentary point of view—an equal of Mr. Churchill’s.

This is because the British Cabinet is a committee of the House of Parliament. It is a committee of equals, wherein the Prime Minister is chairman, a lofty chairman indeed and yet but a chairman. The other members are his colleagues.

With us the situation, as you well know, is different. Our executive branch is not a committee of our legislative branch. Our President is independent of our Congress. The members of his Cabinet are not his colleagues. They are his administrative subordinates. They are subject to his orders.

An American President could fill his whole Cabinet with leaders of the opposition party and still our administration would not be a two-party administration. It would be an administration of a majority President giving orders to minority representatives of his own choosing. These representatives must concur in the President’s convictions. If they do not they have no alternative except to resign.

Clearly no such device as this can give us in this country any self-respecting agreement between majority and minority for concerted effort toward the national welfare. Such a plan for us would be but the shadow—not the substance—of unity.

Our American unity cannot be made with words or with gestures. It must be forged between the ideas of the opposition and the practices and policies of the Administration. Ours is a government of principles, and not one merely of men. Any member of the minority party, though willing to die for his country, still retains the right to criticize the policies of the government. This right is imbedded in our constitutional system.

We, who stand ready to serve our country behind our Commander-in-Chief, nevertheless retain the right, and I will say the duty, to debate the course of our government. Ours is a two-party system. Should we ever permit one party to dominate our lives entirely, democracy would collapse and we would have dictatorship.

Therefore, to you who have so sincerely given yourselves to this cause, which you chose me to lead, I say: “Your function during the next four years is that of the loyal opposition.” You believe deeply in the principles that we stood for in the recent election. And principles are not like foot-ball suits to be put on in order to play a game and then taken off when the game is over.

It is your Constitutional duty to debate the policies of this or any other administration and to express yourselves freely and openly to those who represent you in your State and national government.

Let me raise a single warning. Ours is a very powerful opposition. On November 5 we were a minority by only a few million votes. Let us not, therefore, fall into the partisan error of opposing things just for the sake of opposition. Ours must not be an opposition against—it must be an opposition for—an opposition for a strong America, a productive America. For only the productive can be strong and only the strong can be free.

Now let me however remind you of some of the principles for which we fought and which we hold as sincerely today as we did yesterday.

We do not believe in unlimited spending of borrowed money by the Federal government—the piling up of bureaucracy—the control of our electorate by political machines, however successful—the usurpation of powers reserved to Congress—the subjugation of the courts—the concentration of enormous authority in the hands of the Executive—the discouragement of enterprise—and the continuance of economic dependence for millions of our citizens upon government. Nor do we believe in verbal provocation to war.

On the other hand we stand for a free America—an America of opportunity created by the enterprise and imagination of its citizens. We believe that this is the only kind of an America in which democracy can in the long run exist. This is the only kind of an America that offers hope for our youth and expanding life for all our people.

Under our philosophy, the primary purpose of government is to serve its people and to keep them from hurting one another. For this reason our Federal Government has regulatory laws and commissions.

For this reason we must fight for the rights of labor, for assistance to the farmer, and for protection for the unemployed, the aged and the physically handicapped.

But while our government must thus regulate and protect us, it must not dominate our lives. We, the people, are the masters. We, the people, must build this country. And we, the people, must hold our elected representatives responsible to us for the care they take of our national credit, our democratic institutions and the fundamental laws of our land.

It is in the light of these principles, and not of petty partisan politics, that our opposition must be conducted. Itis in the light of these principles that we must join in debate, without selfishness and without fear.

Let me take as an example the danger that threatens us through our national debt.

Two days after the election, this Administration recommended that the national debt limit be increased from $49,000,000,000 to $65,000,000,000.

Immediately after that announcement, prices on the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges jumped sharply upward. This was not a sign of health, but a sign of fever. Those who are familiar with these things agree unanimously that the announcement of the Treasury indicated a danger —sooner or later—of inflation.

Now you all know what inflation means. You have lately watched its poisonous course in Europe. It means a rapid decline in the purchasing power of money—a decline in what the dollar will buy. Stated the other way round, inflation means a rise in the price of everything—food, rent, clothing, amusements, automobiles—necessities and luxuries. Invariably these prices rise faster than wages, with the result that the workers suffer and the standard of living declines.

Nor no man is wise enough to say exactly how big the national debt can become, before causing serious inflation. But some sort of limit certainly exists, beyond which lies financial chaos. Such chaos would inevitably mean the loss of our social gains, the destruction of our savings, the ruin of every little property owner, and the creation of vast unemployment and hardships. It would mean, finally, the rise of dictatorship. Those have been the results of financial collapse in every country in the history of the world. The only way that we can avoid them is to remain sound and solvent.

It is not incumbent upon any American to remain silent concerning such a danger. I shall not be silent and I hope you will not be. This is one of your functions as a member of the minority. But in fulfilling our duties as an opposition party we must be careful to be constructive. We must help to show the way.

Thus, in order to counteract the threat of inflation and to correct some of our economic errors, I see five steps for our government to take immediately.

First, all Federal expenditures except those for national defense and necessary relief ought to be cut to the bone and below the bone. Work relief, obviously, has to be maintained, but every effort should be made to substitute for relief productive jobs.

Second, the building of new plants and new machinery for the defense program should be accomplished as far as possible by private capital. There should be no nationalization under the guise of defense of any American industry with a consequent outlay of Federal funds.

Third, taxes should be levied so as to approach as nearly as possible the pay-as-you-go plan. Obviously, we cannot hope to pay for all the defense program as we go. But we must do our best. That is part of the sacrifice that we must make to defend this democracy.

Fourth—Taxes and government restrictions should be adjusted to take the brakes off private enterprise so as to give it freedom under wise regulation, to release new investments and new energies and thus to increase the national income. I do not believe we can hope to bear the debt and taxes arising out of this defense program with a national income of less than one hundred billion-dollars—our present national income is only $70,000,000,000—unless we lower the standard of living of every man and woman who works. But if we can increase our national income to $100,000,000,000 we can pay for this defense program out of the increase produced if we free private enterprise—not for profiteering but for natural development.

Fifth, and finally, our government must change its punitive attitude toward both little and big businessmen. Regulations there must be—we of the opposition have consistently recommended that. But the day of witch hunting must be over.

If this administration has the unity of America really at heart it must consider without prejudice and with an open mind such recommendations of the opposition.

National unity can only be achieved by recognizing and giving serious weight to the viewpoint of the opposition. Such a policy can come only from the administration itself. It will be from the suppression of the opposition that discord and disunity will arise. The administration has the ultimate power to force us apart or to bind us together.

And now a word about the most important immediate task that confronts this nation. On this, all Americans are of one purpose. There is no disagreement among us about the defense of America. We stand united behind the defense program. But here particularly, as a minority party, our role is an important one. It is to be constantly watchful to see that America is effectively safeguarded and that the vast expenditure of funds which we have voted for that purpose is not wasted.

And in so far as I have the privilege to speak to you, I express once more the hope that we help to maintain the rim of freedom in Britain and elsewhere by supplying those defenders with materials and equipment. This should be done to the limit of our ability but with due regard to our own defense.

On this point, I think I can say without boast, that never in the history of American Presidential campaigns has a candidate gone further than I did in attempting to create a united front.

However, I believe that our aid should be given by constitutional methods and with the approval, accord and ratification of Congress. Only thus can the people determine from time to time the course they wish to take and the hazards they wish to run.

Mr. Roosevelt and I both promised the people in the course of the campaign that if we were elected we would keep this country out of war unless attacked. Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected and this solemn pledge for him I know will be fulfilled, and I know the American people desire him to keep it sacred.

Since November 5 I have received thousands and thousands of letters—tens of thousands of them. I have personally read a great portion of these communications. I am profoundly touched. They come from all parts of our country and from all kinds of people. They come from Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Christians, colored people and white people. They come from workers and farmers and clerks and businessmen—men and women of all the occupations that make up our American life.

All of these letters and telegrams, almost without exception, urge that the cause that we have been fighting for be carried on.

In your enthusiasm for our cause you founded thousands of organizations. They are your own organizations, financed by you and directed by you. It is appropriate for you to continue them if you feel so inclined. I hope you do continue them. It is not, however, appropriate to continue these organizations in my name. I do not want this great cause to be weakened by even a semblance of any personal advantage to any individual. I feel too deeply about it for that; 1944 will take care of itself. It is of the very essence of my belief that democracy is fruitful of leadership.

I want to see all of us dedicate ourselves to the principles for which we fought. My fight for those principles has just begun. I shall advocate them in the future as ardently and as confidently as I have in the past. As Woodrow Wilson once said: “I would rather lose in a cause that I know someday will triumph than to triumph in a cause that I know some day will fail.”

Whatever I may undertake in the coming years, I shall be working shoulder to shoulder with you for the defense of our free way of life, for the better understanding of our economic system and for the development of that new America whose vision lies within every one of us.

Meanwhile, let us be proud, let us be happy in the fight that we have made. We have brought our cause to the attention of the world. Millions have welcomed it. As time goes on millions more will find in it the hope that they are looking for. We can go on from here with the words of Abraham Lincoln in our hearts:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds. . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Good night. And God bless and keep every one of you.

(Photo credit: TheAtlantic.com)

                       

Notes from a quiet street—elections issue

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A week from today is elections day.  We look forward to elections days for the wrong reasons.  Instead of being excited about taking part in the voting process we are excited because it’s the end of that interminable period when our intelligence is assaulted 30 seconds at a time—all the time, it seems, on the television.

—and when our mailboxes are stuffed with mailers of questionable veracity usually provided by people without the courtesy or the courage to admit they paid for the appropriately-named junk mail.

Interestingly, at the end of the day, a lot of people will transfer from being the kind of people they campaigned against to being those people. And what will they do to correct the impressions their voters have about government?

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We have been interested in some of the reasons various groups don’t want us to vote for a new system of drawing legislative districts after the 2020 census.  One side says it would be a mistake to let the state demographer (a person who spends his or her life analyzing population and population trends) draw new districts because they’ll just use statistics and will come up with districts that are more gerrymandered that some districts from the last go-around.  Others worry that letting the demographer draw the districts will weaken the political power of this or that group.   We must have been mistaken all these years because we thought reapportionment dealt with representation rather than power. Silly us.

Could it be that the state demographer won’t care if two legislative incumbents wind up in the same district instead of benefitting from a process that is suspected of protecting incumbents or at least their party majorities?  As far as the demographer coming up with screwball districts, surely that person couldn’t do worse than the creation of the present Fifth Congressional District that I dubbed the “dead lizard” district after the last congressional redistricting (it looks like a dead lizard lying on its back with its feet in the air) that has a former Mayor of Kansas City representing a rural area as far east as Marshall.

What the heck.  We can always change the constitution back to the present system if the legislative districts after the 2020 census are as bad as some interest groups forecast they will be, can’t we?

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Elections almost always have issues created by petition campaigns.  It’s an important freedom we have as citizens to propose laws or to ask for a statewide vote on something the legislature did that raises questions in the minds of enough people that they want citizens to have the final say.  But that freedom can carry with it unintended consequences because petitions don’t go through the refining process of legislative committee hearings, debates, votes, and compromises where possible.   Of course the legislature sometimes fumbles an issue and in both cases ballot issues can be issues financially backed by a special interest if not an individual.

Voters have an often-overlooked responsibility to get out the spy glass and read all the fine print in the election legal notices.  We haven’t talked to very many folks who have done that. So we get what we get and the courts often have to figure out what we got regardless of what we thought we were getting.

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The best part of election day is that all of the junk mail campaign propaganda that goes straight to our waste baskets will be replaced by Christmas catalogues.  We prefer Christmas catalogs for several reasons.  They don’t forecast national or international catastrophes if we buy something offered by another catalog.  They usually are honest about their products (the pictures usually are more accurate than the pictures of the hamburgers at fast foot joints). We have never gotten an L. L. Bean catalogue that suggests the products in a Land’s End catalogue are dangerous to our well-being because of who wears them or because of who the wearers hang out with.

And they don’t proclaim exclusive knowledge of what our “values” are.  The Vermont Country Store is filled with traditional values—soap on a rope, Adams Clove chewing gum, old-fashioned popcorn makers or hand-cranked ice-cream makers, or dresses whose styles are timeless.  Coldwater Creek is for people whose values tend toward the stylish with a little “bling” thrown in.   We have yet to see the Vermont Country Store catalogue that says the Coldwater Creek catalogue is too liberal to be good for us.

In short, the catalogues have a lot more things that we will buy than most of the campaign junk mail that winds up in landfills instead of recycle bins.

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Jefferson City is building a new fire station, replacing an older one in the east end of town (the building will be for sale, by the way, in case you want a unique home, assuming you can get a zoning change).  News of the planned sale of the old fire house brings to mind our old friend Derry Brownfield, who used to occasionally remind us why fire engines are red:

“Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight is 12, and there are 12 inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always ‘russian’ around.”

Uh-huh.

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Go vote next Tuesday.  Do yourself and your state a favor and spend the next seven days with your reading glass studying all that fine print.

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Notes from a quiet street—October, 2018

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Get your speculation machines turned on.   Someone asked the other day, “If Josh Hawley is elected to the U. S. Senate in November, who do you think Governor Parson will appoint to finish Hawley’s term?”

Well…..?

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In a long life, a person is likely to make some interesting friends.  Well, all friends are interesting or they wouldn’t be friends, would they?  And if you’re lucky, you get to go to interesting places that broaden your perspective on the world and your place in it.  Some who read these entries might be scornful of those, such as your correspondent, who can see beyond the concrete, steel, and glass of the big cities and can cherish the big and the small worlds that surround us.

A friend in Indianapolis is the Executive Director of the Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading prize for animal conservation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UARcO8jTVk0

This year’s prize went to Dr. Russell Mittemeier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=207&v=OqeoeDg-CTo

Harrison Ford flew to Indianapolis to attend the awards dinner.  Nice guy, said those who met him.   Why are we surprised to learn that big-time people we admire from afar are nice?

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In my news director days I sometimes reminded myself and my reporters that it was not always necessary to do a story about an event if nothing was done or said worth reporting.  If a committee or a commission or a council met for three hours but did nothing newsworthy, there was no reason for any of us to waste our listeners’ time by saying a meeting was held and then trying to find something in our notes or on our recorders to write or let people hear that had no purpose other than to justify our presence at the meeting.  “It’s just three hours of your life that you’ll never get back,” I sometimes counseled the news staff.  “Don’t spend any more time trying to find something not worth the time to put on the air.”

Somebody else had the same philosophy a long time ago. From the Jefferson City Daily Capital News of May 10, 1945:

Gov. Phil M. Donnelly yesterday held his first press conference in four days but it was unproductive of printing news.

We were told by a reporter who covered him that Donnelly used to hold two news conferences a day. One in the morning was for reporters from afternoon newspapers.  The one in the afternoon was for reporters from morning papers. He had more news conferences in a month than some governors have in a year.  Or two.

We also had a lot more reporters covering the capitol.

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Some of the saddest places are baseball diamonds in city parks and baseball parks in the big cities when there’s no more baseball to be played. Especially by January. With a little snow. Even hope has left.

But we’ll find it in Arizona and Florida in February.

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A restaurant sign seen from across the room recently:

It raises a question.  Does the sign mean the place isn’t all that dangerous?  Or does it mean that people who eat there live longer?

I rolled the dice.  I had a big breakfast.  So far, so good.

What makes a city also makes a state

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More than eight decades ago a study was done to determine what makes a city a worthwhile place for people to live.  It probably wasn’t the first study and it sure hasn’t been the last.

The same factors that make a city a good place to live make a state a good place to live.  In our political discussions, however, contemporary talk seems to focus on one element that diminishes the importance of other factors and, in fact, makes some other factors harder to achieve.  But the other factors often don’t manipulate political emotions as effectively as the one that year after year gets the greatest attention.

The Jefferson City Post-Tribune ran an editorial on December 17, 1937 about the survey on the qualities of good cities.  Then, as now, the politically popular supposed solution to all problems was not a factor in determining what makes a livable city.   Here’s the editorial that could be as applicable today as it was then.

More than three hundred cities of our United States recently were investigated by a group of researchers from an eastern college to learn the difference between a city where people live and where they merely exist or serve time until the job runs out.

They found among other things that the character of the cities’ inhabitants more than economic advantages make for civic goodness. 

In studying a given city, the university investigators asked questions like these:

What are the general and infant death rates?  How much money, per capita, is spent on libraries, on education, on recreation? How common is extreme poverty?  What percentage of the people own their own homes?  What percentage own automobiles? How many doctors, nurses, and teachers are there in proportion to the population?  What are the per capita expenditures for highways, for light, for sanitation, for police, fire and health departments?  What is the homicide rate?  How much unemployment was there in the census year 1930?  What is the average income of the citizens?

Answer all those questions—and a lot more along similar lines—and you get a pretty fair picture of a city.  Furthermore, you get a picture which is not necessarily the same as the one you would get simply by adding up the city’s tangible, visible assets—its transportation facilities, its industries, its natural resources and so on.

In other words the man who works for decent municipal playgrounds is doing as much for a city as the man who goes out and gets a factory. One is essential to the well-being of the community and the other to its prosperity in dollars and cents. A first rate mayor, chief of police or street commissioner can be a civic asset of incalculable value. And so, of course, can a first rate Chamber of Commerce, civic club, women’s organization, that has the general welfare at heart.

A city is a place to live as well as work and it is what we do to make the idle 16 hours pleasant and worthwhile that goes a long way to measuring the worth of the community.

We thought it interesting that the editorial’s list of questions asked “How much money, per capita, is spent on…?”   But our state policy makers so often find themselves saying, “There isn’t enough money for….” as they discuss the newest proposal to have even less.

A state is a place to live as well as to work and it is what we do to make the idle 16 hours pleasant and worthwhile that goes a long way to measuring the worth of a state. Unfortunately there aren’t many lobbyists or major campaign donors who have “the general welfare at heart.”

There is a difference between a state where people live and where they merely exist or serve until the job runs out.

Which way are we headed?

The portrait

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To be candid, we had something more interesting than this planned for today but decided to wait a little bit before posting it. Instead we are focusing on a tempestuous teapot of an issue.

Post-Dispatch reporter Jack Suntrup asked a few days ago if there will ever be a portrait of Governor Eric Greitens hanging along with portraits of Missouri’s other governors at the Capitol.  The answer is, yes, there should be one.

The hanging of official portraits has been an irregular sort of thing.  Several recent governors’ portraits were missing until the Missouri Academy of Squires (as we remember the story) paid to have them painted.  Matt Blunt’s portrait does not appear between the portraits of Roger Wilson and Jay Nixon. Neither he nor anybody else has commissioned one.

There are no doubt some who think the circumstances of Greitens’ departure should prohibit his portrait from being placed in the building.

We respectfully disagree.

Refusing to allow a Greitens portrait amounts to trying to erase history.  He was elected.  He did serve.  He quit.  We cannot deny that by some arbitrary decision that his portrait doesn’t belong among portraits of statesmen.  And spies. And traitors. And drunks. Human beings are elected to the governorship.

Let’s consider Trusten Polk, Sterling Price, Claiborne Fox Jackson, and John Sappington Marmaduke for example.

Polk, who served the shortest time as governor, became a U. S. Senator and was expelled from the Senate for disloyalty at the start of the Civil War when he cast his lot with the South. His portrait is in the collection and we’ve never heard anybody suggest it should be removed.

Sterling Price was a Confederate general during the Civil War and once led an army that threatened to try to capture Jefferson City by force of arms.  His portrait shows him wearing his Confederate uniform.  We’ve not heard anybody say he shouldn’t be recognized.

Claiborne Jackson was the governor who fled from Missouri when a U. S. Army general rejected his efforts to keep federal troops out of the state. Jackson set up a Confederate government in exile in Arkansas, where he died. He, Price, and Polk had taken oaths to defend the United States Constitution but then took up arms against their state and nation.

John S. Marmaduke is somewhat different.  He was a Confederate general who was nevertheless chosen by the people twenty years after the end of the Civil War to be the Governor of Missouri.  Haven’t heard any objections to his portrait being at the capitol.

James Wilkinson, twice a Revolutionary War General who was involved in shady deals and kicked out of the Army later became a general again and was involved with Aaron Burr’s plot to foment a western frontier revolution. He was a spy for the Spanish government when he was the governor.

Robert M. Stewart was known for his drunken escapades, one of which involved riding his horse into the governor’s mansion and feeding it from a sideboard that is in the present mansion.  He was a bachelor who sometimes employed female prisoners to work at the mansion. No, we don’t know what they did while they were there.  But nobody has suggested that character issues should keep his portrait from being provided.

Guy B. Park, a product of the Pendergast political machine of Kansas City, was just a Platte County Circuit Judge three weeks before his election as governor.  When the Democratic candidate died, Park was plucked from his bench, put at the top of the ticket, and won by a big margin.  His ties to Boss Tom Pendergast were supposedly so strong that the mansion became known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

But his portrait is in the capitol.

These and other governors were humans, political animals of one stripe or another, who did what they had to do to get elected and to serve, or get elected to a lower office and move up to the governorship when the job became vacant for one reason or another.

The portraits are not intended to provoke unwarranted admiration for the men who have held this office. They are there to mark Missouri history.

So it is with Eric Greitens. He deserves some wall space because he was elected to fill some office space. Somebody, some day, will paint his portrait.  There won’t be a historical gap in the images of our governors.   People can look at his portrait as they look at the portraits of other governors and perhaps wonder what he did.

Or, most likely, they’ll glance at it and then move on to something more interesting—the big map of Missouri soils or the stagecoach or the big kettle used by the Boone family to boil salt water.

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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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.”

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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.