Category Archives: journalism

Sounding the bugle call to public office

Posted on by
1

—and why it’s a good idea to know who’s blowing it and how.

We pause this week in our reveries about Africa as we reach the halfway point between the primary election and the general election to share a story that we hope reminds voters that it is wise to be careful about all of the rhetorical horn blowing that is part of today’s campaigns.

Your faithful observer and listener once heard Hughes Rudd tell the story, “Bugle Call of a Georgia Mule,” at an economic development conference at the old Ramada Inn in Jefferson City. This was in the early to mid-1970s.

Rudd (in this old CBS News photo) was a Texas-born fellow who still had a pronounced Texas twang in his gravelly voice as he told stories on newscasts, commentaries, and on the speaking circuit.  He was called by various observers “bright and bristly,” or “deft (and) sardonic,” or “puckish (and) curmudgeonly.”  He achieved his greatest popularity as a correspondent for CBS and then for ABC. He used to finish his daily newscasts with two-minute commentaries that Ted Koppel referred to as “evenhanded malice.”

Rudd didn’t read the news. He told news stories. And that’s why he was so popular. Rudd, who died at the age of 71 in 1992, had come north to study journalism at the University of Missouri but quit after three years to join the Army Air Corps early in World War II.  He had 20/40 vision in one eye so the AAC sent him to the regular Army where he became a spotter pilot for artillery batteries.

Somebody, somewhere (maybe Rudd for all I know), wrote the story I heard Hughes Rudd tell that day in Jefferson City to an audience that became increasingly amused as the story went along.  We pass it along to remind political candidates they’d best know what they’re talking about.

One fine Georgia evening a Mrs. George Wood, now deceased, called a Dr. Marvin Satterfield, a veterinarian in Hardwicke, from her home in Bryan County. It was about her mule, Horace.  She was upset and said, “Doctor, Horace is sick and I wish you would come out and take a look at him.”

The sun was setting, but there was still plenty of daylight to see by.  After asking a few questions and hearing the answers, Dr. Satterfield said, ”It’s after six o’clock and I’m eating supper.  Give him a dose of mineral oil and if he isn’t all right in the morning, phone me and I’ll come and take a look at your mule. 

She wanted to know how to give the mule the oil so the doctor said it should be through a funnel.  Mrs. Wood protested that the mule might bite her. Then Dr. Satterfield, a bit exasperated, said, “You’re a farm woman and you should know about these things.  Give it to him in the other end.’ 

Mrs. Wood went down to the barn and there stood Horace, moaning and groaning and banging his head. He certainly looked sick.  She searched for a funnel, but the nearest thing she could find was her Uncle Bill’s fox hunting horn hanging on the wall. It was a beautiful gold-plated instrument with silver tassels. She took the horn and affixed it properly.  Horace paid no attention so she was encouraged.

Then, she reached up on the shelf where the farm medicines were kept. Instead of picking up the mineral oil, nervously, she grabbed a bottle of turpentine and poured a liberal dose of it into the horn.

Horace’s head shot up with a sudden jerk and he stood dead still at attention for maybe three seconds.   Then he let out a bellow that could be heard a mile down the road.  He reared up on his hind legs, brought his front legs down, knocked out one side of the barn, cleared a five-foot fence, and started down the road at a mad gallop.  Since Horace was loaded with gas, every few jumps he made, the horn would blow.

All the hounds in the neighborhood knew when the horn was blowing, it meant Uncle Bill was going foxhunting. So out on the road they went, following close behind Horace the mule.

People who witnessed the chase said it was an unforgettable sight. First Horace, running at top speed with a horn in a most unusual position, the mellow notes issuing therefrom, the silver tassels waving and the dogs barking joyously.

They passed the home of old man Harvey Hogan, who was sitting on his front porch. It was said that Mr. Hogan had not drawn a sober breath in 15 years.  He gazed in fascinated amazement at the sight before his eyes. Up until this day he hasn’t touched another drop.

By this time, it was good and dark. Horace and the dogs were coming to the Intracoastal Waterway.  The bridge tender heard the horn blowing frantically and figured that a fast boat was approaching.  He hurriedly went out and cranked up the bridge. Horace went kerplunk into the water and drowned.  The pack of dogs went into the water, too. They all swam out without much difficulty.

What makes the story doubly interesting is that the bridge tender was also the sheriff of Bryan County and was running for re-election at the time.  When the election day came, he managed to get only seven votes and those were from kinfolks.

Those who took the trouble to analyze the election said the people figured any man who didn’t know the difference between a mule with a fox horn up his caboose and a boat coming down the Intracoastal Waterway wasn’t fit to hold public office anyway.  

That’s the story Hughes Rudd told that day in Jefferson City.  We offer it in this campaign season to those who think they have heard a bugle call to public service.  We guess citizens will be the ones who decide which end of the mule summoned the candidate to the ballot and will vote accordingly.

Banned for insulting the president

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
2

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.

-0-

Going where the story takes you

Posted on by
2

One of the best parts of being a reporter or an author or a historian or a detective (we suppose) is discovering where a story takes you.  Sometimes the real story is not the original story.

Such is the story of Daniel M. Grissom of Kirkwood.

Your reporter, author, and historian ran across Daniel in a letter he sent to Governor Arthur Hyde in 1924 saying he was honored to have been invited to the dedication of the Capitol that Daniel described as “one of the most chaste and beautiful structures in the world—equal in the exquisite symetry [sic] of its proportions to the once matchless now dismantled Parthenon at Athens, Greece,” perhaps a reference to the structure’s condition after a 1687 explosion.

He could not attend the dedication because “the infirmities of 94 years debar me” from being there. He concluded, “I send up my faint shout of gladness to join in the glorious and mighty outburst of patriotic joy that bursts from Capitol Hill this day.  If it be a cause for pride to be an American, the very next thing to it is being a Missourian.”

The letter was interesting enough to raise a question: “Who was this guy?”

And this is where the story took this author to a completely different place, a completely different time, and to one of Missouri’s most tragic moments.

The first question was how much longer he lasted.  He already was 94 but he seemed from his letter still to be at full mental strength.  A source for that information is the state death certificates on the Missouri State Archives webpage.  And there was Daniel M. Grissom, dead at the age of 101 on May 17, 1930.  But the certificate had another piece of information: “retired news paper editor.”  Two words.

The Missouri Press Association founded the State Historical Society of Missouri in 1898 and for many years, the society’s magazine, The Missouri Historical Review, carried obituary notices of editors and former editors who had been society members. And sure enough, there was Daniel, in the October, 1930 issue.

Daniel M. Grissom, it said, was twenty-four years old when he arrived in St. Louis from his home state of Kentucky to become a reporter for the St. Louis Evening News.  That would have been 1853.  He worked for the News for a decade, becoming the editor on a newspaper with a staff of two while still in his twenties.  When the News merged with the St. Louis Union, creating the Evening Dispatch, he became the editor-in-chief of the combined papers.  The Dispatch eventually merged with Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening Post to create today’s Post-Dispatch, which is probably when he joined the St. Louis Republican which later became just the Republic and lasted until its merger with the Globe-Democrat in 1919.

Then the eyebrows went up when the article reported, “While working on the News he was sent on the famous Pacific Railroad excursion train to Jefferson City, November 1, 1855.”

Suddenly, Daniel becomes even more significant.  That train would inaugurate passenger service between St. Louis and Jefferson City.  The legislature had put up bonding money for the Pacific Railroad and the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad and was to consider in the upcoming session whether to issue more bonds for more railroads. There was some doubt that it would because construction had been slower than expected and more expensive than expected on both lines.  Governor Sterling Price was skeptical.   The legislature was to come into session on November 5 so the arrival of the first passenger train at Jefferson City just ahead of the session was considered extremely important for the railroad interests. The capitol had been decorated for a big welcome. A huge banquet was to be held for the passengers.

But a violent and long-lasting rain storm swept in that afternoon.  And the train did not arrive.  The banquet went ahead solemnly in Jefferson City, attendees fearing something bad had happened.  But the storm had knocked out telegraph service and it was not until the next day that word arrived of what had occurred.

A separate locomotive and tender had been sent ahead of the train to make sure the not-quite-compete Gasconade River Bridge about nine miles west of Hermann was strong enough to support the train.  The locomotive made it safely across and was waiting on the other side when the passenger train steamed into sight.

The locomotive and a few cars made it across the first segment when, suddenly, that segment collapsed. Some of the cars fell thirty feet into the Gasconade River, pulling the engine and tender back on top of them.  Other following cars crashed on top of that wreckage. Only a few cars failed to go into the river. “Mr. Grissom was one of the survivors,” said the Review obituary, “and assisted in the rescue of many persons and became widely known for his reports of the catastrophe.”

Thirty-one people were dead, including two State Representatives.  About two-hundred more were injured.

There are three online resources that we use for newspaper accounts of historic events: Newspapers.com, Newspaperarchive.com; and the Smithsonian’s “Chronicling America” webpage.  There also are more than fifty-million pages of Missouri newspapers on microfilm at the State Historical Society in Columbia. Newspaperarchive.com produced the Liberty Weekly Tribune for November 16, 1855 and a gripping account of the tragedy.

In those days before wire services as we know them, newspapers exchanged issues with one another, which is how the Liberty newspaper came to have this account more than two weeks after the event.  “Yesterday was a sad day for St. Louis—a day whose events have cast a shadow over many a heart and made desolate many a bright hearthstone,” the story began in a manner typical of reporting in those days but far different from our times.

There was no byline. Bylines did not catch on much for another forty years or so after reporters became more popular with the public although correspondents at the time of the disaster sometimes signed their stories, usually with nom de plumes such as “Publius,” the Liberty newspaper’s Jefferson City correspondent who had a brief story about the tragedy on another page.

At the end of the eyewitness account in the Tribune was another surprise.  The article originally appeared in the St. Louis News.  It was Daniel M. Grissom’s account—which a survey of other newspapers in the “Chronicling America” website shows became THE nationwide story of the event.

Betty Johnson Douglas, writing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on March 6, 1927 described him as “a young newspaper man who had come to St. Louis from Kentucky only a few years before and was already editor of a paper which had given much support to railroad building projects in the state… blue-eyed, eager for new experiences and already making a reputation for himself as a writer of strong editorials.’

Climb aboard that ill-fated train and ride into a disaster with 26-year old Daniel M. Grissom:

Yesterday morning, at the seventh street depot of the Pacific railroad, a large crowd of happy persons were gathered, prepared for the excursion to Jefferson City, to celebrate the completion of the road to that point. It was a happy hour. Gay greetings were spoken and congratulations were joyously interchanged between friends who were glad each to find that the other was going.  Many who did not go came to wish a pleasant journey and God speed to those who did.  Some who could not go then promised to join the excursion to-morrow (today).  Two military companies, with stirring music and gay uniforms added to the pageant.  At half past eight the train started, freighted with six hundred happy hearts, followed by the good wishes of all whose hearts beat responsively to those “of the parting ones.” All was bright and pleasant, and although the twelve cars constituting the train were crowded to such an extent that many had to stand in the aisle between the seats, and others on the platform outside, yet there was a universal good feeling and “all went merry as a marriage bell.”  The people at the stations and villages along the road cheered us onward and shouted and waved hats and hand’cheifs in response to the merry music our Brass Band entertained them with.  As we came into Herman, a cannon pealed forth the glad greetings of the hearty citizens.  But how soon was the scene destined to be changed!  How soon were so many of those founding hearts to be pulseless. No one dreamed that death was near, yet it lurked for us only a few miles further on.  At 1 o’clock we left Herman [sic], preceded by a locomotive and tender which had been sent forward, to see what that the way was clear, and no danger impending.  Soon we came in sight of the bridge across the Gasconade river, about nine miles from Herman, and thirty-five from Jefferson City.  The bridge is approached by an embankment thirty feet high which terminated in a massive stone abutment.  Forty yards from the abutment, and just at the edge of the river, stands another staunch pillar, three more of which reach the other side of the stream, and support the bridge. The river is about two hundred and fifty yards wide and the bridge thirty feet high, at least.  The Pioneer locomotive had crossed the structure safely and was waiting at the other side to see the result of our attempt.  There was no fear of danger, nor thoughts of peril.  We slowly moved along the embankment and came on to the bridge.  The locomotive had passed the first span and had its forewheels above the first pillar beyond the abutment—there being then rested on the first span, the locomotive, baggage car and two heavily loaded passenger cars.  The weight was too much for the long, slender timbers which supported the rails and the enormous load above.  Suddenly we heard a horrid crash—it rings in our ears now—and saw a movement amongst those in the car in which we were seated; then there came crash-crashcrash as each car came to the abutment and took the fatal plunge.  The affair was but the work of an instant. We were running slowly at the time and the successive crashes came on at intervals of nearly a second.  We were seated in the seventh car—there being three behind us—and when we heard the horrid sound that came up, as each car slowly and deliberately took the leap, we hoped that our car might stop before it reached the precipice.  But no; it seemed that the spirit of ruin was beneath, determinedly dragging each car to the spot, wrenching it from its fastenings, and hurling it to atoms beneath.  Six cars fell in one mass, each on the other, and were shivered into fragments.  The seventh fell with its forward end to the ground; but the other end rested on top of the abutment.  Those in it were only bruised.  The eighth and ninth cars tumbled down the embankment before they reached the abutment.  Such a wreck I never saw and hope never again to see.  It was one undistinguishable mass of wooded beams, seats, iron wheels and rods, from beneath which came up groans of agony. Those who could, crawled out of the ruin immediately, and either sought to relieve their own wounds or the wounds of their friends.  Some wept tears of joy to find their friends alive and others shuddered to find their friends dead, the uninjured organized themselves under the lead of Mr. Pride, the conductor, and endeavored by chopping to extricate those who were yet alive from the wreck. Here a beam was cut into to disengage a broken arm; there an iron axle was pryed up to relieve a mutilated leg. There was no shrieking and screaming, though all begged for the love of heave to be extricated from some mass of iron or beam of wood which pinned them to the earth. All begged for water, drank it when brought and prayed for more.  There was hardly an entirely uninjured man to be seen.  Most of those who had escaped had streams of blood flowing over their faces from splinter wounds.  Others limped and hobbled about, looking for their friends.  A board shanty was the only shelter to be had and that was soon filled with the wounded, whose silent speechless agony was enough to make the stoutest heart shudder.  Soon after the accident the heavens grew dark and black as though in twain, and from the crevice gleamed the white lightning, and the harsh thunder bellowed its cruel mockings at the woe beneath. It seemed as if the elements were holding high carnival over the scene of slaughter. 

Grissom wrote a second version of the story, cited by Douglas in her 1927 article:

Suddenly there was an awful crash, a sickening lurch—another crash—another—another. We were moving forward jerkily, sickeningly.

Horrid sounds came from ahead. We realized in a flash what must have happened—the bridge was gone—we were being pulled into the river by the weight of the cars ahead, which had already crashed over the bank! Then—our car was going too. The violent motion threw us to the floor.

I was the first to gain my feet. I may have been unconscious for a moment, for the movement had stopped. When I got up and looked around not a soul was in sight. I was staggered for another second, but then I called aloud and one by one the passengers began to crawl out from under the seats, behind doors, through the debris of the wreck. No one in my car was seriously hurt, though we were all badly shaken up and some of us were bleeding and so weak from shock that we were hardly able to walk…

When a relief train from St. Louis came to our aid it was a very different kind of crowd which started on the return journey from that which had set out so gaily a few hours before. Hardly a word was spoken as we leaned our heads on our hands, some uttering groans and low cries of despair caused by their own sufferings or by the realization of the loss of a friend or relative in the disaster.     

(We pause for a while until the mental images of this extraordinary writing fade enough for us to continue.)

Jen Tebbe wrote on the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis  (not to be confused with the state Historical Society of Missouri that is based in Columbia) last November about some things other survivors had to say. http://mohistory.org/blog/what-survivors-had-to-say/

Grissom built an outstanding career in the years ahead. Historian and journalist Walter Stevens wrote a long time ago that Grissom was “among the foremost editorial writers in the West for a third of a century. He…wrote in a virile, lucid style.”

During the Civil War he and his Evening News were critical of General John Fremont, the commander of the Army of the West at the start of the war.  Fremont became so upset at the newspaper’s criticism after the fall of Lexington that he jailed Grissom and fellow editor Charles G. Ramsey.  They were released two days later.

The microfilmed old newspapers in Columbia tell us Daniel Grissom was 82 when he moved into the Kirkwood Old Folks Home where, said the St. Louis Globe-Democrat he “delighted to regale willing listeners with tales of the Civil War, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the capture of Camp Jackson, and other events, the formal accounts of which may only be found in histories.”

When he was in his nineties he wrote a dozen articles for the Missouri Historical Review about the famous people he had known, personal intimate sketches of people such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Governors Sterling Price and Claiborne Fox Jackson (who tried to take Missouri South at the start of the Civil War), James S. Rollins, and artist George Caleb Bingham, among others.  The last article was published when he was 98.

It was a surprise to him when he turned 100.  He thought he was only 99 until a week before the landmark birthday when he got a letter from a relative who had dug into an old family Bible and found that he had been born a year earlier than he thought.  So, actually, he was 95 when he wrote to the governor.

The Post-Dispatch reported he carried on a “voluminous correspondence with friends and relatives into his 90s but complained on his 100th birthday, “My pencil won’t do what I want it to now.  It wanders all over the page.  I used to walk up and down the corridor here by myself up to the last ten months but I just can’t make it alone any more.  I’m getting old and my legs just won’t support me the way they used to. I’m beginning to feel my years.”

More than one-hundred friends and relatives joined him at the home for his next, and last, birthday where he cut a thirty-two pound cake decorated by one candle symbolizing all of the others there wasn’t room for.

He survived one of Missouri’s greatest tragedies to live a long and historic life for another three-quarters of a century.  But his tombstone in Kirkwood’s Oak Hill Cemetery says only “Daniel M. Grissom, 1829-1930.”

When he thought he was 94 years old he wrote a letter to the governor of Missouri and another journalist read it after another ninety-four years and wondered, “Who was this guy?”  This is where the story took us.

Sport

Posted on by
Reply

We have reached the time of year when we face crises galore, when many people become passionate about trivial events, when one’s emotions are strained, where hard feelings are generated and superiority is established, when detailed analysis of events dominates much of the public discussion and arguments—even fisticuffs—are motivated by events that in reality have only passing impact on our daily lives.

It’s World Series time in baseball. College football fans are starting to evaluate the value of life on the basis of bowl eligibility.  Pro football fans bemoan the one misplay that dooms the home team or keeps a Super Bowl dream alive.  Pro basketball and hockey fans already are agonizing over or exulting about the puck or the ball that barely missed the net—or got into it at the last second.   College basketball fans soon will cheer the home team in its quest for the post-season or demonstrate their hate for a traditional rival.  In fact, Missouri has (be still my beating heart!) played Kansas in a basketball game!

This is the time of year when games don’t end when the clock or the innings or the quarters run out.  It’s a time when we forget these are only games that have their most meaning during the time they are played. The world will not be more peaceful and safe because they were played.  Homeless people will still live in boxes or in doorways.  Children will still starve and die in desperate circumstances.

We were reminded of those sentiments recently when we re-discovered one of our favorite sports books that puts all of this in perspective.   It’s Heywood Hale Broun’s Tumultuous Merriment, which came out in 1979, a memoir of the decade he spent as a “color commentator” for CBS Sports.  A better word probably is “essayist.”   He was, in our memory, the sports counterpart to Charles Kuralt, the other CBS correspondent on the road. He was the fellow with the great moustache and the colorful sport coat who always saw sports with more perceptive eyes that did not focus on the final outcome.

If you remember him and/or you have some qualms about the value of sports in general and big-time sport in particular, you might want to search out a copy of this book.

Broun began his book with a definition of “sport” from Samuel Johnson’s eighteen-century dictionary: Play; diversion; games; frolick and tumultuous merriment and then asks, “Who now, save an occasional small child, regards sport as diversion or as tumultuous merriment? How much frolick is there in the Ohio State-Michigan game, the modern Olympics, the Little League championship of a crossroads country town?”

He says it is “somber tosh” to explain play as a way to serve wish-fulfillment, or a way to work off hostility, or a way to burn off excess energy, or something that “builds character, creates a healthy moral climate, builds bonds of fellowship, and gives a chance to earn big money with the pros.”

Coaches, he wrote, dare not admit they are just teaching a diversion.  To avoid being paid like English professors, they must “pose as saviors of youth, muscular alchemists who can take the base metal of bad boys and produce golden lads, saints who can block and shoot baskets.”

“It is to our discredit that we swallow all this stuff,” he wrote.  And he had no patience with those who cited the Duke of Wellington’s contention that the Battle of Waterloo had been won  on the playing fields of Eton.  Better, he argued, to remember what the Duke said as he watched troops whose preparation for war had consisted of playing rugby and cricket: “I don’t know if they frighten Napoleon, but by God, they frighten me!”

Broun charges our games “ruthlessly” root fun out of our games “lest it soften our fiber.”  But he says fun need not disappear as the stakes increase and tension grows.  After all, he says, our games are not open heart surgery—where there is real tension and the stakes are really high.

“We are only grotesque when we apply the standards suitable to the gladiator to our Little League children,” he wrote. “It is unfair to make them the surrogates of our flab-shackled daydreams.”

He did not begrudge the high salaries paid to the professionals by the corporations that own their teams but he finds the talk of money turns the athlete and his agent into dullards and he wonders why he even cares whether they win or lose.   Broun said he could get the same kind of behavior at a sales convention.

“After all, one game is not really more important than another in the cosmic scheme of things,” he wrote. “But it’s wonderful fun to pretend and we all have expended a lot of pretense on the Super Bowls, the World Series, the Triple Crown and football games like Yale-Harvard, Oho State-Michigan, or Texas-Oklahoma.”

Broun notes that “small children, more than their elders, demand a structure of immutable rules in their games” regardless of where the games are played. The rules are made up to fit the circumstances, but the rules must be followed.  And that, he says, is why we are fascinated by games. “They are the only activities of life where the rules are, metaphorically or actually, written on the top of the box.”  Life, on the other hand, is a place where the rules quickly can change for a participant, which is why we find relief to “escape into the small, known, well-defined structure of a game.”

“We agree, for the time we play it at least, to its importance, and everything else is lost in the shadows behind the sidelines,” he wrote.  Cheating only thrusts the participant back into the uncertainty of the real world.  “If winning is overwhelmingly important, and is the only reason for playing, we must break the ‘rule’ if no one is looking, or bend it if someone is.”

Broun discovered a game that he thought represented the purity that “sport” in its truest form should be while covering a story at the D. D. Palmer College of Chiropracty in Davenport, Iowa: Rugby.  Perhaps, he reasoned, the game’s lack of the “war game precision” of football that left spectators unable to have strategic discussions about why a team won or lost, and who was responsible, is why rugby has never caught on here. “What rugby does provide,” he wrote, “is an immense amount of pleasure to its players…The air is always filled with fiercely happy cries as the packed scrum into which the ball is dropped dissolves into a thirty-man whirlpool.

“For all the talk of American coaches about team effort, it is possible in sports like football and baseball to put the blame for a loss on an individual, the man who struck out with the bases loaded, dropped a fly ball in the ninth, couldn’t hold a pass, missed a crucial kick. In true team sports like rugby this finger-pointing is a lot more difficult, which is why I found the players at Palmer, scab-nosed to a man, full of good cheer after bashing about on a cold and muddy day.”

He reminds us:

“The actual importance of the contest is immaterial to both spectators and players once the period of magic has begun.  The level of excitement is subconsciously chosen by those present and after a time exists beyond their control…All of us should play as if life and honor depended on it, and all of us should cheer as if it were Lucifer State versus Angel U. in the arena; but at game’s end all of us should recognize that paradise was neither won nor lost. None of us should emulate those middle-aged men who stare glumly into the bottom of a highball glass when they think of a shot that failed to drop in the last second of some long-ago basketball game…

“Let it not be said, although I’m afraid it will, that young men are preparing for a stern world where mistakes are not forgotten, and that they should have a stern preparation for that world.

“Sport is a preparation for more sport and not a businessmen’s ROTC…You can’t tackle economics or block logistics.

“Boys and girls, men and women, can all be distorted by the philosophies that use games to grotesque ends…A coach is not a priest. Games are not life. There is no authority save the Rule, which all players have agreed on, and there is no fun like playing a game for the sake of a game.”

Broun died in 2001.  He was 83.

We’re not sure if his words are any more useful or meaningful in shaping the world of sport and the public’s attitude toward it today than they were in 1979.  Or even whether there is some wisdom in them for the game of politics.

But then again, “There is no authority save the Rule,” and we risk a lot when we decide on or off the playing field that The Rule is expendable.

(Photo credits: paulikreport.com)

Heywood Hale Broun, Tumultuous Merriment, New York, Richard Marek Publishers, 1979

Journalism I

Posted on by
1

It’s not as if we haven’t been called names before. It’s not the first time that those in power wish reporters weren’t telling people what they’re really up to.  Or thinking about.

Criticisms or attacks from those who wish we weren’t so bothersome to them are not new nor will they ever go away. And what they say about us is sometimes not nearly so scathing as some of the things we say about ourselves.

We have accumulated through the years some of the noble things said about our profession and some of the criticisms leveled at it, internally and externally.  From time to time we will share them with you because we know that journalists have responsibilities and obligations of which they need at times to be reminded. We live in a world of kicks in the butt and occasional pats on the head and we are glad to toil in a nation that allows, if not encourages, both.  Here is a sample of the things said about those of us who do a job that is essential, regardless of whether you agree with what we say and write.

“Controversy? You can’t be any kind of reporter worthy of the name and avoid controversy completely. You can’t be a good reporter and not be fairly regularly involved in some kind of controversy. And I don’t think you can be a great reporter and avoid controversy very often, because one of the roles a good journalist plays is to tell the tough truths as well as the easy truths. And the tough truths will lead you to controversy, and even a search for the tough truths will cost you something. Please don’t make this play or read as any complaint, it’s trying to explain this goes with the territory if you’re a journalist of integrity. That if you start out a journalist or if you reach a point in journalism where you say, ‘Listen, I’m just not going not touch anything that could possibly be controversial,’ then you ought to get out.”

—Dan Rather, Staff, May 5, 2001

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.”

—Norman Mailer, The Snark Handbook

“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. I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism. I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true.”

—Walter Williams, founder of the nation’s first School of Journalism at the University of Missouri (1908), The Journalist’s Creed (partial)

“Journalism is unlike any other craft. It most closely resembles show business. There’s an undeniable element of ego in journalism, and an equally undeniable element of self-sacrifice. Performers know the show must go on. Journalists know the paper has to come out on time.”

—Donald L. Ferguson, Opportunities in Journalism Careers

“It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles.”

—G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

“There is a line I would often share when I was a newspaper reporter talking to people who complained that we only reported ‘bad news.’ I would tell them: ‘It’s not news when a plane lands safely.’ And it’s not. ‘Everybody lived happily ever after’ is a great ending, but if they lived happily the whole time you wouldn’t bother reading.”

—Rick Polito, newhope360, January 20, 2016

 

“There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism.  By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891.

Citizens do not think through the meaning of a free press.  Too many regard it merely as a profitable privilege of publishers, instead of the right of all the people and the chief institution of representative government.  A free press is that privilege of citizenship which makes governmental dictatorship impossible.  When editors fight for the liberty to speak and write, they fight for the greatest of all human rights under government.  He is not thoughtful who cannot see that democracy cannot exist except through the maintenance of a channel through which information can flow freely from the center of government to all the people and through which praise and criticism can flow freely from the people to the center.

—American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1938

So the journalist, the reporter, flourishes in this climate of scorn and principle. And your correspondent cannot think of anything he would rather be doing with his life than living in that climate.

We’ll let you inside that climate from time to time in the future.

 

0000

no one cares

Posted on by
1

An extraordinary writer has written an extraordinary book you should read, especially if you are in a public policy position, particularly if that position involves holding public purse strings.

He begins his book bluntly: “This is the book I promised myself I would never write. And promised my wife as well.”

Why?

“I have kept that promise for a decade—since our younger son, Kevin, hanged himself in our basement, a week before his twenty-first birthday in July 2005, after struggling for three years with schizophrenia.”

Then, three years later, his eldest son, Dean, developed symptoms of schizophrenia, too.

Several weeks ago, while driving to Columbia to do some research at the State Historical Society, I heard Ron Powers being interviewed on National Public Radio about this book. I knew instantly I had to read it:  no one cares about crazy people, which draws its title from a “ghastly” remark made in 2010 by a campaign aide to Scott Walker, who was running for Governor of Wisconsin.  Even the lower-case print used on the cover and title page is a message.  Crazy people are lower-case people, ones we prefer to ignore, ones easy to lose.

It should be explained that Ron and I have been friends most of our lives although that friendship became strained for reasons that are now clear from reading his book, a circumstance that might not be unusual when friends do not realize the cumulative effects of life circumstances upon other friends.  If you’re not familiar with him, Google him.  He’s a Hannibal native. Look at the long list of his books. Read about his Pulitzer Prize and his career with Charles Kuralt on the CBS Sunday Morning show.

Early in his book, Ron writes of an experience he had in a Vermont legislative committee hearing (He lives in Vermont) that equals one of the most vivid memories I have of covering thousands of hours of committee meetings in four decades as a statehouse reporter.  I recall a father testifying in one of the committee rooms on the first floor of the Missouri Capitol about this state’s inadequate services for the mentally ill.   He recited the struggles of his son whose deteriorating mental health eventually led the son into crime and then to state prison.  The point the father made that day should have been disturbing to anyone facing him from the committee table: the only place his son could receive treatment for his mental disease was in a prison.

Ron and his wife, Honoree, had gone to the lovely, small, Vermont Capitol in Montpelier in January, 2014 to testify about whether mental patients should be institutionalized against their will when their conditions reach certain levels of desperation and danger, or whether such action violates the individual’s civil liberties and exposes them to questionable drug therapies perceived by some as being prescribed by doctors who receive financial rewards from “Big Pharma” for prescribing those drugs.  We’ve heard the same arguments here. He heard people such as the father I had listened to here in Missouri.

Just three weeks after the Powerses attended that hearing came the revelation of the callous pronouncement from the Walker aide.  And that’s when Ron began to re-think his vow about not writing the book, reconsidering his desire to protect the privacy of his sons, and reconsidering his feelings that he did not want to exploit them.  I am glad that he made the difficult decision to write it after that hearing jolted him out of his introspection and into what he realized is “a simple and self-evident and morally insupportable truth: Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity.”

The book is not just a recounting of his family’s personal journey.  It also is an excellent journalistic recounting of the way societies have treated the mentally ill for centuries. Early in his book, Ron writes, “For centuries those who have been struck by madness have always had their own cruel nomenclature to bear, names intended to separate them out, divide us from them: lunatics, imbeciles, loonies, dips, weirdos, wackos, schizos, psychos, freaks, morons, nutcases, nutjobs, wingnuts, cranks.  The mad one, then, is something between a clown and a demon.  Unless that mad one is a gift of God made flesh.”

Such as a child.

Ron mixes the deeply-personal narrative of his family’s eventual shift from one of being normal, proud parents of gifted sons to a deepening search for hoped normality in the face of increasing and inescapable reality, with perceptive accounts of the years of society’s shifting thought on mental illness and the coining of the phrase “schizophrenia” by Eugen Bleuler in 1908.  Ron demonstrates his extensive journalistic story-telling skills to track the attitudes toward mental illness from the days of  demons and shamans; from Hippocrates to today’s researchers; from Bedlam, the first madhouse dating to 1247, to today’s asylums; from Sigmund Freud, Dorothea Dix, and Charles Darwin, to the disciples of Eugenics, and to Julian Jaynes’ Twentieth Century thoughts on the origins of madness—and research and policies in the forty-years since then, including mental illness deniers such as L. Ron Hubbard and Thomas Szasz..  It was mortifying to read that one Albert Priddy, the superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, was a strong advocate of eugenics and a leader of the effort to defend the Virginia Sterilization Act.  It is only slightly comforting that his name does not show up on our particular branch of the family tree.

His writing on the deinstitutionalization movement started in a Ronald Reagan-signed law while Governor of California, the effects of which remain obvious to those will but see, is damning.  Ron calls the Lanterman-Petris-Short act “the national gold standard for clueless, destructive government interference in the interest of mentally ill people.” And he offers studies showing that our prisons have become the largest treatment facilities for those with mental illness since the national adoption of the act’s philosophy.

Ron doesn’t want you to “enjoy” the book—and you won’t.  But read it anyway. FEEL his book.  Have the courage and the empathy to read it from beginning to end including the preface, especially if you deal with public policy—particularly health and mental health issues and budget issues.

Too rarely, I asked legislative committee chairmen and women how they could listen to real people plead for the kind of help that only government can provide and then ignore the humanity behind those pleas.  The answers always were basically, “Well, we only have so much money.”  In recent years, their successors have moved to assure the state will have even less.

It is sad that so much of the process of government—at all levels—and citizen participation in a society that is greater than the one behind our front doors seems to look only at dollars and not at the real people next door or across the street. National and international health studies indicate one in four of us experience, or will experience, some kind of mental illness. All of us know someone who is one of those. But it’s okay to see the face of only one person—George Washington, whose benign gaze greets us on the front of the dollar bill.

This is a book of humanity that every health and mental health committee member in every state legislature should read.  It’s a book ALL of us should read.  We should be uncomfortable throughout it, and after it.

Thank you, Ron and Honoree, for your courage and your strength with this book.  We hope others can draw courage and strength of their own to see people, not just dollars.

Story-tellin’

Posted on by
1

One of the great things about being a journalist is the stories people tell you, often stories that aren’t exactly “news,” but are interesting enough that you file them away to tell to others later. In my case, I used to have in the newsroom several boxes carrying the ghoulish label, “Prospective Death Box.”  Through the years my staff and I put recordings of interviews, speeches, and events into that box so we would dig them out and play parts of them back in our coverage of the death of a prominent person or the anniversary of an important event.

Some of those recordings are, as far as I know, the only preserved telling of a story, the only known recording of an event, the only sample of someone’s now-stilled voice.

One of those recordings is of the only man ever to serve three terms as State Treasurer.  He did it in the days when the Treasurer could not succeed himself, which makes his service even more remarkable.

M. E. Morris was a Dadeville native—southwest Missouri’s Dade County—who founded in 1928 the People’s Bank in Miller. He was elected to the Missouri House for the first of his two terms in 1932, after which he became the CEO of the Trenton National Bank. He left the bank in 1945 to become Commissioner of the state Division of Finance.

When the 1945 Constitution created a new agency for collecting taxes, the Department of Revenue, Morris became the first Director of Revenue for Missouri, serving under Governor Phil Donnelly.  This was in the days when Governors could not succeed themselves and therefore keep patronage-appointed department heads so when Donnelly left office, Morris ran for and was elected State Treasurer for the first time.  He could not succeed himself but fortunately Donnelly decided he wanted to be Governor again, so when Donnelly became Governor a second time, Morris became Revenue Director again.  When  Donnelly’s second term ended, Morris ran for Treasurer and won a second term.  The Revenue Director while Morris was in his second term was Milton Carpenter who became the state Treasurer in 1961, at which point, Morris replaced Carpenter as Revenue Director under Governor John Dalton.  When Carpenter’s term ran out, Morris ran again, and won a third term as state treasurer.

He retired from state government after almost 25 years as either revenue director or state treasurer, a pretty remarkable career that few people recognize.

Name recognition is important in politics and M. E. Morris felt he had a leg up on any candidate.   Although known as M. E. to the press, and “Monty” to friends, his real name, you see, was MOUNT ETNA Morris.

On March 23, 1984, a little more than four years before he died, I went to his home in Jefferson City to interview him for my book about Thomas Hart Benton.  The interview was pretty frustrating because Morris had little information to offer and furthermore spoke in a slow, low, halting voice and provided no useful details.  At the end, however, I asked him to explain how he got the name “Mount Etna.”  I listened back and transcribed it. And here, from his lips to my ears, from my keyboard to your eyes, is what he told me:

“Seems there was a Welsh captain on a ship, sailing ship, of course, back in the Mediterranean back in the old days, and he was off the coast of Sicily.  A storm came up and he was about to lose his ship, did lose his bearings.  Mount Etna was in eruption at that time, there on the coast of Sicily there.  So he got his bearings from the stream of lava flying up over there.  Got his bearings and saved his ship.  So when he got back home, his first boy baby, he named him Mount Etna.  That name has been in our family for many years.

“And I know about four or five Mount Etna Morrises are buried in south Missouri there.  That’s where they finally hung up.  In fact I sent a check this morning to the old Morris Cemetery down in the county just this morning.  They’re getting ready for Decoration Day down there. 

“My grandmother’s name was Mount Etna Morris.  That’s where the name originated.  It’s a good story.  And as far as I know it’s a true story because there’s been some Mount Etna Morrises in the past.  I know where four of them are buried. 

“I told that story many times in campaign speeches just so they would remember it.”  

Let’s face it, if you’re a voter and you go into the booth aren’t you more likely to remember a man named for a volcano than somebody named Smith, Or Jones, or whatever?

Mr. Morris died in 1988, at the age of 87.  I doubt there are many recordings of his voice, let along many, or any other, recordings of the story of his name.

I intend to donate these recordings to the audio history collection of the State Historical Society.

———————–

As I was writing the book about the art of the Capitol, it dawned on me late in the process that I had not written about the three paintings in the Senate Lounge of Senators A. Clifford Jones, Richard Webster, and Michael Kinney.  In writing the story of Kinney, I recalled that I had on tape a fascinating story about him that Webster had told me.

Michael Kinney served 56 years in the state senate, longer than any legislator in the nation served in one chamber of any state legislature.  He was a Democrat from the rough and tumble “Kerry Patch” Irish neighborhood of St. Louis once dominated by two Irish gangs, the Hogans and Egan’s Rats, a group that’s been described as “the first full-time gangsters to make regular headlines.”   He succeeded his brother, Thomas, an Irish tavern-keeper known as “Snake,” who handled the political issues for the gang before he died in 1912 during his second term in the Senate.

Michael served until he lost a primary bid for re-election in 1968.  He seldom spoke in the Senate and when he did his voice was so soft that many of his colleagues could not hear him in those days before there was a public address system. But his seniority and his knowledge of Senate procedure gave him great power throughout his career.

He sponsored many bills that became laws in his career, the one that is his most visible legacy being the one that created the state cancer hospital in Columbia.  For most of three decades he was part of a Senate triumvirate that exerted enormous influence.  He, Senators Michael E. Casey of Kansas City, who served from 1909-1944 after serving six years in the House, and Senator Joseph Brogan of St. Louis, who was in the Senate from 1909 until his death in 1940, were Presidents pro Tem four times among them and chaired powerful committees throughout their careers.  The St. Louis Globe-Democrat said Casey “was the spellbinder of the group…Brogan..was the witty, nimble floor fighter, while Senator Kinney was the subtle, behind-the-scenes diplomat, string-puller and compromiser.”

Senator Webster, who was from Carthage, was in the House before moving across the rotunda to the other chamber.  He remembered when he and Kinney were on a conference committee of House and Senate members working on a compromise of a bill that had passed both chambers in different form and Webster—then in the House—was complaining about Governor Forrest Smith.  Kinney told him, “I’ve told every House member and every Senate member that’s arrived on the scene and got mad at whoever the Governor was, ‘He’s just a Governor.  Those fellows come and go.’”

Webster remembered that Kinney sat on a high stool in his office at 7 a.m. each day of the legislative session, stripped to his waist with a table cloth wrapped around his neck while his grandson-in-law, State Auditor Haskell Holman, shave him.  Kinney sat with his back to the open door.

“If you looked, you’d see a bullet hole in his back, “Webster told me.  It was a scar that Webster said remained from an assassination attempt during an Irish gang war.  Kinney was shot four times—in the chest, both arms, and in the jaw—in 1924.  He later identified a police photograph of a recaptured escaped mental patient as the man who shot him.  But there was considerable doubt even then that Kinney told the truth.  Although suspicions lingered for decades that his near-assassination was part of the heated rivalry between the Rats, of which Kinney remained a part, and the rival Hogans, Kinney never commented about the issue publicly.” 

Privately, though, according to Webster, he did talk about it.  And Webster told me about one of those conversations in the privacy of Kinney’s office.

“Someone would say, ‘Senator, do you remember a fellow named Jimmy O’Brien?’  And he would say, ‘Jimmy O’Brien.  He was a nice fellow.  Whatever happened to him?’”

“Well, what had happened to him was that Mike Kinney could never identify his assailant although his assailant was about three or four feet from him when he fired the shot.  But a month later, Jimmy O’Brien did rise to the surface of the Mississippi River.”   

There is, as far as I know, no other telling of that story except for the version Richard Webster related on tape to me that day.

Another case of the journalist collecting the first draft of history.

——————

I have in my tape library several hours of Senate floor debate in which one of the greatest Ozark story tellers ever to serve in the legislature embarked on some of his long, windy expositions on some subject that might or might not be related to the issue at hand.  There is no doubt that many of the stories Danny Staples told were pure fabrications or old jokes recycled for the moment.  But many of his stories came straight from his early life as the son of a grocery-store owner in rural southeast Missouri.

In March, 2002, the Senate was working on an election reform bill triggered by some of the big problems at the polls in St. Louis in 2000.  Staples launched into a story that was not particularly original except in the telling.

“I’m not going to say what country it was because I don’t think the statute of limitations have run out yet. But I can remember full well an old boy that was a sheriff down in one of the southeast counties.  And this young, handsome, debonair, good-lookin’ candidate was running against the incumbent state senator down there.  And the old retired official down there had named his successor and they came in and they both liked this young, handsome, debonair good-lookin’ fellow that was running the incumbent.

“One night it was raining, two days before the election, and the old man and the boy, his protégé, were out in one of those famous Civil War cemeteries down there in southeast Missouri.  One of them had a flashlight; the other one had a legal pad and a pen. And they were taking names off the Civil War cemetery headstones, been there since 1865.

“They were voting absentee ballots for this young, handsome, debonair challenger of this old retiring state senator. 

“And…the old official that was retiring had the flashlight and he was looking at a headstone there in the middle of the night and it was weather-beaten; it was worn from the hail, from the wind, from freezing rain, and the atmosphere.  And the young official that replaced the old official looked at him and said, ‘Hey. Pop, we can’t get the name off this headstone.  It’s been worn out. It’s no longer legible.  Let’s move over to the next one.’  The old man looked at the boy, and he says, ‘Cubby, this man has got just as much right to vote as this man.’’   

“That’s the way you run an honest election.”

Staples told the Senate after that, “You don’t need laws on the books to protect the innocent.  We only need laws on the books to protect those that would be corrupt and greedy and grafty in the greatest society in the world, and that’s the electoral process.”  I have read the transcript of that remark time and again and I’ll be darned if I can figure out the logic in it.

Staples usually tipped off his storytelling by asking a Senator who was handling a bill, ‘Would be interested to know, Senator….” Even if the Senator was NOT interested, Staples would proceed to inform him—and everybody else.

He decided to tell another story during this particular debate but the other senator—Doyle Childers who later became director of the Department of Natural Resources under Matt Blunt—answered “No, Senator, at this moment I’m not interested to know that, but thank you Senator.” At which point Staples stopped trying to debate and just asked to speak on the bill.

“Mr. President, it comes to my remembrance and my recollection now that they had another election in southeast Missouri…One day down in southeast Missouri, the day after the election, this man about fifty years old was sitting on the courthouse steps.  He was crying.  Tears rolling down his face.  A business partner of his walked by and he said, ‘What’s wrong?  Has there been a tragedy?’  He said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Yesterday was election day.’  He said, ‘My daddy’s been dead for nine years.  He come home and voted yesterday, didn’t even stop to see momma and I.’” 

(The Senate dissolved into laughter for several seconds on both sides of the aisle.)..

Staples went on:  “Now, I’ve won ten elections and lost one.  There was never voter fraud in the 20th Senatorial District.  Oh, sometimes we Democrats voted on Tuesday, sent out a press release, the Republicans would vote on Wednesday.  But the polls weren’t open on Wednesday as you well know. So the Democrats always won.”

Term limits finally got Danny Staples—one of the many egregious shortcomings of that misguided concept that relies on public apathy and civic irresponsibility for its support—after twenty years in the Senate preceded by six years in the House.  Not long after he was forced out of office, Danny Staples and his wife were getting ready for a trip.  He had taken the family motor home to town to get it all cleaned up and fueled up.  He drove it home and dropped dead of a heart attack on July 22, 2002. The legislature has been far too serious since he left.

We journalists not only get to witness events as they unfold and capture the stories that people tell in that process, the journalist also comes across long-forgotten stories in the course of our curiosity. I don’t remember how I stumbled on this last story but I filed it away, knowing I’d have a chance to tell it to somebody sometime. And son-of-a-gun, here is that opportunity.

Missouri history has LOT of wonderful animal stories.  Here’s one.

Many years ago I knew the first three-time Speaker of the House.  He served in the 1930s, was the Speaker for three of his four terms, and one night my longtime friend Clyde Lear and I sat down with him after dinner and recorded him telling some stories.   He told us about a day that the House and the Senate met together to see a special guest who was multi-lingual, including Morse Code, and apparently was clairvoyant to boot.

His name was Jim. Jim the Wonder Dog.  Folklorist and folk song-teller Bob Dyer wrote a song about “Jim, Jim, Wonderful Jim.  Never was a dog smarter than him.” At least not according to Bob Dyer.

Former House Speaker John G. Christy, who later was Mayor of Jefferson City for twelve years, recalled that there was no way Jim’s owner, Sam VanArsdale, could have given the dog any signals that day in the House of Representatives when—during an informal joint session—he was told in Morse Code to find the man known as the “Beau Brummel of the House.”   Jim trotted down the main aisle, paused, then turned in and wound his way through a row of desks and put his paw on the leg of a state representative who WAS known as the Beau Brummel of the House.  He was also told to find the sponsor of the horse racing bill, and he picked that man out from the crowd in the House Chamber.  That’s another story I recorded more than 35 years ago.

I love the way Bob Dyer concluded his song about Jim:

“So the next time you hear about man’s best friend,

            Think about that wonderful dog named Jim.

            And remember,

            Dogs can be just as smart as some humans are….dumb.”  

God gave people one mouth and two ears for a reason. Journalists are blessed by working in a profession that relies on that statement and having the tools to capture the stories that prove its truth.

 

Jerry

Posted on by
5

We’ve lost a good guy named Jerry Nachtigal. 

Those of us who have spent a lot of time covering state government might be excused if we think of Jerry as the last of his kind, a press secretary who recognized that his job was to be an enabler, not a roadblock. 

Jerry was Mel Carnahan’s spokesman.  He was the one who made the official announcement that terrible night almost seventeen years ago that his boss and two others had been killed in a plane crash. Governor Carnahan, his son Randy, and the governor’s chief aide, Chris Sifford died in that crash.  Chris had been Jerry’s predecessor as the governor’s press guy.  

Jerry stayed on as Roger Wilson’s spokesman during Wilson’s two-month governorship.  And he remained in the position for a while for Bob Holden.  He always dealt with the press with high professionalism.  This reporter cannot recall ever having a cross word with him. If we needed a comment from Governor Carnahan, he always tried to connect us with him or at least was able to tell us what the governor was thinking—we recall several times when the governor had gone to Washington or somewhere else to conduct state business and Jerry always made sure we could get a long-distance call by the governor from the airport before takeoff on the return flight.

It helped that Jerry had spent almost two decades working for the Associated Press in Kansas City and Springfield as well as in Phoenix.  Unlike too many of his successors throughout state government, he knew the press and how it operates.  And he worked for a governor who was open about his actions and who was unafraid to explain and defend them. 

Jerry was a native of South Dakota and the state eventually drew him back to it, first to be a spokesman for an unsuccessful candidate for governor and then as a spokesman for Citibank in Sioux Falls.   When he died, he was the Senior Vice President of Public Affairs.  He was a respected community leader, a trustee of the South Dakota State University foundation (he was a graduate of the school), a board member of the Sioux Falls YMCA, and a board member of the South Dakota Banking Association. He also ran most of Citi’s philanthropic efforts in the state. 

The CEO of the Sioux Falls YMCA was quoted in Jerry’s obituary saying Jerry was a powerful corporate executive but didn’t lord it over anyone. “He was just down to earth, great communicator, always open to talking about things…someone who believed in giving back.”

He and his family were the South Dakota State University Family of the Year in 2005.  He bled blue and yellow as he watched the Jackrabbits basketball and football games.  And there was some purple, too, for his Minnesota Vikings.  He loved baseball, particularly the Twins, he fished; he hunted; he looked at birds.  He once said that everybody in family but him and the dog played tennis—but he was one of the top leaders in efforts to build a major indoor tennis facility in Sioux Falls so people could play in the months when, as he noted, South Dakota is frozen. 

Cancer claimed him at the age of 57.  He leaves his wife, three children, and other family members.

We appreciated him and respected him when he was with us at the Capitol. That was, unfortunately, a far different time.  The press and the public here have not been served as well since he went back to South Dakota. 

He was a good man.  We are lucky to have been able to work with him.  And grateful that we did.