Category Archives: Media

Motivational posters

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Your correspondent dislikes walking into a room—usually somebody’s office—decorated with motivational posters.  You know them.  Lovely pictures with some syrupy words about success, or greatness, or achievement, or—motivation.

The motivational poster industry probably has been around forever; I think I have read of some motivational sayings painted on the walls at Pompeii.  But they’ve become noticeably popular in the last two decades or so.  We will leave it to various “ologists” to study what has changed about us to warrant such treacle.

There always was this feeling that anybody who really needed one of these saccharine decorations must have been short of self-esteem—or working for bosses who think a treacly poster can be a transformative influence on the employee.

I know several apparently well-adjusted folks who have these things on their offices.  As far as I know they do not spend any time every day meditating on them and pondering the significance of the message. They seem to be perfectly normal people who do their work competently every day.  I’ve known some of them long enough to know that the poster in their office has not changed the high-quality work they have always done anyway.

All of this is why my newsroom work station, for several years, sported a calendar from Despair.com (https://despair.com/collections/demotivators) that countered the hard-hitting soupy sayings on walls elsewhere in the building.  Every couple of months there was a new mini-poster taped under my name thingie.

Now, understand that news people have a tendency to be kind of anti-establishment, independent, unruly, and untidy souls who have an inborn pride in being to some degree as manageable as a wheelbarrow full of frogs.  Or cats.  Or Beagle pups. We are only slightly more manageable than a wheelbarrow full of canaries.

But my work area used to be decorated with beautiful pictures such as one showing several hands hoisting a trophy with the big word, “Winning” beneath and the ensuing paragraph: “Because nothing says, ‘You’re a loser’ more than owning a motivational poster about being a winner.”

There are several others—enough that I did not have time to acquire them all.

One that some legislator with a sense of humor might want to hang in the outer office where visitors can see it. If features a lovely early evening sunset-illuminated Nation’s Capitol and its reflection in a mall pool.  It says “Government,” and beneath it are the words, “If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.”

Apparently there is an alternate contemplation: “They may seem inefficient and feckless at times, but your Representatives in Washington just want what’s best for you assuming you’re a major corporation. Otherwise, you’re pretty mush screwed.”

Another poster shows a stack of newspapers with the big word “Media,” followed by, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies right to our faces.”

And there’s one labled “Conspiracy” that says, “Never attribute to stupidity that which can easily be explained by a pathological blood lust for control.”

Or one showing hands raised in high fives and labeled, “Teams,” with the note, “Together we can do the work of one.”

And of course the poster reading “Motivation,” which advises, “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job.  The kind robots will be doing soon.”

I’m waiting for the poster that says “Treacle.”  The accompanying line should be a pip.

Theatre of the Inane

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Elon Musk, insanely wealthy and looking to fend off boredom, has decided he wants to buy Twitter. He says he’ll pay $43 Billion.  Twitter doesn’t want to be bought and thinks it has a poison pill that will keep it Muskless.  He has suggested these are just the opening rounds of what can become an increasingly nasty fight.

We don’t twitt. We don’t Facebook. Both refusals probably are to our disadvantage when it comes to sharing this twice-a-week wisdom. But, frankly, we have a life and it’s not spent focusing on what’s between our thumbs.

When Twitter first came along, the Missourinet news staff was told it was going to have to start using it because it was the coming thing in communication.  The example given of its usefulness was a narrative series (forgive me, friends, I abhor the word “tweets”) of a friend of ours who was going somewhere and reported at various times that he had arrived at the airport, had been checked in, was waiting to board, was boarding, and was sitting on the airplane that was spending too much time packing in the passengers..

The Missourinet staff was unimpressed beyond description.

A few days later, your observer, the now-retired Missourinet news director saw a message from a friend who told the world that she was going to have to stop on her way home from work to get a new sump pump.

The news director quickly dubbed Twitter “the theatre of the inane.”

While Twitter has proven to be useful in distributing news in real time (as well as lies, conspiracies, accusations, and general trash), it still is awash in inanities.

Representative Harry Yates of St. Joseph would not have liked Twitter if it had existed in his day. He introduced a bill in the 1925 legislative session making gossip and scandal-mongering a criminal offense.   He proposed fines of ten to one-hundred dollars or a ten-to-fifty day jail sentence for anyone “maliciously repeating or communicating any false rumor or slander detrimental or harmful to another person.”

Yates would, of course, be apoplectic about Facebook.

His bill never made it into the statute books. It had some obviously serious First Amendment problems. And worse yet, if people couldn’t gossip or be mongers of scandals, there would be little to talk about, especially at the Missouri Capitol.  The place is a hothouse for gossip of varying degress of veracity.

But then again, imagine how nice would be the Silence of the Thumbs, at least in some places, if Representative Yates had succeeded.

 

The Obit

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We’re all going to have one, eventually.  Some help write theirs, or write the whole thing (see the New York Times recent obituary for former Secrtary of State Madeline Albright).

I had to remind Missourinet reporters from time to time that people die.

They do not, I told them, enter into rest, make the transition, cross to the other side, pass away, or any of the myriad euphemism that we use to escape saying someone died.

Years ago, one of my journalism school professors said “passing away” refers to a quarterback who throws a pass that goes over the hands of a leaping receiver, clears the goal post, flies out of the stadium, and is last seen disappearing into the distance.  “THAT,” he said, “is passing away.”

While at the Missourinet, I kept a file of those euphemisms.  I was astonished at its length.

Published obituaries often come from the families of the dead rather than from the pen of a newspaper writer, which is okay as part of the grieving process.  Few newspapers have reporters on the obit beat, but an obituary written by one of those people is considered a form of literary art.  The Albright obit in  The New York Times is an example of the obituary as literary art. Some of its previous write-ups are in book form.

One of our favorite obituaries is one that pulled no punches.  Accuracy was more important than tribute in this obit published by the London Telegraph, April 21, 2005: (To get full enjoyment, we suggest you put on your best English accent and read it aloud)

—

The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, whose death aged 66 was confirmed yesterday, demonstrated the dangers of the possession of inherited wealth coupled with a weakness for women and Champagne.

Shaftesbury, who disappeared last November prompting an international police investigation, was tall, debonair, affable and rather shy.  He tried after his own fashion to be true to the liberal philanthropic family traditions of his ancestors, notably the first Earl (1621-83), founder of the Whig party in Parliament, and the 7th Earl (1801-85), the great 19th century evangelical social reformer.

He served as president of the Shaftesbury Society, which the 7th Earl had founded, and—as a keen music fan—was chairman of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1966 to 1980.

He was also respected as a conservationist.  On his 9,000-acre estate at Wimborne St. Giles, Dorset, he planted more than a million trees and, in 1992, was joint winner of the Royal Forestry Society’s national Duke of Cornwall’s Award for Forestry and Conservation. He also served as president of the Hawk and Owl Trust and as vice-president of the British Butterfly Conservation Society.

It was said, after his mysterious disappearance from a Cannes nightclub, that the 10th Earl, like Gladstone, had been devoting himself to helping vulnerable young girls working in nightspots on the French Riviera to start new lives. But as the mystery deepened, it seemed that his interest was more than merely philanthropic.

Indeed, Lord Shaftesbury had always exhibited a weakness for exotic women. At Eton he had famously penned an article for the college magazine in which he described English debutantes as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne.”  His subsequent amorous career was notable for his avoidance of the species.

He met his Italian-born first wife, Bianca Le Vien, the ex-wife of an American film producer and 12 years his senior, during a skiing holiday. They married in 1966 but divorced owing to his adultery with an unnamed woman, in 1976. The same year he married Swedish-born divorcee, Christina Casella, the daughter of a diplomat, with whom he had two sons.

That marriage, too, ended acrimoniously, in 2000, and he embarked on a long string of short-lived and expensive love affairs with younger women distinguished by their exotic looks and equally colourful past histories.

He became a familiar figure in some of the loucher nightspots on the French Riviera, where he cut a curious figure in his leather trousers, pink shirts, and large red-and-black spectacles; he was notable for his habit of flashing his money around as he bought drinks for a succession of nubile female companions.

In 1999 he had begun a relationship with Nathalie Lions, a pneumatic 29-year old whom he had met in a lingerie shop in Geneva, where she was working as a model. They became engaged, and he paraded her around London, Barbados and the south of France, maintaining that she was a member of the Italian royal house of Savoy. He admitted to lavishing some £1 million on her in cheques and expensive gifts, including a £100,000 Rolex watch and an Audi TT sports car.

But their relationship came to an end in 2002 after it was revealed that she was, in fact, a French nude model and former Penthouse “Pet” with silicone-enhanced breasts.

Later that year, he married Jamila M’Barek, a Tunisian divorcee with two children, whom he had met in a Paris bar where she was working as a hostess. She separated from him in April 2004, claiming that he had become an alcoholic and “sex addict,” regularly overdosing on Viagra and having testosterone injections. Among several bizarre stories, she alleged that, on one occasion, she had returned unexpectedly to their flat in Cannes to find her husband in the company of a large Arab gangster and two Arab women who were rifling through the wardrobes. Her husband was on a stool singing and dancing; the women left with a car-load of her belongings.

In August 2004 Shaftesbury was reported as having taken up with a 33-year old Moroccan hostess known as Nadia. He installed her and her two children in their own flat and, a month later, asked her to become the fourth Countess of Shaftesbury.

On the evening of November 5, 2004, Shaftesbury left the Noga Hilton Hotel in Cannes and, as was his regular habit by this time, entered a basement hostess-bar nearby. Within 24 hours he had vanished, setting off an international criminal investigation.

The saga of “Le Lord disparu” send the French media into a frenzy, and spawned a multitude of theories. In February his estranged wife, Jamila M’Barek was arrested by French police and allegedly admitted that she was present when the Earl was killed in her home; but she insisted that she was only a witness to a fight involving her husband and his killer. She and her brother Mohammed have both been placed under investigation for murder which is a step short of formal charges under French law.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper was born on May 22, 1938, the elder son of Major Lord Ashley, elder son of the 9th Earl of Shaftesbury KP, PC, GCVO, CBE. Lord Ashley, who died in 1947 before he could inherit the earldom, had shocked London society by marrying the model and chorus girl Sylvia Hawkes.  After their divorce she went on to marry Douglas Fairbanks Sr., followed by Clark Gable. Anthony was the son of his father’s French-born second wife, Françoise Soulier.

He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and as a young man was a keen climber and skier. He succeeded to the earldom at aged 22 on his grandfather’s death in 1961.

The 9th Earl had, by prudent financial planning, arranged matters so that his heirs would avoid death duties.  The young earl therefore came into an estate which included the family’s 17th century home and large estate in Dorset, several other properties and a collection of art and other valuables.  By the 1990s his wealth was said to be in the “low millions.”

It was another ancestor, the 3rd Earl, who had bequeathed to his wayward descendant the wisest counsel: “The extending of a single passion too far or the continuance of it too long,” he observed, “is able to bring irrecoverable ruin and misery.”

Shaftesbury’s body was found in the south of France on April 5; yesterday it was announced that DNA tests had confirmed his identity.

By his second marriage, Lord Shaftesbury had two sons, the eldest of whom, Anthony Nils Christian, Lord Ashley, born in 1977, succeeds to the earldom.

—

Now, THAT’S an obituary!

Let’s take a breath

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—and count to ten before we blurt out a heated response to something someone has said.

I have a friend who says he hasn’t paid attention to the news for several years.  He seems at peace with himself.  Uninformed, but at peace.

Unfortunately, uninformed people who are at peace with themselves are the kind of people despots take advantage of.

Responsible engagement is a friend of freedom.

But responsible engagement should require thought, not reflex.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time of reflex, encouraged by those who want to take advantage of unthinking reaction for their own political benefit. Mischaracterization too often goes unchallenged on both sides of the spectrum.

God gave us a brain to think with.  God gave us a stomach to digest things with. Too many folks, from our lofty standpoint, have forgotten what is between our ears and seem to believe the thing that fills our bowels with waste is the thinking apparatus.

Case in point (and we’re going to get crucified by some of you for doing this): Mitch McConnell’s statement last week, “If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”  The comment, in answering a reporter’s question about Republican opposition to the Voting Rights Act, became Twitter cannon fodder within minutes.

There is no doubt that throughout our land, a lot of nerves are on the outside of people’s bodies. McConnell, a lightning rod for those who think his party leadership would be better for the country if he focused more on service than on power, hit those nerves hard.

From the beginning, we wondered if he would be pilloried for what could have been a clumsy use of the English language. While understanding many would take his comments as racist and an expected attitude toward someone whose party is perceived as favoring limits Black voting, we also wondered if the intent of his remark was that African-American voters are as involved in elections as much as everybody else.

McConnell, instead of apologizing for making his point awkwardly, has given a gut response. He calls the criticism of his comment “outrageous.” He accused some of his critics of spouting “total nonsense.”

After lashing out at critics, he said he meant was that “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as (all) Americans.”

He cited his record in civil rights issues including the Martin Luther King march on Washington in 1963, his mentoring of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is black, and that he has “had African American speechwriters, schedulers, [and] office managers” throughout his political career.

In a time when such defenses would be seen as condescending, he might have chosen to verbalize his defense better.

Kentucky U. S. Senate candidate Charles Booker, who is Black, accused McConnell of thinking “it’s fine for him to block Voting Rights because he has black friends.”

Two points:   First, in earlier times, this instant prairie fire might have burned itself out. But today, social media is a mighty wind that increases the flames.

Second, there were times in our reporting days when someone we were interviewing said something that didn’t seem right the immediate follow up question became, “Are you saying—-?” which either gave the person a chance to dig a deeper hole or a chance to be more clear. Somebody should have asked the question when the original remark was made.

In a time when an inarticulate comment can become a social media hand grenade, it would do all of us well if our public figures allowed a second or two of silence after a question before they say what they mean to be heard. We are so awash in intentionally harmful speech that it is essential that people in McConnell’s position as a political symbol as well as a political leader be more careful in what they say.

It also is more important for those listening to ask, “Did you mean—?” if they can. And it is important for the health of our Republic for those who are quick to condemn to ask if what was said is what was truly meant.

Blurting is not a national virtue.

However, taking a breath is what keeps us healthy.

Truth as a Defense 

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(The Missouri General Assembly is back in session and it, the governor, and assorted denizens of the hallways will be generating ample material for observation for the next four months or so.  We are giving Dr. Frank Crane a bit of a vacation until the end of the session so we might increase the number of appropriate observations pertinent to the times. While they might be of questionable value to you, they are good therapy for your obedient observer. We begin with a story of early United States history and how it might play out in our time.)

Journalists sometimes have to decide whether to break a law by publishing information beneficial to the public or whether to withhold the information and therefore do a disservice to the public.

That ethical dilemma for the journalist who decides to publish then can become a legal issue that is uncomfortable for prosecutors, among others, to consider. When First Amendment protections of the press enter the mix, the situation offers only awkward choices.

Case in point:  Governor Parson is confident the Cole County Prosecutor will file a charge against a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who discovered a flaw in a computer program that endangered the security of personal information of thousands of Missouri educators. The governor believes he breached state law on computer information accessibility.

The newspaper did not publish the findings until the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had fixed the problem.  Clearly, from this observer’s standpoint, the public was better served.  But also clearly from the governor’s standpoint, a law was broken. And as a former sheriff, he took umbrage with what he perceived as law-breaking.

Former Missourian Ulysses Grant, on being sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1869, proclaimed, “Laws are to govern all alike—those opposed as well as those who favor them.  I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”

The sentiment often is credited erroneously to Abraham Lincoln, perhaps based on an 1838 Lyceum speech in Springfield, Illinois.

Throughout our country’s history, the rigidity of law has been challenged by those who push against that rigidity. We could regard the Declaration of Independence as our country’s greatest challenge to existing law, for example.  Or the Civil Rights movement in more recent decades.

But more than fifty years before the Declaration of Independence, an important and surprising legal decision was made that seems to be important to the disagreement about the propriety of the report on education department computer security.

John Peter Zenger, the publisher of The New York Weekly Journal, was accused of libel by Royal Governor William S. Cosby in 1733 after Zenger accused him of various corruptions including rigging elections.  Under the laws of the time, any publication of information critical of government was considered libelous.

Zenger lawyer Andrew Hamilton, the most famous colonial attorney of his time, did not deny the accusations had been printed. But he demanded the prosecutor to prove they were false. The judge told the jury it had to convict Zenger if it found he had, indeed, printed the stories. But the jury stunned the judge, the governor, and many others when it returned after only about ten minutes of deliberation and found Zenger NOT guilty.

The finding was the first time in this country that truth was considered an absolute defense against the governor’s complaint that the law prohibited publication of information critical of government.

That ruling is considered by some historians as critical to the circulation of ideas that led to the Declaration, the American Revolution, and the development of our Constitution and Bill of Rights—and the First Amendment that includes press freedom.

Can the “truth is an absolute defense” be used in the case of the Post-Dispatch story?  We’ll see.  It is unlikely this series of events will rise to the historical significance of the Zenger case. But free public knowledge of truth must have value in a free society and a chance to emphasize that value in this time of the Big Lie should not be missed.

The principle established in a courtroom 288 years ago casts a light on the governor’s belief that a law must be strictly enforced despite the exposure of truth and the prosecutor’s decision about how to best address the issue of public benefit versus strict obedience.

The Unanswered Question

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There is an unanswered question that we did not address in Monday’s observation in this space about the governor’s accusation that a newspaper had “hacked” a state education department website.

It is unfortunate that Governor Parson refused to take questions after last week’s press conference in which he said he wants St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud criminally charged for notifying the state he had found personal information about thousands of school teachers easily obtainable from a Department of Education website.

Someone should have asked—and we are confident WOULD have asked—“Did the story tell the truth?”

That has been the critical question for 300 years whenever a United States political figure does not like what a reporter has written about him or her—since 1734 when New York’s Royal Governor, William Cosby, jailed newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger for eight months on a charge of libel.  Cosby proclaimed Zenger’s criticisms of his actions amounted to “divers scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections,” an 18th Century equivalent, perhaps, to Governor Parson’s complaint that the Post-Dispatch and Renaud were involved in a “political game” intended to “embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

The jury in the Zenger trial was out for only ten minutes before finding him not guilty. His  attorney had argued that a statement cannot be libelous if it is true regardless of the discomfort it causes someone, in this case the Royal Governor. More than fifty years later, Freedom of the Press became part of the nation’s constitution.

More than a century ago, a Missouri Capitol reporter was jailed for reporting the truth. Robert Holloway of the long-defunct St. Louis Republic was jailed after reporting in 1917 that a Cole County Grand Jury had indicted a top state official for selling coal from the state’s coal supply.  The official was John W. Scott, the former Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government.  Holloway also reported the grand jury was investigating whether Penitentiary Warden D. C. McClung improperly used state property. Grand jury proceedings, even today, are supposed to be secret.

His story ran before any indictments had been made public, leading the judge who had convened the grand jury to haul Holloway before him to tell where he had gotten his information. When Holloway refused to reveal his source, the judge jailed him until he talked, or until that grand jury’s term ran out. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the order.

State Historical Society Executive Director Gary Kremer, who wrote about the Holloway case for the Jefferson City newspaper several years ago, has a picture of Holloway seated at his typewriter next to a barred jail window as he continued to report, his stories datelined “Cole County Jail.” He finally was released after two months on a promise to appear before a new grand jury if it called him.  It refused to take up the whole issue when it was convened. Those who had been indicted by the earlier grand jury were found not guilty.  Holloway remained a reporter, off and on, for most of the next three decades.

But he remains, as far as we have been able to determine, the only Capitol reporter ever jailed by the state of Missouri for telling the truth.

The governor’s call for Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson to take action against the newspaper gives Thompson a lot to think about.  There’s the First Amendment protection of press freedom. The newspaper attorney doubts the state’s law on computer tampering sufficiently applies to this case because the computer code allowing anyone to access the information was readily available through the Department of Education’s website.

There might also be a question of whether the state law on computer tampering is unconstitutional prior restraint on reporting information gained through legal means from a state computer. And proving the newspaper published the information with malicious or criminal intent will be difficult.  To the contrary, the newspaper’s actions to withhold the story until the department fixed the problem the investigation pinpointed is a strong argument against criminal intent.

But the basic question remains.  Did the reporter tell the truth?  There is no acceptable “yes, but” response. Zenger-Holloway-Renaud (or the name of any reporter since 1734) are linked together by that question.

And that is the only question that matters.

It’s What We Do

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We are replacing today’s usual reflection on life by Dr. Frank Crane with a reflection on a regrettable reaction by our governor to a good piece of journalism in which the journalist did what journalists are supposed to do journalistically and did what a good citizen should have done ethically.

In all my years of covering Missouri politics I have never heard of any of our top leaders suggest a reporter should be jailed for giving the state a chance to correct a serious problem before a story was published.

Let’s be clear:

There is nothing wrong with testing whether the information about us held by government is safely held.  You would expect a journalist to defend another journalist who was able to prove some private information held by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education wasn’t so private after all.

And I am.

Good journalists test and challenge systems, people, programs, and policies to see if they are what they claim to be.  It’s a responsibility we have.  If I can get information about you that the government claims is protected, how safe are you from those who want that information for malicious purposes?

We were involved in just such an issue many years ago and it exposed a weakness in state government that could have exposed everybody’s most important private information.  This is the story, as I remember it.

Steve Forsythe was the bureau chief for United Press International back then. In those days there were two highly-competitive national wire services.  Steve’s office in the capitol was next door to the Associated Press office in room 200 , which now is carved up into several legislative offices.

One day, Steve called the Department of Revenue because he couldn’t find his previous year’s income tax return, something he needed for the current year’s return.  Could the department send him a copy of his previous year’s return?  Yes, he was told. What’s your address? And a few days later it showed up in his mail box.

Steve was a helluva reporter who instantly realized what had happened.   The Missourinet was a UPI client.  He called me and we talked about what he had learned and we decided on a test.

We lured one of State Auditor Jim Antonio’s employees to call the department and use the same line that Steve had used. The department gladly agreed to mail the previous year’s tax return to her.

—except the return she asked for was that of State Revenue Director Gerald Goldberg.   And the address she gave was mine.

A few days later, a fat envelope arrived in my mailbox.

Steve and I went to the Jefferson Building that afternoon and, as I recall it, stopped Director Goldberg in the lobby as he was returning from lunch.  I handed him the envelope and asked him to open it.  He was stunned to see his personal state income tax return inside it.  There was a brief moment of, I suppose we could say, anger. But as Steve explained to him why we had done what we had done, he calmed down.  On the spot he said he’d immediately look into the situation.  I don’t think he wound up thanking us but we didn’t expect any thanks.

We could have asked for anybody’s tax return, I suppose, even Governor Teasdale’s although that might have been a harder ask.  But this was bad enough.

There naturally was a certain amount of hand-wringing and anguish and probably some hostile thoughts about two reporters who were not known as friendly toward the administration to begin with pulling a stunt like this. But rather quickly, the department recognized that we had not opened that envelope and we had not looked at the director’s return, had not made any beneficial use of the information, had not yet run a story, and that we certainly did not intend anything malicious in our actions.

Antonio was less than enthusiastic that we had used one of his trusted employees as a tool for our investigation, but he also recognized the problem we had pinpointed.

The department almost immediately changed its policies to outlaw accepting telephone requests such as the ones that led to the stories UPI and The Missourinet later ran and instituted a process designed to protect the confidentiality of those returns.

From time to time in later years I wondered if I should see if the department’s policies had slipped back to those days when Steve and I embarrassed it.   But I never did.   Every year, Nancy and I file our state tax returns and assume you can’t have them mailed to you with just a phone call.

I suppose Governor Teasdale could have demanded a criminal investigation of our actions but he didn’t.  His Department of Revenue just fixed the problem.  Steve went on to a long career with UPI, which eventually lost in the competition for wire service clients to the AP and closed its capitol bureau.  I went on to a long career with The Missourinet, which still serves a lot of radio stations in Missouri. We didn’t often care if we ruffled some feathers from time to time as long as we were reporting the truth—and that always was our goal.

Good reporters do what they are called to do—question, investigate, test, and report.  Sometimes those whose skirts that turn out to be dustier than they think they are don’t like the findings.

One big difference between the days when Steve’s tax return and the security of private information turned into a state policy-changing news story and today, when a reporter’s news story about the security of private information has led to threatened criminal charges, is the change in times. We are living in stressful times that not only breed physical and political disease, but tend to breed reactions that are less prudent than necessary.

But that won’t discourage good reporters from doing what they have a calling to do.  And the day it does, all of us are losers, even those who are embarrassed by what reporters find.

 

Food at It’s Best

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“Ignorance and laziness have won,” said retired British journalist John Richards a while ago.

Richards, who turned 96 when he made that observation, started the Apostrophe Protection Society about twenty years ago.  He crusaded for the correct use of the “much abused” apostrophe.  But he has given up.   He told the London Evening Standard late in 2019 there were two reasons for disbanding his organization: “One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.”

His society was a small one.  Depressingly small, it seems.  He told the Standard he started the APS after he saw the “same mistakes over and over again.”  He hoped to find a half-dozen people who felt the same way.  He didn’t find a half-dozen.  Within a month of his announcement of the founding of the society, he said, “I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada.

But that wasn’t enough (Note the apostrophe).

That sentence is an example of one of the three simple rules Richards has given for proper use of the apostrophe.

  1. They are used to denote a missing letter or letters.
  2. They are used to denote possession.
  3. Apostrophes are never used to denote plurals.

And there’s a corollary.  “It’s” only means “it is.”  The possessive version is “its.”  The cat had its breakfast.

Otherwise, this sign says “Food at it is best.”  The Towne Grill in Jefferson City isn’t (note the proper use of the apostrophe to symbolize the elimination of the letter “o”) going to change its (note proper use of the possessive) sign.  It has become an institution in Missouri’s capital city, a quirky but incorrect use of the apostrophe that is part of the city’s (proper use of the apostrophe to denote the possessive) culture.

The Apostrophe Protection Society seems so English.  The story about it reminded us of Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner & Lowe’s Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” of a half-century ago.  Professor Higgins decided to teach an untutored London flower girl to speak proper English and lamented:

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him
One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get
Oh, why can’t the English learn to

Set a good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears
There even are places where English completely disappears

In America, they haven’t used it for years!

To end this on a couple of more serious notes:

First, John Richards died earlier this year—March 30.  He was 97. Mr. Richards’s Washington Post obituary is at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-richards-dead/2021/04/25/9c7c1994-a425-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html.

Second, I had a friend named Ed Bliss who used to write news for Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite at CBS.  Ed, who died several years ago, often conducted newswriting seminars at our conventions of news directors. I can still hear him say, “We have become a nation slovenly with language. The slovenliness in grammar, punctuation, and spelling is all about us.”

If we lack respect for our language in speaking and writing, we limit our abilities as a people to communicate effectively and we damage the trust we can have in one another. Today, we shout more than we speak; we talk but we don’t listen; we tweet more than we write; we dismiss one another with disparaging personal assessments.  In the midst of this noise, this transformation of the grace of our language into crudeness, it is no wonder that a group that upheld something as small as an apostrophe should feel that “ignorance and laziness” have won.

It’s not just the continued improper use of apostrophes that should concern us.  Our language deserves better use than we are making of it. We cannot respect one another if we do not respect the language we use with one another.

 

Simile When You Say That, Pardner

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One of my favorite satellite radio channels Radio Classics, maybe because I’m so old that I remember when radio was filled with diverse entertainments instead of the steady diet of super-inflated egos who pour division and distrust into democracy’s gears.

One thing television has taken away from radio is the detective show in which the main character is the narrator who explains in often-colorful phrases the world in which he or she lives.  Many of these shows were created in era of hard-boiled detective novels and magazines, thus leading to a lot of similes that left vivid images in the listeners’ minds.

Let’s face it, television and movies cannot come close to showing what we see in our minds and they did it with similies.

The king of the detective simile was Pat Novak, played by pre-Dragnet Jack Webb on “Pat Novak for Hire.”  The other day Radio Classics played an episode called “Agnes Bolton.”

To refresh your memory of high school freshman English, a simile is a figure of speech in which something is compared to something different.

Pat Novak was a tough private eye living on the financial edge with a boat rental business in San Francisco. Webb’s narration throughout the program described his situations and those he met, including a friend who tells him during the show, “You’re never on the right side of things. You’ll always be in trouble because you’re a bad citizen. You’re a shabby half-step in the march of human progress. You don’t know the difference between good and evil. For you, all of human endeavor is a vague blur in high heels…You might as well try to recapture melancholy or ventilate a swamp. Ya haven’t a chance. You’ll never be any good.”

The writers for the show were Richard Breen and Gil Doud.  It must have been fun writing Webb’s narration as Pat Novak.  Even those who were raised after the dawn of television can probably hear in their own minds Jack Webb’s clipped, blunt, reading:

Around here a set of morals won’t cause any more stir than Mothers Day at an orphanage.

It doesn’t do any good to sing the blues because down here you’re just another guy in the chorus.

About as likely he would show up as a second pat of butter on a 50-cent lunch.

A smile as smooth as a pound of liver in a bucket of glycerin.

His eyes swept the room like a $10 broom.

She was at least 50 because you can’t get that ugly without years of practice.

(Her complexion) was red and scratchy as if she used a bag of sand for cold cream.

Her hair hung down like dead branches of a tree.

The way she fit (into a telephone booth), a sardine ought to be happy.

He was making noises in his throat as if he was eating a pound of cellophane.

(I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me.) I might as well have been selling tip sheets in a monastery.

If you keep your foot on a bar rail, you’ll find it’ll do more good for your arches than for your brain.

I better have a drink first; there’s an ugly taste in my mouth. I think it’s saliva.

It wasn’t raining hard anymore…It sounded quiet, almost private, like the sound a woman makes when she runs her fingernail up and down her stocking. It got on your nerves at first and then you learn to enjoy it.

Her main talent is more dimensional than dramatic.

(She was) stretched out as dead as a deer on a fender.

Her skin reminded you of a piece of felt that was almost worn out. But the rest was all right.

Riding with (him) is just about as safe as eating an arsenic sandwich.

The rain was hitting the windshield and it was like trying to see through a mint julep.

—All of those are from that single show.  If a person loves descriptive writing or wants to learn something about it, I suggest they listen to some of these great old detective shows.

Various people have proclaimed, “Theatre is life; film is art; television is furniture; but radio is imagination.”  Have you ever seen on television anything that has shown you someone “as dead as a deer on a fender?”  Or seen anything on television as sensuous as “the sound a woman makes when she runs her fingernail up and down her stocking?”  What we see with our eyes is often so inadequate when compared to what we see in our minds.

This is a good opportunity to pay tribute to those two writers. Their names are unfamiliar. In fact, we don’t pay much attention as the credits roll at the end of our movies or TV shows and name of the writer(s) show up.

Richard Breen started as a freelance radio writer who moved to movies. He won an Oscar as the screenwriter for 1953’s Titanic.  He was nominated for writing A Foreign Affair in 1948 and for Captain Newman, M.D., in 1963.

Gil Doud also wrote for the Sam Spade radio series.  He wrote one episode of the radio Gunsmoke and adapted five of John Meston’s Gunsmoke radio scripts for the early television versions of the show. He didn’t match Green’s screenwriting credentials but he did write Thunder Bay starring James Stewart in 1953, Saskatchewan with Alan Ladd the next year, and Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back in 1955.  He also wrote episodes for the radio shows Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.

These guys were writing for radio in the era when people such as Mickey Spillane were beginning their tough murder mysteries with (from Spillane’s The Big Kill):

“It was one of those nights when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world.  The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door. The place reeked of stale beer and soggy men and enough cheap perfume thrown in to make you sick.”

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels and the radio shows written by people such as Breen and Doud create images no television program or movie could ever show.  It’s the power of the written word.  And the spoken word.

Let’s conclude this colorful reminiscence with part of the script from the opening of the tenth Pat Novak show, “Go Away Dixie Gilliam.”  It’s from https://www.genericradio.com/show/07d5af03664522b5:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the American Broadcasting Company brings transcribed to its entire network, one of radio’s most unusual programs:

MUSIC: BRIEF, DRAMATIC INTRO, THEN SOFTEN FOR NEXT LINE

ANNOUNCER: Pat Novak, For Hire.

MUSIC: UP AGAIN BRIEFLY AND FADE OUT

SOUND: HARBOR AMBIANCE DURING NOVAK’S INTRO LINES

SOUND:FOOTSTEPS OUT OF THE FOG

 

NOVAK: Sure, I’m Pat Novak, For Hire.

SOUND:HARBOR OUT

MUSIC: CUP AS HARBOR FADES. PLAY BRIEFLY AND THEN SOFTEN AS NOVAK CONTINUES.

NOVAK:

That’s what the sign out in front of my office says: Pat Novak, For Hire. Down on the waterfront in San Francisco you always bite off more than you can chew. It’s tough on your wind pipe, but you don’t go hungry. And down here a lot of people figure its better to be a fat guy in a graveyard than a thin guy in a stew. That way he can be sure of a tight fit. (Pause) Oh, I rent boats and do anything else which makes a sound like money–

MUSIC: OUT

NOVAK:

–It works out alright, if your mother doesn’t mind you coming home for Easter in a box. I found that out on Wednesday night at about 9 o’clock. I closed the shop early and I came home to read. It wasn’t a bad book, if you ever wanted to start a forest fire. It was one of those historical things and the girl in it wandered around like a meat grinder in ribbons. Ah, I was moving along alright. She was just getting her second wind before going for the world’s record when the door to my apartment opened and the place began to get kinda crowded. From where I sat, the crowd looked good.

SOUND: SOFT FOOTSTEPS APPROACH UNTIL LEIGH’S FIRST LINE

NOVAK:

She sauntered in, moving slowly from side to side like a hundred and eighteen pounds of warm smoke. Her voice was alright, too. It reminded you of a furnace full of marshmallows.

 

My God!  “Like a hundred and eighteen pounds of warm smoke….”  Let NCSI or Law & Order try to match that.

Some of our women readers might consider this language blatantly sexist.  It’s hard not to agree.  Perhaps in our comment box below, some might want to suggest some similar similes describing men. Just remember, this is a family blog, rated no higher than PG.

This concludes our refresher course on SIMILIES.

And how much better our minds were when radio brought them to us

Patriots

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The time between the first Juneteenth National Independence Day and the traditional Independence Day on July 4th provides an opportunity to think about patriots and patriotism. It’s an important discussion to be having this year, as we approach the six-month anniversary of the attack on the national Capitol by many people who think they are patriots.

Their definition of patriotism is repugnant, we hope, to the huge majority of Americans.  We shall not explore that matter specifically today.

Instead, we are going to turn to a study announced the other day by WalletHub, a personal finance website that attracts attention to itself with surveys of public attitudes on this and that. It’s a good gimmick because Americans love two things in particular: surveys and lists.  And WalletHub provides them.

The self-serving nature of the surveys aside, they do often provide food for thought.  So it is with the recent one that ranks Missouri in the top 20 most patriotic states, thanks largely to a number 1 ranking in required civic education.  Otherwise we’re about where we are in so many ratings—middling.  That ranking for civic education boosts us to 18th.

The five most patriotic states according to the WalletHub system of rankings are Montana, Alaska, Maryland, Vermont, and New Hampshire.  The five least patriotic states in this survey are California, Michigan, Connecticut, Florida and New York.

One thing the survey does is debunk any feelings of superiority by Red States.  The survey shows there is little difference between them. The average rank of red, or Republican, states is 25.68.  The average rank of blue, or Democratic, state is 25.32.

It appears the red and blue states, however, are cumulatively much less patriotic than individual states.  Montana, number one, has a rating of 61.91.  New York, at number 50, has a rating of 21.64.  The cumulative ratings of red and blue states as blocs would rank them 49th among the individual states.

How do you measure patriotism?  Patriotism is an abstract term, a personal term, and trying to measure what is in one’s heart is difficult.  But WalletHub tries to use external factors.

While we are first in civic education requirements and 18th in the average number of military enlistees per 100,000 population, we are 23rd in percentage of voters who took part in the 2020 presidential election; 24th in percentage of veterans among adult citizens; 26th in Peace Corps volunteers per capita and volunteer hours per resident; 27th in volunteer rate and AmeriCorps volunteers per capita; 28th in active military personnel per 100,000 people.

WalletHub has a “panel of experts” that define patriotism apart from the statistics. It provided their comments in a news release accompanying the survey:

What are the characteristics of a good patriot? 
“Patriotism is about loyalty – an attachment to a particular place and/or way of life. A good patriot exhibits dedication to that way of life, sacrificing one’s private time and even resources to work on behalf of one’s community. The patriot, however, does not seek to impose that way of life upon others nor to blindly follow without questioning. Like any good relationship, a patriot is committed and generally trusting but also preserves the right to question and exercise healthy skepticism.”
Christie L. Maloyed, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

“While some may argue that a good patriot is blindly loyal to their country, in fact, a key characteristic of the good patriot is the willingness to hold their country accountable in terms of living up to the high ideals it professes, or upon which it was founded.”
Sheila Croucher – Distinguished Professor, Miami University

Is there a link between socioeconomic class and level of patriotism?
“Studies suggest schools in places with higher socioeconomic characteristics engage in more critical approaches to history and civics than schools with lower socioeconomic characteristics. These schools are more likely to give students experiences in debate, dialogue, and critique—these concepts are important for healthy patriotism. On the other hand, studies also suggest military recruiters are more likely to seek students from schools in communities with lower socioeconomic characteristics. Having limited economic access to higher education, students in these communities are more likely to serve in the military.”
Benjamin R. Wellenreiter, Ed.D. – Assistant Professor, Illinois State University
“There can be. When there are fewer economic resources in a community, there are often fewer chances to engage in community building as many individuals need to focus on meeting their basic needs, working long hours or multiple jobs, caretaking, and other commitments. Moreover, many areas experience civic deserts, areas where there are fewer opportunities to participate. In these communities, there are fewer organizations to join. This can happen due to depopulation or economic hardship.”
Christie L. Maloyed, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

What measures should schools, and local authorities undertake in order to promote patriotism among citizens?
“I would love to see civic education become a larger priority around the country. Most American students learn the history of our founding, but citizenship requires more than historical knowledge: it requires a commitment to active participation in the community and politics (with voting as a minimum), and a willingness to work with fellow citizens to address our shared problems and to advance a common good, along with the media and information literacy to stay informed about one’s community and nation. Civic education requirements vary greatly from state to state, but few have gone far enough.”
Libby Newman – Associate Professor, Rider University
“The measures should come from individual citizens more than schools and authorities. Patriotism is a grass-roots concept. We need citizens to engage in dialogue with one another, work to experience and understand multiple perspectives, volunteer when the need arises—both military and civilian— and be continually committed to societal improvement. Schools and local authorities should be transparent in their work and take stewardship approaches to their responsibilities. Patriotism is taught through action as much as it is through the word.”
Benjamin R. Wellenreiter, Ed.D. – Assistant Professor, Illinois State University.

What makes you a patriot?  Or do you even consider yourself to be one?

What is the difference between patriotism and nationalism—and which poses the greater danger?

These two weeks between the Independence Days are time to weigh those questions.

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