Tag Archives: journalism

College Is More Than Just a Thing You Do

Posted on by under Critical Thinking, Society

During my junior year at Whittier College, I was the managing editor of our student newspaper. We put out an issue every week throughout the school year, which involved the combined efforts of a diverse mix of students who reported, wrote, and edited the stories, took the photographs, and handled the layout. I have fond memories of that time.

In each issue there were a few column inches of space set aside for an editorial. The editor-in-chief and I traded off each week writing the column. Most of them were last-minute compositions, often little more that whatever was on our mind that day. Some were pretty good. Others were not.

This being the 1988-1989 school year, the AIDS epidemic was on everybody’s mind to some degree. One week I wrote an editorial column that essentially repeated the conspiracy theory that the World Health Organization (WHO) was responsible for creating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). I spent no time researching this topic and thus was simply repeating a rumor without bothering to consider the implications.

After that issue was published, I got a stern talking-to by our faculty advisor Gary Libman, a professional journalist at the Los Angeles Times and Whittier alum. He calmly stressed the importance of journalistic integrity and the need to critically assess and publish the facts, even in an editorial. He reminded me that as editors of a publication we have a responsibility to our readers that includes avoiding giving voice to rumor, hearsay, and misinformation. He was clearly unhappy that my column made it into print. Although he did not force me to issue a retraction or an apology, he probably wished he had been able to intervene before our publication date.

Me at Whittier College in 1990

This event from almost 40 years ago clearly made an impression on me. And I didn’t have to be told twice. I regretted my mistake, took Gary’s lessons to heart, and used this teachable moment as a chance to learn.

Because that is why I went to college–to learn. It sounds strange to have to say that, but it seems that more and more I am hearing about people who go to college not to learn but for some other reason. These include:

  • to get a job (a fine goal but not mutually exclusive of learning, one would hope)
  • to make a lot of money (education provides riches that money can’t buy)
  • to get The Degree (which feels more like the checking of a box than actual learning)
  • to be told things that align with your existing worldview (challenging assumptions is exactly what college exists for, so this makes no sense to me)
  • to play football (college is an educational institution first and foremost, in my view)
  • to get phenomenally drunk as often as possible (a classic college activity but not conducive to learning)
  • to get laid (again, classic but you can do that without having to pay tuition).

I’m going to be clear and say that I think these reasons are all bullshit, and here’s why.

College is a place that provides one of those rare opportunities in life: it places the individual student into a learning environment that is probably the richest they will ever encounter before or since. And by “learning environment” I mean both inside the classroom, on campus during non-class hours, and in the surrounding community. During my years in college, I was far removed from my sheltered suburban life, having to interact every day with people who were different from me and see through their eyes how they viewed the world.

College also is a place where faculty puts time and effort toward growing real, human intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

Furthermore, college is usually attended at an age when young adults are the most open to these learning opportunities. We are very much like sponges at that age, soaking up these new experiences and using them (hopefully) to help us shed the prejudices of our upbringing.

But the student must be willing to learn. Evidently, there are people who manage to get through four years of college without learning a thing. This is pointless. It is a waste of money and a waste of both the students’ and the professors’ time.

Sadly, the confluence of a variety of factors including market forces, academia that does not easily acknowledge or embrace change, and a growing distrust of our basic societal institutions such as schools, churches, and government has brought us to the brink of disaster as a nation.

This impending disaster wears two faces. One is the face of those young people who view college as just something to put on your resume, as a thing you do leading from here to there. These people are going to college only because they feel they have to, or their parents insist they do, or they think they want the ‘college experience’ (see drunk and getting laid above). Some of these maybe will emerge on the other side having been changed by the experience, and we’re lucky if they do.

The other face is of those who see college as an outright “scam” to be avoided. These are people who should be going to college–any college–but are not. And thus we have a growing number of citizens who have access to some of the best higher education in the world but instead are turning away.

To be clear, I agree that the academic demands and the traditional structures of college means that it is not suitable for everybody. However, the things college teaches–critical thinking, awareness that there is more than one way of seeing things, learning that life is more than just grubbing for money–are very suitable for every person who wants to live in our multicultural, modern society. If they don’t get those things from college, I hope they get them from somewhere.

Quick Note on Conspiracy Theorists and Iron John

Posted on by under Purpose

I just finished reading a Washington Post article about, in essence, the deep connection between the new-age men’s movement and the idiots who mobbed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

The gist is that at least some of the thick-brained Trump worshipers got their ideas from their reading of the men’s movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s. One guy in the article says it all started for him with reading Iron John: A Book About Men, by Robert Bly.

In the article, this guy praises the book and how it lead him to conclude, among other things, that “fierce protective men have been noticeably absent, and the women are standing up stronger and more vocal,” apparently a negative thing.

And I just have to say, I read Iron John–I have a copy in fact–and I would never vote for Donald Trump for president even if you paid me to do it. I wouldn’t elect him to the local school board, for that matter. And I certainly wouldn’t commit treason in his name.

So I’m missing something here. I just don’t see how someone could read a book about reaching a deeper understanding of masculinity beyond drinking beer, being violent, and having sex, and then claim that it leads to this QAnon bullshit.

Clearly, these White guys are searching for more meaning in their lives–aren’t we all?–but I would think that the absurdity of whatever falsehoods they think they believe in would sooner or later trigger the rational thinking alarm bells.

And to trace it back to a book where the intent was to fashion a more caring, more self-aware man is just nonsense. Or maybe they read a different Iron John than I read.

Don’t Like the News? Kill the Messenger

Posted on by under Critical Thinking, Loss

I’m not a journalist but I have worked with and around journalists for over two decades, something I have talked about before here and here.

Which is why I found it disheartening to read the story of the demise of LAWeekly as I knew it. While it is true that newspapers and other journalism outlets have struggled over the past decade or so in the face of economic hardship brought on by the internet (and to some extent, themselves), to learn that an established news outlet has been deliberately targeted for destruction is chilling.

Years ago, I read the LAWeekly and its sister publication the East Bay Express rather frequently when I was a college student in California. These “alternative” weeklies could always be relied on to provide thoughtful stories about local issues not covered in much depth by the bigger news organizations. (Washington, D.C.’s alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper, is still chugging away, but it’s sister paper, the Baltimore City Paper, folded in 2017.)

The story I read about how the LAWeekly has been gutted may contain some hyperbole–journalists are not perfect, and often they have an overblown sense of self and of the importance of their work, in my view.

But I have no doubt that the institution of journalism with its modern emphasis on fairness and accuracy is essential to the effectiveness of democracy and the protection of civil rights. To disparage legitimate journalism as so-called fake news–as President Trump does almost daily–creates a situation where fewer and fewer people trust facts, such as they are.

(It’s important to remember that the freedom of the press was important enough to the Founding Fathers that it is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution–alongside the freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice and ahead of the right to bear arms.)

According to this version of events from the editorial staff at The LAnd Magazine, the LAWeekly was bought by a “cabal of Republican donors and Trump supporters from Orange County” who are “devoted to defeating progressive ideas by indoctrinating young conservatives and infiltrating what they considered to be liberal institutions.” If true, this is another example of the hypocrisy of conservatives these days.

Conservatives themselves claim with alarming frequency that liberals are somehow “indoctrinating” or “brainwashing” people (if you want examples, leave a comment–I don’t want to unnecessarily drive traffic to people promoting falsehoods). The argument is illogical, however.

The conventional concept of brainwashing requires that someone is led by the intentional actions of others to believe something they would not have and could not have believed if left to their own thought processes. If a journalistic organization publishes verifiable fact, without attempting to manipulate its audience, and someone reads it and draws a conclusion, I can’t see how that, in any way, is brainwashing. (Note that conservative “news” manipulates its audience intentionally every day by distorting the facts and not questioning unsupported claims.)

Conservatives give lip service to individual liberty. However, conservatives are all too eager to oppose that exercise of personal liberty when individuals make up their own minds about their own lives and the lives of those around them in a way that does not conform to an established conservative point of view.

Conservatism, almost be definition, is threatened by new ideas and the reconsideration of how we as a society view the world. It is thus not in favor of personal liberty at all, but rather the adherence to a strict set of codes of (mostly old fashioned) behavior. If a news outlet such as LAWeekly questions those conservative “values,” it is seen as a threat to the conservative ideal.

A threat that, unfortunately, is sometimes targeted for elimination. So who is the larger threat?

Maybe this is an isolated incident and perhaps I’m over-generalizing (overreacting?). And maybe the ideal of having news that’s free of bias is a pipe dream. But the possibility that reasonable people cannot agree on some basic structures of society, such that we now have flavored news that meets our preferred tastes, is frightening.

“Participatory democracy depends on a broadly shared view of reality, and therefore on trusted institutions of journalism and mass media.” – Kevin Platt, University of Pennsylvania

Three Awards

Posted on by under Career

The corporation I work for has three awards to recognize employees’ accomplishments, none of which I qualify for.

One is for journalists, and I am not a journalist. One is for people who work on specific products that we offer, and I work on none of those products. And one is for managers, and I am not a manager.

Which leaves me in the pool of employees who essentially work unrecognized, day after day, year after year. This would include people such as accountants, help desk representatives, or the people who make sure the toilets still flush.

However, there is one award we all qualify for: the “service award.” This is the “award” people get for sticking with the company for 10 years or more. It basically recognizes people for being unambitious and unable to be employed anywhere else. It rewards people for not being creative enough, or providing enough value, to be noticed. It rewards people for blind loyalty and doing the minimum required to not get fired.

The situation does not inspire me to achieve much. I was laid off once from this company and I fully expect that it could happen again.  I know I’m expendable. This makes the “service award” less impressive than the others. (Full disclosure: even people who’ve won the above mentioned awards have been laid off.)

Which means that all the corporate-speak about teamwork, collaboration, and excellence ring hollow. If employees truly mattered, there would be more ways to recognize, more value placed on everyone’s work product (and not just the work product of the few). There would be a CEO who actually spoke to employees, not at them (we used to have one; he’s dead now).

Corporations are different than they used to be, and I don’t think it can be entirely blamed on the economy. My father ran a commercial operation for over 20 years in San Francisco and he knew the name of every one of his employees. This could still be done today if the CEO wanted it to, instead of wanting more salary and to please the shareholders. Or to achieve greatness. In other words, corporations are the people who compose them, more so than their stock ticker or SEC filing. It would be nice if they behaved that way.

Maybe I Am Smarter Than NPR

Posted on by under Critical Thinking

It was once pointed out to me that, more often than not, things that seem like a great idea but never really become popular are probably just not very good ideas.

This is counter to the school of thought that there are All These Great Ideas out there that Nobody is paying attention to, but would Really Change Things As We Know Them if we would just embrace them. I have been a victim of this way of thinking on many occasions, so I know how seductive it can be.

So I have this idea for solving the ongoing problem of uncivil online conversations. This is a real and growing problem.giphy

The problem is so bad that NPR announced last month that they were discontinuing their online comment system for their news stories. This is despite the fact that Scott Montgomery, managing editor for digital news, has said that they “believe strongly in the value of audience conversations about the news and our work.” This is in spite of eight years of trying to make it work. This is in spite of saying they wanted a “forum for infinite conversations.”

And they finally threw in the towel. According to Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen, they got “overwhelmed” using staff efforts to keep the conversations free of spam and trolls. They upped their game in 2011 and again in 2012, “trying to find a workable solution.”

But they seem to have never considered one potentially workable solution. As I have discussed before, the biggest problem with online comments is that they are anonymous and free of charge. One way to fix that is to charge money for the privilege of leaving a comment. It would provide revenue and encourage more thoughtful discussion.

NPR–like most news organizations–is operating under the perception that online comments must be free, or not exist at all. Why they have not considered a compromise option is a mystery to me.

In real life, the exchange of money serves many purposes. One of them is as a gauge of how much you really want something. Do you value it highly? You pay more money. Don’t care? You look for cheap or free.

This is basic economics.

When people leave nasty, uncivil comments on news sites, it is because they have nothing at stake. So it seems obvious that NPR and other news services would find a way for their readers to care more about the things they say.

Make them put their money where their mouths–or keyboards–are.

But maybe this just isn’t a good idea.