Never Lie to a Journalist

Newspaper people don’t like to get lied to.  Among the many elements that are the bread and butter of their profession is access to people and obtaining accurate information from them.  It’s the lifeblood of their profession – including, of course, advertisements and paid circulation.

A basic aversion of journalists, and one they will stone you for, is a lie – especially a big one.  The reason is not that they are necessarily pure of heart.  As the saying goes, every day each one puts on his or her pants just like the rest of us.

Their motive for not wanting to be lied to is a very mundane and human one. When a reporter writes a story or a columnist calls a source for information, both rely upon the honesty of the person they have contacted for data, background information, or for attributable comments.

U. S. Tech Firms Help Squelch Freedom in Middle East

Thurgood Marshall, late Supreme Court Justice, on the 1st Amendment

Click here to view the Press Freedom Map, and you will see a world that is half colored in red.  It depicts countries which have severely restricted their citizens from enjoying freedom of the press and the use of the World Wide Web by employing U.S. designed and marketed Internet-blocking software.

This partitioning of freedom by country, as you can see from the map has created an East/West gulf in which entire continents – look at all those colored in red – are largely cut off from the rights which we enjoy in America under The First Amendment.

A quick glance shows a startling picture of the world, in which freedom of speech and of the press – while prevalent in locations such as North America, Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea – is heavily censored in many other parts of the globe.

A Responsibility Unmet

Call it denial or what else you may, but in the last couple of days the thoughts rolling about in my thinking cap have been pushing back at all of the negative news emanating from the wires of the news services, cable TV, and the print media.

It isn’t that the reporting of bad news does not reflect the reality of central events happening here and internationally, but rather that many in the media seem to display an almost morbid obsession to concentrate exclusively upon the unconstructive, man-made problems of our globe.

Consider, for example, the overwhelmingly tragic disaster of the oil spill out in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of our national government concentrating on solutions, it has been cover-your-butt-from-the- beginning. Correspondingly, that’s what the media have latched onto, and that’s what they focus their reporting upon – thereby feeding further into a national sense of divisiveness.

Meanwhile, the Cajuns of Louisiana – my blood brothers and sisters – are left to suffer through another life-altering disaster in their beautiful part of America.

We can do better than that. And so can our elected leaders and those who claim to be professional journalists and pundits.

Thanks for reading, and stay engaged.

The Changing Face of Local Journalism

In his latest regular column in the Courier News, managing editor Paul C. Grzella, commented on some of the feedback at the community outreach meeting from last week, one that I witnessed. He wrote that “one of the community members who attended talked about how an opinion piece she wrote and that we published in the paper generated some unkind words on our Web site.”

Before newspapers adopted the Internet, letters-to-the-editor were submitted for publishing either by email or ‘snail mail.’ Original letter writers and those wishing to respond were bound by the same crisp rule designed to keep at least a moderate level of sanity in the process:

As I remember it, the policy of the Courier News was that it would print only letters and responses signed and submitted with a name and legitimate telephone number for confirmation of the author’s identity. I think the author’s address also was required. Anonymous contributions were simply not published.

This process maintained a reasonable level of social consciousness and integrity. But Internet practice has flushed at least part of those rules down the tubes. Today, anyone with a fictitious handle can respond to just about anything on the ‘net.

A person can be as careful, thoughtful, and as intelligent as can be with his or her response to a known author. Conversely, a person’s Internet response can be …… well …… as inconsiderate, uninformed, and as dim-witted as one can imagine. But that’s the way it is. Most professional journalists that I read and the few that I know will tell you that they don’t like it.

But the newspaper business is in an economic crunch. The anything-goes rules for online reader responses have been cast in stone for a long time, and newspapers have little influence on those rules. There is a need to carry on and to keep getting those ‘clicks’ on Web pages and the accompanying ads that may help them to survive and to prosper.

Freedom of speech is a powerful instrument of liberty. But it doesn’t inoculate anyone from the written thoughts of aspiring dolts.