Relentlessly Negative

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Even-Handed Horsesh*t

“Negative news has partisan consequences. Given that journalists bash both sides, it might be thought the impact would be neutral. It’s not. … 

“If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans. 

“The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.” 

—Thomas Patterson, researcher and author of “News Coverage of the 2016 Election: How the Press Failed the Voters,” Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, 2016.

 
• Editorial Comment: The press has lost the capacity to make sense of the world for the rest of us. Throw horsesh*t (or rose petals) on everyone, and that’s how everyone smells.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Colt









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Writing for Fun

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But Not Profit

“Show me a writer who was in it purely for the fun, and I’ll show you twenty pages of an unfinished manuscript.” 

—Jennifer Niesslein, writer, “The Joy of Writing,”’ Creative Nonfiction #62, 2015.

 
• Editorial Comment: If you have enough fun, happy writer, you can make a nice doorstop.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Seagull







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Hug a Librarian

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Banned Book Week, Sept. 24-30

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. 

“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

 

―Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), author, from A Man Without a Country, 2005.

 
• Editorial Comment: Banned Books Week runs through Sept. 30. Click here for a list of “Banned Books That Shaped America,” including Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” banned in 1884, poet Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (1855), Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963), and the most banned work of the decade 2000-2009, the Harry Potter series. Wash my mind out with soap.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Absolute Certainty












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Free Speech

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Backward Movement

“Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses. In fact, despite protestations to the contrary (often with statements like ‘we fully support the First Amendment, but…’), freedom of expression is clearly not, in practice, available on many campuses, including many public campuses that have First Amendment obligations.”

—John Villesenor, researcher, “Views among college students regarding the First Amendment: Results from a new survey,” The Brookings Institution, Sept. 18, 2017.

 
• Editorial Comment: They really let college kids say that?

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Hagoods’ Hardware, Orick, CA








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Happy National Punctuation Day

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Punctuate;) This¿

“The holiday started when Jeff Rubin, a former reporter, grew increasingly frustrated as he spotted errors in the newspaper.

 

“‘I would sit at the kitchen table with my red Sharpie ... screaming obscenities, which would upset my wife,’ Rubin told CNN. ‘She encouraged me to find another outlet for my aggravation.’ . . .

 

“The day isn’t just for people who get cranky over misplaced commas or hyperventilate over errant hyphens.

 

“Rubin said he wanted to help educators remind students that punctuation still matters, even in an age of rapid-fire tweets and text messages.

 

“‘We are graduating children from high schools now who cannot read and cannot write. When these kids get out into the real world, they’re going to be unemployable.’”

 

—Catherine E. Shoichet, writer, “Punctuation: Yep, it’s got its own holiday,” CNN, 2016.

 

• Editorial Comment: See, kids? commas are sexy.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Luffenholtz Meander












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Perfect Entertainment

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Dead Zones

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”  

—Stephen King, who knows his dead spots, turned 70 yesterday. He’s done his part, writing 54 books that have sold 350 million copies worldwide.

• Editorial Comment: Take that, cell phone society.
 

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Anemone








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Extra!

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Small-town News

“Talking with dozens of editors, from Atlanta to Wyoming and Texas to Tulsa, has reaffirmed my belief that a massive share of the most important journalism done in America today is from reporters and editors committed to improving their own communities, not in amassing empty praise or followings on Twitter.” 

—Kathleen McLaughlin, journalist, “America’s local newspapers might be broke, but they’re more vital than ever,” The Guardian, Sept. 11, 2017. 

• Editorial Comment: Gotta love those Planning & Zoning meetings.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

116 W. Wabash












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Invidious Comparisons

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Dick & Don

“The similarities between Nixon and Trump leap off the page like crickets.

“There is, first and most superficially, their nonpresidential looks . . . . More substantively, there’s the matter of their Old Testament fury at the news media. (‘The press is the enemy,’ Nixon told his aides. ‘Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.’)

“What else? Their thin skin. Their skyscraping paranoia. Their cavernous memory for slights.”

—Jennifer Senior, reviewing John A. Farrell’s book in “‘Richard Nixon,’ Portrait of a Thin-Skinned, Media-Hating President,” The New York Times, March 29, 2017.

 

• Editorial Comment: Well, sure. But aside from that . . . .


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Makes the Garden Gnome Look Good












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard