Not So ‘Veritas’

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Bushwhacked

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith. But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.” 

—Marty Baron, executive editor, The Washington Post, “A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation,” The Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2017.

• Editorial Comment: From the Why-read-the-story-after-the-longest-headline-ever? File.

• Related: “James O’Keefe’s Credibility Is On Trial As DOJ Seeks Felony Convictions For Trump Protesters”

 PeezPix by Ted Pease

Birch Swoop









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

qwertyLeaks

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машинистка in Russian

“My manual typewriters were stored in closets, with the fond regret bestowed on old prom photos and shells plucked from forgotten beaches. Now, however, all things analogue are coming back. Rumour has it that the Kremlin has returned to typewriters: a typed page can’t be leaked on the internet, or not as easily.”

—Margaret Atwood, novelist, “How Margaret Atwood Learned to Type,” The Walrus, Nov. 20, 2017.

• Editorial Comment: Just put that leak in an envelope and mail it.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

Beach Sky









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

Oh, Geez . . .

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Tweeter-in-Chief

• Editorial Comment: Contest? Let’s make it fair and balanced. A simple content study should do it. Step up, J schools.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

Truckload







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

Balder & Dash

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Everyone’s a Critic

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. [Warren G.] Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two-and-a-half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abcess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” 

—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), journalist, author and curmudgeon, “H.L. Mencken on Balder and Dash,” Lapham’s Quarterly, 1921. (Thanks to alert WORDster Karl Petruso)

• Editorial Comment: More flap than doodle, in my opinion.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

You Old Shroom







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

Unacceptable Ideas

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Free Speech

“It’s based on a faith that we’re all going to be better off when there’s more ideas expressed than having the government pick and choose which ideas are acceptable and which are unacceptable. Maybe that faith is misplaced. But the alternative, to me, is much more frightening.” 

—Erwin Chemerinsky, First Amendment scholar and dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, “What Students Don't Understand About Free Speech,” Truthdig.com, Oct. 27, 2017.

• Editorial Comment: Nah. Just tell us what to think.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

No Drumsticks



















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

Spavins

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A Fairy Tale Life

A reporter’s life “is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty.’ Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.” 

—A. J. Liebling (1904-1963), press critic, quoted in David Remnick’s “Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., the Longtime Owner of The New Yorker and Chairman of Condé Nast, Has Died at Eighty-nine,” The New Yorker, Oct. 16, 2017. (Thanks to alert WORDster Mark Larson)

• Editorial Comment: Bran mash will always beat potato peelings in any newsroom I know.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

View From Old Home Beach












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

A Nice Thank You

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‘The Enemy of the People’

“I really came here tonight to thank you. That's all. Just to thank you, all of you. 

“Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, the fourth estate, our first line of defense against tyranny and the establishment of state-sanctioned news. 

“Thank you, you intrepid, underpaid, overextended, trolled and un-extolled, young and old, battered and bold, bought and sold, hyper-alert, crack caffeine fiends. You gorgeous, ambitious, contrarian, fiery, dogged and determined bullshit detectives. You persevering, cool, objective, indefatigable, chronically fatigued, pharmaceutically soothed, chocolate-comforted twitter clickers! You, the Enemy of the People. (Yeah, but just the Bad People!) 

“May I, on behalf of a grateful nation, thank you?”

—Meryl Streep, actress, the Committee to Protect Journalists' annual press freedom dinner, Nov. 15, 2017. Full remarks and video here.

• Editorial Comment: Well, I must say, that’s pretty damn nice.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

The Big Finish, 11/18/17












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

I Miss Kurt Vonnegut

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Wait. They’re What?

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

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

• Editorial Comment: Normal humans don’t give a damn about semicolons; that’s all there is to it.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

Moxon House












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

Deadlines

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Write Fast

“[Novelist] Russell Banks keeps part of an old gravestone in his office, inscribed with the epitaph ‘Remember Death.’ There’s nothing more inspiring than the awareness that time is short, and that the ultimate deadline is soon approaching.” 

—Joe Fassler, writer, “I talked to 150 writers and here’s the best advice they had,” LitHub, Oct. 26, 2017

• Editorial Comment: Editors don’t finish editing; they just run out of time.


• Related:

On a grave from the 1880s on Nantucket, Massachusetts:

Under the sod and under the trees

Lies the body of Edward Pease.

He is not here, there's only the pod:

Pease shelled out and went to God.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Writer’s Cubicle








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

Yup, Something Smells

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Putin Wins

“Paul Reynolds, the Republican National Committeeman from Alabama, told The Hill that something about the timing of the accusation and the Post’s role breaking the story ‘doesn’t smell right.’ 

“‘My gosh, it’s The Washington Post. If I’ve got a choice of putting my welfare into the hands of Putin or The Washington Post, Putin wins every time,’ he said.” 

—Ben Kamisar and Lisa Hagen, “GOP scrambles to respond to Moore allegations,” The Hill, Nov. 9, 2017. 

• Editorial Comment: Roy Moore and the Sex Clams is a good name for a band. With Putin on drums.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Outhouse












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

Pentagon Papers

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Presidential ‘Infallibility’

“All Americans should know the story of the Pentagon Papers and what it instructs about the value of whistle-blowers and a free press willing to challenge a government when it goes astray — and the folly in believing the ‘implicit infallibility’ of any president of the United States.” 

—John Diaz, editorial page editor, The San Francisco Chronicle, “‘The Post’: A film that could not be more timely,” Nov. 10, 2017.

• Editorial Comment: Thank you, watchdogs.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Birches









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