Snappy

“I’m such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don’t need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.” 

—Fran Lebowitz, humorist and writer, “A Humorist at Work,” The Paris Review, 1993.

• Editorial Comment: I don’t “process” words; I ferment them.

PeezPix

Early Tee Time.

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

Deadliest for Journalists

“The world's five deadliest countries for journalists include three — India, Mexico and, for the first time, the United States — where journalists were killed in cold blood, even though those countries weren't at war or in conflict.

“‘The hatred of journalists that is voiced . . . by unscrupulous politicians, religious leaders and businessmen has tragic consequences on the ground, and has been reflected in this disturbing increase in violations against journalists.’” 

—Christophe Deloire, secretary-general, Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The group reports that 80 journalists and media workers worldwide were killed in 2018; 49 of those, including the Washington Post's Jamal Khasoggi and five reporters at the Annapolis, Maryland, Capital Gazette, were purposively targeted. “United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for the first time,” NBC News, Dec. 18, 2018. Full report here. 

• Editorial Comment: Shoot the messenger.

PeezPix

Goodnight.

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

Satan-Proof

“It’s not just that we aren’t good at critical thinking; we don’t even value it. The United States, seeking to distance itself from its European counterparts, was founded on a deep anti-intellectualism. . . . Puritan John Cotton once wrote, ‘the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan you will bee.’”

—Sophia A. McClennen, professor of international affairs, Penn State, “Trolls and Hackers Find It Easy to Trick Americans Because We Are a Nation of Ignoramuses,” AlterNet, March 3, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: By that measure, Mr. Cotton, America is safe from damnation.

PeezPix

Evening Light

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

Mitch Takes a Stand

“No act of speech is so obnoxious that it merits tampering with our First Amendment. Our Constitution, and our country, is stronger than that.” 

—Mitch McConnell, U.S. senator, R-Ky, casting the deciding vote in 2006 against a GOP measure to amend the Constitution and criminalize flag-burning, in “Trump Wants Stiff Penalties for Burning American Flag,” Rollcall, 2016.

• Editorial Comment: Well, whaddaya know. Of course, that was 12 years ago.


Note: McConnell went on to explain that weakening one constitutional amendment could set a precedent threatening other freedoms, such as the Second Amendment freedom to bear arms. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in two cases in 1989 and 1990 that flag-burning is protected free speech.





PeezPix

Schrooms

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

Too Smart to Succeed?

News Note: The staff of The Weekly Standard (1995-2018), a respected conservative magazine, were told to pack their things and leave the building by 5 p.m. Friday in a “Christmas massacre.” Employees were told severance pay will depend on their signing a nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement.

“[T]his is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning. . . .

“This is what happens when the commercial forces trying to dumb down the American media run into a pocket of people trying to resist those forces.” 

—David Brooks, columnist, “Who Killed the Weekly Standard?” The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2018. Image: Weekly Standard co-founder William Kristol/Getty.

• Editorial Comment: Dumb is a hot commodity these days.




PeezPix

After the rain

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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 Better Journalism

“I didn’t feel much when the Slovak prime minister resigned soon afterwards. My job is to provide information, not to take down politicians. Journalism is facing a kind of crisis around the world. But maybe soon we will hit the bottom, and then we can come up with a better kind of journalism for the 21st century.”

 

Jan Kuciak & Martina Kušnírová

—Pavla Holcová, Czech journalist, whose 28-year-old co-worker, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée were killed while working on a story linking the Slovak prime minister and the Italian mafia. More than 30 journalists, including Kuciak and the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi, were murdered in 2018. “‘Killed for speaking the truth’: nine journalists murdered in 2018,” The Guardian, Dec. 5, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: RIP. #All for Jan and Martina.




PeezPix

RIP

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

On Reading

“I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right, and I recommend this method.”

—James Thurber (1894-1961), cartoonist, author, journalist and celebrated wit.

• Editorial Comment: Tsk. Traditionalist.




PeezPix

Did you hear a seal bark?

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

The War on Truth

“‘This is the world of the strong leaders who hate the free press and truth,’ says Can Dündar, who, after being charged with revealing state secrets and nearly assassinated as a newspaper editor in Turkey, fled to Germany.

“That world is led, in some ways, by a U.S. President whose embrace of despots and attacks on the press has set a troubling tone. 

“‘I think the biggest problem that we face right now is that the beacon of democracy, the one that stood up for both human rights and press freedom — the United States — now is very confused,’ says Maria Ressa, editor of the online Philippines news site Rappler. ‘What are the values of the United States?’”

—Karl Vick, reporter, “The Guardians and the War on Truth,” TIME’s Person of the Year 2018.

• Editorial Comment: Good question.




PeezPix

Where Poppies Grow

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

Real Fake News

The WORDmeister sez: Many of us — hell, anyone drawing breath — have complained since the start of the Drumpfobscene Era about all the free press the man gets. He’s a canny media manipulator, because Cheetohead knows that if he sneezes or pharts or Tweets that there are cows on Pluto, the press just has to report it . . . because he’s president and Leader of the Free World. By definition, that’s news. 

As Politico points out, many news organization are “still reflexively amplifying his remarks even after he’s made 6,400 false or misleading claims in office.”

But there *is* some push-back. Like last week, when the Tweeter-in-Chief announced exactly the opposite of what happened in the Cohen and Manafort legal filings. When NBC retweeted the false Trump tweet, a few whistles sounded. So maybe there’s hope.

“If this isn’t true (it’s not), a news organization should not be repeating it uncritically,” responded New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik. ASU journalism professor Dan Gillmor called the NBC tweet “journalistic malpractice.” And Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) accused NBC of becoming “a vector for an [obvious] lie.”

—“Morning Media” on Politico.com, Dec. 10, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: Wait. Cows on Pluto?




PeezPix

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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

Bwa-hahahahahahahahaha!!!!

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” 

—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), novelist, in letter to Sheilah Graham, 1939.

• Editorial Comment: Very funny!! he chortled.





PeezPix

Boats Against the Current

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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