Season 26 May Be the Hairiest Ever

As longtime WORDsters know, it has been my practice to open each new season of Today's WORD on Journalism with a gripping account of the WORD's reemergence and escape from St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose, where he recuperates each summer.

Indeed, I wrote just such a melodrama that has the WORD, who self-isolated in a deep funk after the disasters of 2019-2020 in his Global Center for Omphaloskepsis and WORD Peas, emerging somehow energized to meet a new season.

But I find that the whimsy pales this year in the face of all the fearful challenges of a despotic U.S. presidency and the continuing pandemic, as California and the West burns like never before.

As important as optimism and a light heart and spirit are in the face of adversity, this is no laughing matter. Never have our democratic institutions been under such concerted attack. Never has the American people been so misled and angry. Never has the defense of solid journalism for an informed and engaged citizenry been more important.

The nation and participatory democracy may very well sink or swim based on the outcome of the Nov. 3. I don't think that’s mere hyperbole.

So while it is fun to think of the WORD escaping from St. Mumbles with a team of commando sea lions wearing JoMala t-shirts, to singlehandedly confront the world's evil with green eyeshade and reporter’s notebook in hand, journalism in 2020-21 is more important and more threatened than ever. Not funny.

Like Sir William Berkeley, Virginia’s colonial governor in the 1670s, I believe in “free schools and printing” as a fundamental defense against tyranny. In this 26th year of encouraging free expression, responsible journalism and an informed and free-thinking people, Today's WORD on Journalism has its work cut out for him. We all do. 

Let’s get at it.

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TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM: The Perennial Season Opener. Again.

“I thank God we have no free schools or printing, and I hope that we shall not have these for a hundred years. For learning has brought disobediences and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both.”

      —Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677), Governor, Virginia Colony, 1671

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

The WORD’s Back-story: The WORD was originally concocted (“conceived” is, I think we all agree, altogether too grand) as a way to get journalism students to pay attention to their email. Strange as it may sound, email was a new and unpleasant disturbance of the general peace back in 1995, and many students did not then spend 16 hours a day online.
 
As a professor hoping to get and keep their attention while also instructing them, my object with the WORD was to give them something to think about before class. Hope, like the WORD, springs eternal.

I think it’s fair to say that this strategy was a dismal failure. Most of my students ignored their daily WORDs and gaily accepted point reductions on their quizzes for not knowing that day’s wordish wisdom from philosophers ranging from Soren Kierkegaard to Lisa Simpson.
 
But the WORD has become rather frighteningly popular with non-students — purported grown-ups, mostly, who actually ask to be afflicted or who send email addresses of unsuspecting friends/enemies/ colleagues/parents/bosses, so that they might be victims as well.
 
When the WORD was trundled by those nice white-jacketed men into St. Mumbles last spring, about 2,000,0006 victims voluntarily or involuntarily subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the website, whence it was linked and Tweeted and forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting folk by so-called “friends.”

 

• Editorial Comment: Fasten your seatbelts, kids. It’s going to be a bumpy ride..
 

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