If It’s Online, It Must Be True

“Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-Other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on.

“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.” 

  —Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), author and journalist, in “Terry Pratchett predicted the rise of fake news in 1995, says biographer,” The Guardian, May 30, 2019.
Cartoon: Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon is The New Yorker’s most-reproduced.

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• Editorial Comment: Online, all ‘facts’ are created equal.


 
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 Frolic

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

Nature Photography

“Instagram users who love the outdoors have a habit of ruining the wild places they touch — a perverse irony that seems lost on them. 

“It is now axiomatic that a locale of stunning natural beauty will quickly degrade into a morass of crowding once it is posted on the platform as a pristine image. The herd instinct kicks in, and other users who also want to be photographed in those same lovely landscapes converge with their own cameras and Instagram accounts and followers — ad infinitum, ad nauseam.”

 

—Christopher Ketcham, writer, “How Instagram Ruined the Great Outdoors,” The New Republic, April 18, 2019. Image: James Cameron, Arches National Park, Utah.

   

• Editorial Comment: Communing with nature and a few hundred of your iPhone besties.

PeezPix

Tunaface.

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

Enemies Stopped at the Border

“He wanted to know if I’d ever worked for CNN or MSNBC or other outlets that are ‘spreading lies to the American people.’ He aggressively told me that journalists are liars and are attacking their democracy.” 

—James Dwyer, online editor-in-chief, Empire magazine, “Journalist stopped by U.S. border agent for ‘being part of the fake news media,’” The Independent, Aug. 23, 2019. 

• Editorial Comment: And what’s that notebook in your carry-on, bub?

PeezPix

Barn Bath.

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

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Remember

The WORDmeister says: Attacks on the “lamestream media” and “fake news” are bull, of course, strategies to kill the stories that unite and connect us. Without many people and many perspectives to record our stories, the day’s events — and our very history — are lost forever. It’s how we remember.

“It is the job of journalism, and of witnesses, to tell the stories of what happened. It is how we gain or retain perspective, see things through the eyes of those who were there, and remember what should not be forgotten.”

—Caleb Howe, reporter, “The Journalism of 9/11,” Mediaite, 2018. Image:
U.S. Navy Photo by Jim Watson/Getty Images

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

Which Half Are You?

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”  

—Robert Frost (1874-1963), poet (Thanks to alert WORDster John Taylor)

• Editorial Comment: And who do we pay attention to?

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Fence Project.

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

Raise Hell

“It’s almost unnerving to see how prescient [Molly] Ivins was: In the 1970s and ’80s she was already writing about threats to free speech and, even with legal abortion, the ricketiness of women’s reproductive rights. She foresaw the relentless expansion of mass incarceration and the rise of inequality and growing social, economic and racial divisions. (‘Polarizing people is a good way to win an election and a good way to wreck a country,’ she wrote.) The issues unraveling the edges of American democracy, she often said, weren’t left to right, but top to bottom. (To drive home the point, she once called George W. Bush ‘a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America.’) Politicians work for the people, not the other way around, an Ivins sentiment that could surely use a revival all its own.”

—Mimi Swartz, columnist, “This Texan Showed That Liberals Can Fight and Have Fun, Too,” The New York Times, on release of new documentary, “Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins,” Sept. 8, 2019.

• Editorial Comment: We need more Molly.

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Not THE End, but AN End.

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 New Low’

• Editorial Comment: Submitted without comment, but a heavy sigh.

PeezPix

 

Hot off the Presses: September’s Senior News

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

Editors

Note: Mark Twain was a paid public speaker during much of his career. In this piece for Harper’s Monthly, he explains how he used drawings as memory prompts instead of notes.

“That is an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet on a chair, which is the editor's way; then he can think better. 

“I do not care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor suggests the sound of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better if I had a model, but I made this one from memory.

“But is no particular matter; they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome, and don’t pay enough.”

—Mark Twain (1835-1910), writer, lecturer and recovering journalist, “How to Make History Dates Stick,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1914.

• Editorial Comment: And this editor appears to be in a straitjacket, perhaps to aid in dealing with writers.... 



PeezPix

Humboldt Morning

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,006 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

Season 25: ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy,’ The WORD Vows

Donning his gorget and swashing his buckle, the WORD took a deep, cleansing breath and unbolted the door to the lead-lined isolation cave where he has spent 3-1/2 months, striding out into a hopeful dawn.
 

That’s right, you MAGA weinies, it’s morning in America again.
 

Bill & Hill were in the White House when the WORD launched 24 years ago — Man! How time flies when you’re having fun! — and journalism had not yet been redefined as 4-letter word (or, as AP, which recently has suffered a series of debilitating strokes, now says, 4 letter word . . . more on that later). 

Then came Dubya, temporarily labeled the worst president ever, followed by the hopeful and comparatively cerebral Obama Era.

And then . . .
 

Well, you all know what happened in 2016. Confirming that truth is stranger than fiction, a concept that even Hulu rejected as impossible to sell to audiences sold so many red hats and gallon jugs of hallucinogenic snake oil optioned the American democratic experiment.
 

In past years, Today’s WORD on Journalism has had to concoct wily escape plans involving tunnels, commando seals and hot-air balloons to escape from St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose (and Emotionally Exhausted). Since 1995, when he first took up the challenge of waking up America to the primacy of free speech, free press and free thought, the WORD’s daily doses of “wisdom” on journalism, words and the marketplace of ideas have not always been universally welcome.

“This year, we’re taking America back from those wingnuts,” the WORD announced in a brief statement to the mouldering corpse of the last member of his press corps. There were no questions.

Brace yourselves, gentle and beleaguered WORDsters, and get your own swashes buckled up. It ain’t going to be pretty.

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: And so it starts again. 

PeezPix 

The WORD Motors Away from St. Mumbles. Game on.

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,006 (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