And that's the way it is . . .

The editor said if it bleeds,

it leads . . .

talkin’ bout them newsworthy stories

when journalists  were in their glory,

back in the day

before this present cranked-up fray.

Oh, but

that newsworthy rule was back in the former times,

when readers paid in nickels and dimes;

reporters had a pencil tucked o’er their ear,

and readers held our heritage dear.

Nowadays, if it provokes,

it’ll stoke

the facebook fire

and whip up tweeter ire,

as our frantically repulsing extremities

drum up crank polarities.

I hate to break it to ya

but here’s our newsworthy brouhaha:

The user who insults

gets results.

Read ‘em and weep

I said;

watch a talking video creep

instead.

Now fake news and hyped-up spin

constitute our gravest social media sin.

Meanwhile . . .

and I do mean mean,

Journalism gets lowered to the grave,

final resting place of the brave.

In this land of the free,

internet froth is mainly

what we see . . .

in this republic, if we can keep it,

'though as we sow

we'll surely reap it.

And that’s the way it is

in  21st-century democracy shobiz. . .

(as Cronkite might have said

if Uncle Walter were not dead.)

Glass half-Full

"The Press"

Our world was forever changed when, about 577 years ago, Johann Gutenberg devised an effective way to reproduce printed documents. His invention enabled the printer man to apply controlled mechanical pressure to an inked image in a manner that facilitated efficient multiple printings.

When the printer man repeatedy applied "the press" (more about this later) to those blank pages, the world was changed forever.

Gutenberg's innovation enabled printers to print multiple editions of documents and books. Our Library of Congress recently displayed a centuries-old Bible that was printed by means of the Gutenberg innovation.

The printing industry progressed rapidly. It wasn't very long before books and other documents were being churned out all over the world in great numbers.

Books have changed the world.

Our fascination with the stories, literature and information we find in books has revolutionized the way we live. In the late 1800s, the American artist John Frederick Peto painted this image of a pile of books. His picture, recently displayed in our National Gallery of Art, captures the fascination that I find within those printed pages.

The spread of printing throughout the globe induced an information revolution that has affected the way we think about, and do, just about everything. As people became more and more literate, news of the times we live in became a larger and larger factor in the ways people think about the world. People in the modern world use news and contemporary information to inform their decisions, and modify their strategies for living life successfully.

News became such an obsessive element in our modern life that large institutions were built for the purpose of informing people about what's happening in our world.

Those massive news-spouting institutions now find themselves being cornered into a different role. The big picture of 21st-century information dispersal is being turned on its ear by an unruly multiplicity of online mini-sources. This development is along the lines of what George Orwell called the "brave new world."

Actually, it's the wild, wild West out there. What we have now is like a million Okies hightailing it across the internet prairie, every one of us hell-bound to claim our little stake of the cyber-dirt that's now being divvied up for the media of the masses.

Or "dictatorship of the proletariat", if that's what rings your chimes.

It used to be that "The Press" was all those journalists and editors who gathered and published the news on a daily basis.

But not any more. Our meaning of "the press" is now something else entirely, and I'm not sure how to define or describe it.

But I do surmise that our new understanding of "the press" has something to with that collective pressure applied by reporters on public spokespersons.

Here's an example. Sean Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, argues with The Press about how many people showed up for the inauguration.

That's The Press now, and this disconnect between "us" and "them" is the new "news."

Lastly, as Uncle Walter might have said:

And that's the way it is, Tuesday, January 24, 2017.



Glass half-Full

WashPost came through on report

Today I made my first intentional effort to understand what the Hillary Clinton email controversy was all about. This initial reading session, which must have lasted about an hour, came about when I decided to read this morning's digital Washington Post article entitled "How Clinton's Email Scandal Took Root."

As many years as this political controversy has been gathering steam, I have never paid more than cursory attention to it. It just seemed to me like a bunch of political malarky, although I did have a vague understanding that somehow the the security of our nation was involved.

If my sketchy Everyman Citizen memory serves me well at all, this hot issue came to the forefront of media exposure when Congressional Republicans raised the issues about Benghazi in 2012. Now let me say here that I am a Republican.

And about all I may know, or not know, about that tragic turn of Benghazi events is: my understanding of it is very small, based precariously on my limited retention of any details or vague narratives about the events that happened on that fateful day in 2012. But let me say this: I did see the movie!

So, as you can see I am, like most Americans, rather clueless about what is really going on in the inner recesses of our .gov because I really don't have a clue about it all until I, you know, see a movie about it.

So the movie, Thirteen Hours, gave me some notions about what happened the tragic assault on our consulate in Libya on a certain day in 2012. But who knows why such a terribly fatal assault on our supposedly secure embassy might have happened? These issues in foreign lands are much more complicated that we simple-minded Americans make them out to be.

This morning, March 28, 2016, along comes this routine (daily) email from the Washington Post, a journalistic institution with which I have a minimally subscriptive connection. And when I open the email, this reported headline grabs my attention: "How Clinton's Email Scandal Took Root."

"Aha!" I thought, here's my chance at last to glean some understanding about what this big brouhaha is all about.

Now our conservative and Republican friends may question my seemingly naive submission to that journalistic institution's supposedly left-leaning reporting on such a hot issue. But hey, I saw Redford and Hoffman portraying Woodward and Bernstein back in the day, when I was myself a manipulated clueless college kid with a leftward bent. And I certainly understand and respect their Ben Bradlee legacy of Beltway investigative journalism; so yes, I am going to read this article and see what this reporter has to say about that whole dam Clinton email thing.

I mean, this is bound to be more reliable than the New York Times, n'est-que-c'est? and more journalistically thorough than, say, Fox News.

Robert O'Harrow Jr., is the reporter (with journalistic contribution also from Alice Crites) and I must say: What an exhaustively long reporting job has been therein provided-- quite informative about a vast chain of complicated, intertwining events that began mostly in January of 2009, yet still rolls on through 2015 and even spills out into this year--quite informative and yet, somehow, impressively concise.

Took me over an hour to read it.

My usual confusion in reading long journalistic reports aside--that confusion being frothed up in my uninformed brain about a multiplicity of persons whose first names are laid to rest after that first article-mention-- and if that were not enough, all these names nested within the reporter's dutiful covering of myriads of events and scenarios that happened in the dark recesses of securitized (or not securitized) .gov offices long ago or even quite recently, and what you have here is a confused citizen who is trying to become well-informed.

Me.

Now I am no Congressional committee, but I do have an opinion because I am an American. Furthermore, as both Jefferson and Adams advised, citizens of a free democratic republic should inform themselves about the issues of our times.

If you care to join me in an assessment of same article by reading it yourself, then I commend you for doing so. And rather than render my half-baked opinion about the controverted content of Hillary Clinton's thousands of emails, I will simply say this:

It seems to me that poor Hillary, finding herself at the crossroads of an electronic digital technological revolution that had not--and probably still has not--caught up with itself, made some attempts to find a middle path between two frustratingly extreme strategies of secure communication protocols; one extreme being absolute, classified security, which is systemically impossible; and the other extreme being her personal freedom and expediency in communicating persuasively with very important people all over the whole dam world.

And yes, she made a few bad choices, maybe even dangerous mistakes.

But hey, who wouldn't make some screw-ups? with all that's going on in this rapidly declassifying cyberspace world. I myself would probably be overwhelmed with it all, trying to negotiate with Wen Jiabao while making sure not to confuse the email accounts with recipes from Aunt Martha or whomever.

Nevertheless, although I may be willing to pardon the former Secretary of State for her (perhaps, perhaps not) innocent security breaches, I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton for President; I will be voting for Ted Cruz.

Because: I think Ted would do better with the choices that a new President must face, better than Hillary, and most certainly better than Donald.


Glass half-Full

Reminds me of the kids' whisper game

Honestly, I think we can do better this this, but maybe not.

The horserace groupthink has taken control of our TV people this year. It happens every election year, but this year worse than ever.

A perfectly deplorable example of how tribal infighting trivia has taken over vid-journalism has been dissected by Michael Brown, writer for Townhall.com.

I'll not explain the whole ridiculous chain of events; his exposition is quite sufficient:

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2016/02/05/draft-n2115304

Now what I'm thinking is this: It would seem appropriate that the voting citizens of our nation would be considering, in this election year:

~ why our .gov owes so much more money than it can repay to its creditors,

~ and what can be done about it,

~ how we can minimize pollution without being ruled by climate-banging control freaks,

~ how we can reconstruct a manufacturing sector that is relevant to 21-century needs and economics,

~ how our great, unprecedented military capability and its supportive infrastructure cannot be put to good use in making the world a better place for our people and for the nations,

~ how to help men and women stay married so they can raise their children together,

~ why we cannot effectively educate all our children and prepare them for life-well-lived in the 21-century

~ how to judiciously keep the golden door of opportunity open to the homeless huddled masses of this strife-torn world

~ how to get people fed and housed without castrating nor sterilizing their personal independence and initiative,

~ how to encourage, by our policies, personal and collective responsibility instead of systemic dependency,

~ how to make peace, and encourage constructive cooperation, between cops and citizens in our cities,

~ how to enrich, through our common efforts, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all our people who care to make an effort to improve themselves and their children and neighbors,

~ how to select a President and Vice President without all this fluff and bullshit.

So it would seem appropriate that we would build and patronize a communication system that would enable us to talk about these problems in the context of national politics, instead of:

why one candidate tried to take a few days off from the rat race and how it has no effect on what's happening in Iowa or New Hampshire or Peoria or Pennsylvania or even Pennsylvania Ave.

Maybe some of you hyped-up vid-journalists need a break. Take some time off, go home, like Ben did. If you need someone to replace you in the interim, give me a call. I'm currently unemployed, and gladly will I take your mic and your twitter feed and show you it could be done better. Besides, I've never been to New Hampshire.

King of Soul