Where Do You Get Your News?

  

Remember the good old days when the local daily showed up on your front porch in time to have it with your first cup of coffee? My Grandpa would glance at the front page then read the funny papers. My Daddy would look at the front page then turn to the want ads. My Momma just drank her coffee.

Then we got the evening news in black and white on television. The TV stations went to color in 1966, but the televisions we had didn't.

Known as "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite gave us the news. He didn't comment on the stories. He just reported them. He covered much of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R with its Cuban Missile Crisis. He covered President Kennedy's assassination with its follow-on murder of a suspect in custody. The assassin was killed not by police, but by a nightclub owner on live TV amid the chaos of reporters and police and justice officials. 

Cronkite covered the Civil Rights Movement with film of its peaceful protesters being brutalized by their local and state law enforcement officers. We watched film of the Vietnam War and its world-wide anti-war demonstrations. We got the official daily body count -- ours and theirs. Theirs were always many times higher than ours. I began to wonder how there could be any North Vietnamese left, but we didn't question it. There was no way for the average person to research those figures. No internet. No Google.

    

Now the news is available anytime, anywhere on our smart TVs or our smart phones, from Siri and Alexa or the Amazon Echo Dot. Sometimes I have nightmares about getting it on my dental implants!

Twitter and TikTok and Facebook. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. PBS News Hour, BBC America, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle. The Onion, Saturday Night Live, Facebook.

Okay, the technology is here. And it is available to most of us whether we know how to use it or not. But there are some very old rules about how we should use all this information, be it true or be it false. And those old rules rightly should continue to inform our use of all this information. Just because something we read, hear, or see seems believable doesn't make it true. Like, for instance -- I don't have dental implants.

One of those old rules is as old as the Ten Commandments, the Ninth one, to be precise. Thou shalt not bear false witness. This includes repeating, retweeting, and/or sharing something that is not true. How can you tell if something is true or not? Do your own research. 

I like Snopes.com. Just type in your question. In fact you can just Google your question. Google will give you several options to check out. Got a question about an organization that is saying something you agree with or don't agree with, but you don't know anything about that organization. Google it. 

The Washington Post is a reputable newspaper. The New York Post is a tabloid. The Philidelphia Inquirer is a reputable newspaper. The National Enquirer is a tabloid. What's the difference between a reputable newspaper and a tabloid? Google it.

Want to know if a particular newspaper is generally considered "conservative" or "liberal"? Google it.

Want to know how many species of rabbit and hares are native to North America? This is what Google said, "North America is home to 15 species of rabbits and hares. All of these are rather abundant within their range."

Google's source:  https://science.jrank.org/pages/3785/Lagomorphs-Rabbits-hares-North-America.html
 

November 22, 1963 -- a birthday remembered

It was Friday, November 22, 1963. My 16th birthday. 

After school, Daddy was going to take me from Edmond into Oklahoma City to pick up my best friend Vicky. I was three months into my first year in high school, the first time in six years that Vicky and I had not lived across the creek from each other and been in the same classes at the same schools.

We had been best friends since my family moved to Oklahoma City from my parents' very small hometown about thirty miles away. Of course that was a long time ago so thirty miles took an hour by car -- no Interstate Highways. It was a long way in other ways, too. No cell phones. In fact, telephone calls between towns were long distance and expensive. No internet for nearly instantaneous communication. Snail mail, which we called mail, usually took three days from that small town to The City.

I came to Valley Brook Elementary School as a member in good standing of the Baby Boomer Generation which meant there were too many of us kids and not enough teachers. So five of us Fifth Graders were chosen to move up to the Sixth Grade classroom -- three boys and two girls. Being the new kid, I didn't know anyone yet. Neither class knew me from Adam Allfox. It didn't help that the regular Fifth Graders wouldn't have anything to do with us because we were too smart or something. The Sixth Graders wouldn't have anything to do with us for what to them was a much more obvious reason, we were "too immature." So we five were pretty much on our own socially. Vicky and I were the two girls. Plus, Vicky was really nice and she could do the splits and cartwheels! Instant best friends.

By the time we moved up to Junior High School, the Oklahoma City schools were adhering to President Kennedy's program to turn out more scientists. The Cold War had taken on Space Race attributes following the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik. Consequently, we were all tested and those who tested well in math and science were put on accelerated educational tracks.

When we moved to Edmond, their schools were not putting students in advanced classes. I again needed to make new friends. But because I'd already had the normal math and science classes for Tenth Graders, I was put into classes with upperclassmen. Add to that, I had pierced ears and all my hems were well above the knee. Neither fashion had yet arrived at Edmond High School.

After lunch that Friday, November 22nd, when I came into my English Class, a particularly aggressive classmate who regularly made fun of me told me, "Someone shot Kennedy."

I thought he was just being mean, but the principal came on the intercom and announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was in the hospital. Then in Physical Education Class an announcement came over the intercom that a priest had been called in. I knew it was for Last Rites. They thought he was dying.

Vicky's father, a Master Sergeant in the Air Force, was based at Tinker Air Force Base, a few miles from where we'd lived in Oklahoma City. He'd flown missions during the Berlin Air Lift over Soviet controlled ground. We knew that what he was doing was very dangerous. We also knew what number Tinker was on the Soviet's missile target list.

We'd held our breath during the face-off between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba. Plans were made about how to get back with our families if "something" happened while we were at school and they were at work or home.

Magazines at the grocery store check-out had recipes for Jello salads and blue prints for backyard bomb shelters. Official bomb shelters were marked by yellow and black signs on doorways into school basements and government office building basements. They were stocked with big olive drab cans of water and nonperishable food.

The Cold War and its attendant threat of becoming hot was a daily reality. But no shots had yet been fired on American soil.

In 1963 TV shows were not commonly interrupted by news stories and the term "Breaking News" was not used. On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite interrupted the soap opera As the World Turns with the news of President Kennedy's assassination.
Click here to watch https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=walter+cronkite+jfk

That Friday no one knew who killed President Kennedy. Then when they did identify the killer, we still didn't know why. As if that were not horrendous enough, the murderer was killed two days later, live on TV. Had the killer and his killer been the opening salvo of World War III?

Pearl Harbor ended my parents' generation's Age of Innocence. My generation's tenuous hold on innocence was destroyed by two murders in Dallas.

Vicky spent the weekend with us. We had cake and went to the movies. I don't remember what kind of cake or what the movie was. Our world had changed. Cake and movies were not important.

The Newsroom -- A Review

         Please take the time to click on The  Newsroom and watch the opening scene.

I've never worked in a television newsroom. I have worked in a newsroom. The newsroom for a small town daily newspaper where we didn't measure our stories in minutes, but in column inches. We had to leave space for our advertisers because that's where the money came from. Subscriptions and street purchases wouldn't have been enough to pay for the paper our news was printed on.

The Newsroom is television. It covers real news stories that occurred far enough in the past that the writer knows what happened and when. But recently enough that most of us remember following the stories as they happened and were reported from real TV newsrooms.  

The first season starts with the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, who is a pompous ass news anchor concerned only with himself and his ratings. Luckily for him, though he doesn't appreciate it, his boss, Charlie Skinner, played admirably by Sam Waterston, hires a passionately idealistic new Executive Producer.  British actress Emily Mortimer plays MacKenzie McHale, the new EP. She has a past with Will.

Will's redemption brings me to tears. The first season of this show is, if not the best, one of the best written and acted series I've ever seen. And I'm a died-in-the-wool Downton Abbey-Maggie Smith fan.

The second season runs through the Romney campaign while all hell is breaking loose in central Africa and Syria is gearing up to collapse in the tragedy the world is still dealing with today. This season deals more with romance. Okay, so the course of true love does not run smooth. There is humor. There is pathos. There is "Are you kidding me already?!" We get the private lives of the characters -- all the characters, the main characters, the supporting characters, the cleaning crew. (No, that's not true. We never find out who the cleaning crew sleeps with or wants to sleep with or used to sleep with.) I don't believe it lives up to the first season's promise.

But even with the second season being less-than, it is so far above standard television fare that I came back for the third season. And I'm glad I did. It is as good as the first.

The third and final season begins with the Boston Marathon bombing. This season deals with the downfall of the news organization -- battered on all sides by market forces, the competing interests of its owners and its news people, and ultimately the passage of time and life.

The Newsroom made me laugh out loud. And I cried because it was so touching and because it was so sad. That, for me, is the mark of good work.

Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin is the writer, the man who conceived of and wrote The Newsroom. He proves that Americans can write. I was beginning to think your middle name had to be Julian Fellowes and you had to be British to write and sustain quality TV material. Thank you Mr. Sorkin.

In this year of our country's history, this election cycle, this media frenzy, I cling to a life raft. A life raft of ideals lashed together with oft maligned ropes -- information, education, ethics.

And today's media? It is a child who wants to be popular, to have the highest ratings. It participates in a political arena that's been taken hostage by a circus. It's a regular kid being bullied by a spoiled rich kid. It's caught up in a maelstrom along with a certain portion of our electorate who are Pinocchio to that spoiled rich kid's Lampwick. I hope we don't all grow donkey's ears and a tail.

The sad truth is Walter Cronkite doesn't live here any more.

We are facing a choice between two less than inspiring people, each of whom is roundly disliked by portions of our society. And for good reasons.

Me? I'm going to vote for the person I perceive to be the lesser of two evils, and I believe The United States of America is strong enough to survive the next four years.

America may not be the greatest nation in the world. I don't think there is a 'greatest nation in the world.' But I do believe 'It can be.'