Monday, May 11, 2015

Mikie sez: EBBOM- Engage Brain Before Opening Mouth!

“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Monday May 11, 2015
Partly Sunny 72°F/22°C in Rancho Santa Margarita
Buongiorno,
 
I bought my “History Major” T-shirt to show off, knowing full well that it would be irksome to some people. But, I had put in a lot of hard work to be able to say that. A few years ago, when I made the decision to go back to school, in part, to relieve the crashing boredom that had descended on my life in retirement, there was also another reason.  I wanted to take care of a big item of unfinished business and get my college degree. At the time, I had no idea how that decision would ultimately impact on my conversations on Facebook and other worlds in the Social Media Universe.
  My very first class was California History, primarily because I wanted to learn more about my adopted home state.  Growing up in New York, I had learned a lot about Henry Hudson and his good ship Half Moon and the sale of Manhattan Island for $24 worth of junk beads, but I lacked the same familiarity with California.  After the first class, I introduced myself to the teacher, a chap named Wes Swanson. Taking note of my somewhat elderly appearance in a sea of fresh young faces, he inquired, “If you don’t mind my asking, Mike, but how old are you?” At that moment, I was somewhere around the sundown side of 68. “Older than my History professor, for sure,” I replied. With that he invited me to join him for lunch in the faculty dining room.
   “So,” he asked me over the salade nicoise, “what brings you back to school at this stage of the game?” I told him that I had started out on a quest to earn a Bachelor’s Degree many years before but that a busy life and career had gotten in the way. At that point I was just a few units away from an Associate’s Degree in Communications.  By the time we were presented the dessert menu, Dr. Swanson had persuaded me to change my major to History. The change would add several years to my schooling, but hell, I was retired and had nothing else to do. “You've done Communications all your life,” Mike, he said, “Radio, Television, Public Relations. If you had a degree for just doing your job, you’d have your doctorate.” And so, I went back to square one and became a full time student majoring in History:  World, California, Middle East, Women’s History and Mexican-American History. Rounding that out were the required math and science courses and electives like political science, criminal justice, Geography and Art History all executed with a high enough grade point average to make the Honor Roll. Not too shabby for an old geezer whose contemporaries tend to worry mostly about the onset of senile dementia.
   Happily, I found that studying history was like being back in the news business. There was a lot of reading involved along with a heavy emphasis on research and documentation of sources. Each History class included a section devoted to research and documentation. And each term paper required identification of all primary and secondary sources, along with a bibliography of all sources. Finally, all of our papers were submitted through a scholastic internet site that examined all of our term papers for any hint of plagiarism. My class work was submitted to an editing and validating process that was every bit as thorough as the New York Times.  Much later, I went to work part time at the college helping Professor Swanson with the grading of tests and term papers, in a process that was every bit as demanding as any perfectionist editor or news producer.
  The scholastic standards are a far cry from the modern day blogosphere where anybody can cut and paste somebody else’s “meme” or bumper sticker slogan and call it documented research. The deluge of sheer propaganda and bilious verbal detritus on Facebook alone is enough to gag a maggot! (A favored response from my teenagers back in the day). So my recent history studies served to remind me what I had learned from my training as a newsman.
  One of the critical elements in my college studies was the focus on original source material. This requires at the very least a library card, access to a variety of internet search engines and the skills of a detective. The end result must include the five “W’s”: Who, What, Where, When and Why, with How also in the mix. Cutting and pasting other material without sourcing and attribution is simply insufficient unless you are Joseph Goebbels, a commentator on Fox News, or any one of a substantial number of stars in the “Blogosphere.”
   Along the way to writing this particular piece, I had a Eureka moment reading Manny Fernandez’ column in the May 4th edition of the NY Times and have chosen to lift some of his comments to help me make my points in this effort to show you how to navigate the stormy waters of contemporary social media with its memes and campaign sloganeering. An example from Fernandez column:
What's the first thing you do after you get a story assignment?
Students jumped in with answers. Pick up the phone. Run out to the story.
Grab a notebook. Start writing. The professor, a wiry, fiery, chain-smoking
newsman straight from central casting named George Flynn, dismissed all
responses.
No one guessed the correct answer- go to the morgue!
Fernandez’ point is that a reporter’s first stop should be the morgue, that library of old stories on the same or related subjects.  We generally don’t go to a Morgue these days. It’s Google or Lexis or Wikipedia or any one of a number of search engines. A public or college library card is the key to accessing all sorts of research tools and primary sources.  Your favorite daily newspaper has a search mode on its home page enabling the reader to look up previously published stories on a given person or subject.  It’s actually a task that I would get started for the reporter in my one-time role as an assignment editor. I’d give the reporter a folder of wire copy and news clips dealing with the assigned story to read en route. While the reporter would be working in the field gathering facts there would be editors and writers and researchers back in the newsroom working with the reporter gathering facts and information, so that when deadline time came, the story would be as complete as possible.
  An awful lot of what is presented as news and information these days is really nothing more than entertainment disguised as journalism. Or it’s driven by someone’s political agenda. Or, it’s just outright propaganda or product marketing all dressed up to go out. So, it’s vital for the reader or listener to check out the story before regurgitating bad information in a public statement. EBBOM!
    During my career as a radio and television journalist and later on in government service, I've been in the cat-bird’s seat as a lot of history has been made. I've covered news stories and interviewed a lot of people on a multitude of subjects. I've been very fortunate, but it’s also left me with a touch of PTSD. Covering breaking news stories is like seeing the cowboys in an old western movie chasing the runaway stage coach. There’s not much time for much more than a running narrative.  With history, there’s plenty of time, but a lot more work involved and a more stringent degree of fact checking and research. In addition to that, there is also the reality that there are usually forces at work that don’t want the story you are pursuing to be told at all, or there are pressures to alter the story being told to suit a particular political or personal preference.
  Here’s an example:
  In my study of American History, I quickly became aware of the strong current of prejudice, bigotry and racism that runs all the way through the story of our nation. In fact, I believe that it can be traced back in time from Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland in the present time, back through the racial upheavals in the 1960s and early ‘70s, farther back to the civil rights movement of the 1950s, all the way back through the Indian Wars of the 1800s, our Civil War and Reconstruction, on back into history through the colonization of the Western Hemisphere to a Papal Bull issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493. If that year rings a bell, it’s because it was the year after Christopher Columbus “discovered” a whole New World for Christian Europeans to conquer. To understand today’s story, one must often traipse back through history. Sometimes finding the root causes may take considerable backtracking.
  These days, social media overflows with the work of people who simply cut and paste the suppositions and opinions of still others who, in turn, are cutting and pasting their suppositions and opinions, religious and political beliefs on the theory that what they are passing along is somehow based in fact and therefore valid. In my humble opinion (or as is the current fashion, “IMHO”) we have moved firmly into a new era of Info-tainment.  What is passed off as news is really the product of the corporate marketing or entertainment divisions. Facebook and the other social media sites have become today’s “town meetings.” They host an on-going conversation on every conceivable concept, and have given a voice to people who, in another time, would remain mute. At the same time, the social media is an enabler. It can give voice to just about any fact, thought or belief that humans can express. It is completely up to the reader to separate fact from fiction, myth from reality. I find that an understanding of History is a valuable asset in this regard. Not just knowledge of events, but knowing how to search for the facts.
   The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Winston Churchill
Ciao,
MikeBo

©Mike Botula 2015

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