“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Monday May 11, 2015
Partly Sunny 72°F/22°C in Rancho Santa Margarita
Buongiorno,
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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