Just An Innocent Student--Now An Enemy of Mankind?

I don't know. I just wanted a degree.

And now I'm an "enemy of mankind." Who knew?

I originally wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and major in it.

But I couldn't. My Dad wouldn't let me. It was 1969, and the campus was rife with protests. A film was made about it, in fact: The War at Home. I went to see in in the pre-Covid days to view what I had missed.

I pleaded with Dad to let me go there. "I don't want to get tear-gassed," I said, "I just want to write about the people that do."

But it stuck with me. I kept writing and found myself a sports columnist for a local newspaper in Cedarburg, the community where I taught. 'After a speed bump where I goofed but survived, I found myself with a little weekly niche.

Now was the time to add a degree to my portfolio, I figured. After all, my contract encouraged me to get a master's degree in something, although the rules about connecting it directly to what I was teaching (history and government, mostly) were vague and largely unenforced.

And who knows? Maybe it could expand my horizons. My teaching career was already eight years old, so it would have to take something big for me to change it. I was married at the time, and I had to bring home a consistent income. The health insurance didn't hurt, either. 

At the time, before the present days of Act 10, where collective bargaining has been hollowed out to mean practically nothing, it was a pretty good insurance that once in, a teacher wouldn't be likely to get out of the profession. Besides, a master's degree would increase my salary.  It encouraged people to keep learning. That, I thought, was the idea.

So I got into the graduate school at Marquette University and started taking courses in 1981. I had good teachers, such as Bruce Garrison, who is now at the University of Miami; Bob Griffin, big-time Brewers fan, who somehow managed to make statistics exciting; and Jim Scotton, Dean of the Journalism School, who encouraged me to teach a course in Journalism Writing.

And for any teacher to go back to the classroom and become a student again is, in essence, a re-education with the chance to find a new perspective. New teaching styles, or the realization that yours isn't working the way you thought it would (or maybe even better), help your career no matter what subject you take. The experience of educating oneself in the truest sense, too, helps one mature in the profession.

My thesis was on baseball writers, many of whom I interviewed when on their ways through Milwaukee, then in the American League (I still have the tapes of those discussions). I hypothesized that they were unhappy with what they did. I was wrong. They had their individual gripes, but in all, most of them wouldn't trade it for anything, and those that did still applied themselves to it deeply because the job itself demanded it (and drove them out of it). It was a fun, on-the-ground study of job satisfaction, when newspapers were still something people turned to every day. I got my degree and my raise.

While doing that, I contacted the then sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal, which has turned into the Journal Sentinel, just probing about potential jobs. He wrote back to advise me to stay in my chosen profession for the sake of stability and a guaranteed salary. I kept teaching and kept writing the column well into the next decade.

The history of journalism impacts this country deeply, though, because the way things were reported shaped, and of course still shapes, the public's perception of it. At least three of our wars were created by media compliance or advocacy far beyond any rational discussion of them: The Spanish-American War in 1898, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which mire us down today. I utilized that knowledge in some of my history classes, thus justifying, at least in my mind, the trouble I'd gone to. Journalism is written the first day after it has happened, if even that late, and time clarifies and expands meaning, making history its mature offspring. To me, the connection is clear.

No greater dichotomy exists today between the so-called 'mainstream media'' with its ethos and ethics, and Fox News and other conservative media and blogs. They were created as grudges, to poke a finger in the eyes of mainstream media--read anything about Roger Ailes--give conservatives a framework from which to justify practically anything that's been offered, and has provided 45 with the exact forum he has needed to keep his lies going, with that very mainstream media being an unwitting cat's-paw and taking over for him. He says he hates it, but in fact he loves it because it gives him the attention he craves and can utilize as a demagogue. That's a regrettable legacy.

So the study of journalism couldn't be more relevant right this very minute; the new, expansive effects of tweets and blogs, for instance, and the amateurism it has unfortunately spawned. The effect that information, presented in a particular way, has on us has much to do with the predicament we're presently in, where lies and nonsense somehow get top billing. 

The First Amendment doesn't guarantee perfect journalism; it only guarantees a sufficient forum. It trusts the public to sort it all out. But the sheer volume, the abject noise, of exaggerations and diversions have reached a level that has become genuinely disturbing. It tends to make one tune it all out--and that's a dangerous trend. We don't discuss it enough. We should.

So the other day, when commentator Glenn Beck said that people like me, those with journalism degrees, were "enemies of mankind," I sadly have to give him the right to say such baloney. But here is my response--first, that he couldn't be more wrong if he tried; and second, to kindly go back under the rock from which he was hiding, because for at least the last ten years, he's done enough damage to this country. The message probably won't get to him, but I defend all those who studied those doing the studying, and postulate that we need more of it.

As we go down the stretch toward a presidential election that will be as confusing and confounding as any have ever been, please keep that in mind. If shocking news arrives, even more shocking than some of the stuff we've had, try to wait a day or two for clarification and expansion, leading to some perspective and additional information which explains a bit more sufficiently.

Don't make any lasting conclusions until people have had a chance to absorb and react. Some of the purpose of news reporting is to do it first, so people stay with that particular source. But they'd better get it right, because people also have many other sources they can solicit. There will be some information that will be very helpful to know immediately, but some more that needs a minute to create conversation about it. Unfortunately, we won't know which is which until they happen.

Just the other day, the communications director of the Health and Human Services Department said--paraphrasing here--that left-wing militias would be trying to thwart the results of the presidential election, assuming that 45 would win it. That caused quite a stir, with no minor reason. But the next day, he apologized and announced he was going on leave. That, to me at least, said two things: There were still people in the administration with a conscience who are no more but no less human than the rest of us; and that the internal pressures of the election build-up had found an unfortunate, but telling release, and that we had better get prepared for more of it.

But more information is better than less. It is essential to democracy, as is a study of the way it gets to us. I'm glad I earned that degree. It's going to help me pass along meaningful information and attitudes right here. Thank you, once again, for reading it. I gain no other, and no better, benefit than your attention.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark