Number 27
Although I decided not to continue teaching at the two-year college where last month I taught something called English Composition, I was invited to give a presentation, as a professional writer, to a couple of other English classes. I talked about a few articles I'd written, none of which was likely to be intrinsically interesting to these students, and none of which had been the most appealing to me at the time I wrote them. But they stand out in my mind now, and I chose to speak about them, because of their bearing on integrity in journalism, an issue that has popped up in the news again recently, and which, as we will see, is connected to educational standards.
One story was based on my interview with a staff fundraiser at a private university in the West, Ed Eanes, who'd been a pilot in World War II and the Korean War. I went into this interview with little interest, and some bias. I was an Air Force brat; my dad was a master sergeant, who like Mr. Eanes had been stationed at Thule, Greenland, though not at the same time. Also, I was in college during the Vietnam war. Growing up with a sergeant wasn't always congenial to me, and I'd been against that war, so I approached this interview with two jaundiced eyes. But I listened and learned. Mr. Eanes had some good stories to tell, like when his buddies crashed in a New Guinea jungle, and natives turned their plane wreckage into a shrine. He was also a thoughtful man. He said movies and TV, specifically M*A*S*H, don't show war as it really is.
"It's easy to comment about how bad war is. It doesn't do much good. As I understand it, 3,000 people marched down with flowers and apples and grapes to meet Attila the Hun when he attacked one of their cities, and of course he slaughtered them all. Almost no movies that I have seen really accurately portray war. The trauma that is experienced both by the dying and by the survivors must continue on. Also, there is the horror in the back of your mind as to what will happen if you don't prevail."
When the story came out, Mr. Eanes took the trouble to thank me for quoting him accurately. This made a big impression on me. I hadn't realized that quoting accurately is novel enough that people will thank a writer for not twisting their words.
This happened to me more than once. I'd do an interview, always without benefit of a tape recorder, writing from my notes and memory (always type your notes immediately after an interview!), and the subject would later thank me for being accurate ~ in other words, for simply doing my job. For instance, I wrote about a research project on honeybees, which turned out to be more interesting than I imagined, and, of all things, scientifically controversial, so the story had to be handled with discretion. The researcher came to my office afterward and said that I'd "grasped the subject". Another article on competition between a small-town food co-op and a usurping chain store had me on the side of the co-op mainly because the PR person from the new store was so obnoxious, but I quoted her inflammatory and arrogant remarks carefully; there was no need for me to be other than neutral ~ people speak for themselves.
Fred says that when he was in the Army studying Russian in the late '50s, in Monterey, California, the local press often asked the Russians there for interviews. Eventually they stopped granting interviews because they were so often misquoted ~ "What is this, Pravda?"
The recent scandal about Jayson Blair and The New York Times is not peculiar to Blair and the Times. Blair has personal problems, and it seems his editor was crippled by Southern white man's guilt. But there are many journalists, in print and on the air, who want to be the center of the story, rather than a conduit for information. Reporters want to be the stars. As the late, great Edward Gorey wrote,
To catch and keep the public's gaze
One must have lots of little ways.
Many writers go into a story thinking they already know what the story is, like the student at a university newspaper in Kansas writing about her big trip to London. She was disappointed in London. "Where are the ticker tape parades?" she asked accusingly. A British reader pointed out that ticker tape parades happen in New York, not London. This girl went to London and never saw it.
Remember the Boston Globe scandals with Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle? Both were caught making up stuff and presenting it as fact. Smith was a poet and just felt it was natural to embellish news and invent stories to make the truth more truthful. Barnicle also went so far as to steal from other writers. I don't know what Smith is doing now, but Barnicle's career has continued to flourish since he got kicked off the Globe. He'd been kept on for years, even though his work was suspect, until Pulitzer-nominee Smith, who is black, got the axe; then it was too embarrassing not to fire him too.
As you might guess, there was an extra difficulty in talking about the Blair/Times story in a racially mixed classroom ~ anachronistic and almost surreal today, you'd think ~ but otherwise the story wouldn't have existed. One student thought Blair was being picked on unfairly, since no one complains about papers like the (white) Star and National Enquirer, which are full of lies! I actually had to explain that these kinds of tabloids are to journalism as professional wrestling is to athletics: entertainment. I had to explain that. People can grow up and graduate from high school not being able to make these distinctions, much less understand the intrinsic, objective value of truth, or at least our fumbling attempts at truth; forget truth ~ the humble fact is the sine qua non of journalism. These are the kind of students who say it's unfair to receive lower grades on their compositions simply because other students write better. These are the students who've been jollied through school and believe that learning should be "fun" (the Sesame Street method), the implication being that learning is not fun, and it shouldn't be work. (After a detailed lesson about the pros and cons of the old rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, replete with examples from the textbook, from a book by William Safire, and from Winston Churchill, a student launched a surprise attack and said he learned nothing in my class except not to end a sentence with a pronoun. Sigh.)
I can't help but think there's a connection between declining academic standards, which I have observed first-hand, and this kind of journalistic scandal. There have always been liars and con artists in every profession, but I think the peculiar sort of American racial guilt that led to the New York Times debacle is akin to the sort of thinking that has allowed many students, white and black, to graduate from high school barely literate. Jason Blair was not illiterate, and I can't imagine why he didn't care to do a job that many writers would, well, lie and cheat to get. The question was not his competence, but why he was kept on.
According to The Weekly Standard (June 9, 2003), since Blair's ouster, some young Times staffers are now leaning on management using the plea of (reverse) ageism, rather than race, to pressure management into giving them (premature) promotions, justified mainly by the strength of their eagerness for advancement. They seem to think there is favoritism toward the more experienced reporters. They also want free instruction in journalism; The Weekly Standard points out that Times reporters are supposed to already be up to speed as reporters. I might note that if their demands are met now, they're going to have to come up with a new argument for promotion when they're no longer young.
They must have received the same kind of schooling as my former students. Should everyone get a high school or college diploma or a job and promotion on the country's most famous newspaper just for showing up and wanting it real bad? What does any kind of certification, diploma, or degree mean if everyone can get one who pays tuition? This is a perversion of the concept of democracy. Is the Jason Blair incident a racial issue? Yes, sort of, in reverse. There are enough competent black writers who can and will and do perform the hard work of reporting, so that someone like Blair doesn't have to be given a free ride. But also, no, it's not. Plenty of people assume that the world and this country especially run on politics, not on work and skill. If everyone and every institution are corrupt, no standards of quality need prevail. And I am not talking about the finer points of English usage. I'm talking about the coarser points of fact vs. fiction.
The school I just exited generally slides students through (of any color) with good grades if they do the bare minimum of work assigned, with few or no genuine academic standards. Show up, pay an exorbitant fee per credit hour, and you too can get a college degree. I sympathize with adults who have families and suddenly realize they're not going to get out of that minimum-wage job without some sort of education, which they blew off when they were younger. These are not stupid people, but someone who's attained the age of 30 or 40 and can't write competently or even, sometimes, coherently is not a candidate for a phony liberal arts education. Many don't like to read, which is the foundation of education. Most read only simple stuff, and don't understand anything more complex than the newspaper, and maybe not that. (I noticed that self-help books are popular among the women.) Better they should go for some sort of traditional apprenticeship in a trade, an option that is still strong and respectable in countries like Germany. And students who are frustrated and angry in classes like English ~ not the easiest subject to teach, and not easy to learn if you don't already have a taste and aptitude for it ~ are happier with the evaluation systems in more technical and less ambiguous subjects. Friends of mine who teach ~ on opposite ends of the country ~ tell me similar stories about their classes, and they teach electives, not required courses. English comp ropes in everyone.
Yet ~ reader, I passed them. I hope all my students get better jobs. But I don't intend to teach in a classroom again.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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