Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

journalism

The Journalists’ Prayer

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St. Bride’s Church in London’s Fleet Steet is known as the “Journalists’ Church.” The church and the area around it have a long history with writers, publishing, printing, and newspapers. But it’s history – the newspapers that once occupied the buildings of Fleet Street are long gone, absorbed into other newspaper or moved to other locations.

British journalism grew up here for a simple reason: the first printing press with moveable type was brought to the area in 1500, and the printing (and later the newspaper business) grew up around it. But a church had occupied the site since about 500 A.D.; the current St. Bride’s was completely rebuilt in the late 1950s to restore what had been destroyed during the German Blitz of December 1940.

A nearby building which once housed the Sunday Telegraph.

The church has seen its fair share of famous purposes. Samuel Johnson lived across Fleet Street; John Milton at one time lived in the churchyard; Samuel Pepys was baptized here; the 18th century novelist Samuel Richardson was buried here; and Charles Dickens lived for a time in the parish (we forget that Dickens started his writing career as a reporter). 

On a recent visit to London, we visited St. Bride’s and its crypt during one of the two London Open House weekends. When it was restored, it was rebuilt with all its former Christopher Wren elegance. The church’s interior is simply beautiful. 

The crypts below the church are another story altogether. Over the centuries, they had been forgotten and buried; they were rediscovered after the German bombing. You can see part of a Roman building foundation, a small medieval chapel; and the area where hundreds of people were buried (the nameplate for Samuel Richardson’s coffin is on display). 

Placed around the church proper are various plaques, listing the names of journalists killed in World War I, World II, Iraq, and other conflicts. And many of the seats have nameplates in memory of journalists; I sat in the one bearing the name of Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist well worth knowing about and reading.

What struck me most profoundly was a polished stone sheet bearing “The Journalists’ Prayer.” The words are attributed to St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), the patron saint of Catholic writers and journalists. While St. Bride’s directs them to journalists, the words could apply to writers in general, and more generally to anyone who works. But I read those words, and I felt the gap between them and me. The prayer is something that writers, and especially Christian writers, can aspire to.

The Journalists’ Prayer

Almighty God,
strengthen and direct, we pray,
the will of all whose work it is to write what many read,
and to speak where many listen.
May we be bold in confronting evil and injustice,
and compassionate in our understanding of human weakness,
rejecting alike the half-truth that deceives, and the slanted word that corrupts.
May the power that is ours, for good or ill,
always be used with respect and integrity;
so that when all here has been written, said, and done,
we may, unashamed, meet Thee face to face,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Related: 

Footsteps at St. Bride’s. 

Top photo: The Journalists’ Prayer inscribed stone in St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street. Below, the church’s famous tiered steeple of St. Bride’s, the inspiration for wedding cakes everywhere.

The Major Lesson of Five Decades of Writing

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Looking back at five decades of writing, I can say with certainty the major lesson I’ve learned. I was reminded of it while I was reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough. This is about as no-nonsense, straightforward, this-is-how-it-is discussion of writing that I’ve ever come across. And most of it applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

In other words, I recognize what he talks about. Fully recognize it.

The major lesson: Writers write, no matter what.

You may be sick. You may have 67 other priorities and pressing demands. You may stare dully at a blank page or screen without having a single thing to put down. You may hear the chorus of constant critics, including your own internal voices. You may watch others write something seemingly effortlessly and wonder why that never happens to you. Twice a day might be tempted to pack it all in and walk away, forever.

But it still comes down to this: writers write, no matter what.

I’d like to say it gets easier, and it does, in a sense. Like anything else, the more practiced you become, the better you get at it. What’s different about writing is that every article, every story, every poem, every novel, and every book is its own singular act of creation. Which means that, each time you write, you’re doing something altogether new.

I learned this lesson early, without realizing it. I was a reporter for my college newspaper, and I had a fair number of stories already under my belt, the result of a semester and a half of reporting. The story was the University Court deciding whether a candidate for student body president had violated the election rules. The session, held a few days before the election in a room in the student union, went late into the night. The editors were (impatiently) waiting for the story; they wanted to go home. It was a big story; the candidate was the favored winner.

The comment session ended; the court retired into deliberation. It was getting close to midnight. I found a pay phone nearby (no mobile phones in those days) and called the editor who said she hoped I had most of the story already written (this would have been by hand; no laptops in those days). The court returned and announced a non-decision. The candidate was outraged and demanded a yes-or-no answer. Back into deliberation they went. 

LSU’s newspaper some 13 years before my time

I sat in a chair in the meeting room, writing the story by hand. I guessed what they outcome was going to be, because it was clear that the candidate had indeed violated the rules. And then we all waited. For an hour. I kept tinkering and editing the story, knowing my editors were going nuts, because I still had to type the thing. 

Right at 12:30 a.m., the court read its decision. I’d guessed right. I waited just a moment for the explosion from the candidate (now former candidate) and then ran (I did not walk) the roughly three blocks to the Journalism building. I shouted the decision at the editor and sat down to type like a crazy person. I’d type two paragraphs, and she’d grab the page from the typewriter as I typed the next two paragraphs.

Somehow a coherent story emerged. Nobody said thanks, or good job, or good story, or anything else. I watched the editing and the finishing of the front-page layout. I was asked to check the headline for accuracy. And then it was rushed off to the back shop six blocks away for typesetting. I also had to indicate what could be cut if space was too tight. I got back to my fraternity house (where I was living) about 2 a.m., only to discover half a dozen people waiting for me to return, because they wanted to know what the outcome had been.

Under horrendous deadline and pressure conditions, the writer wrote. 

And it wouldn’t be the last time.

Top photograph by Nik Shuliahin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When You Find Yourself in Someone Else’s Memoir

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University of Iowa School of Journalism office int he 1920s.

I started reading the memoir Ghost of the Hardy Boys because I loved the Hardy Boys mystery books as a kid and because I knew a little of the story of how they came to be. Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) didn’t write all of the 60 books in the series published under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, but he wrote the first third of them. McFarlane was responsible for the 22 books between The Tower Treasure in 1927 and The Phantom Freighter in 1947. 

I read all 22, roughly between 1960 and 1963. I loved them. They even inspired me to write, or start to write, my own mystery. The handwritten manuscript, forever lost, was about 25 pages of a group of kids finding a secret passage from a grandfather down into a cave. I was 10 years old. Yeah, I could see the books had some old-fashioned words, like roadster and coupe for types of automobiles. But I didn’t care, even though I looked up the words in the dictionary. (If you’re interested, a coupe was a two-door car, the name borrowed from a type of horse-drawn carriage. A roadster is what we would call a convertible today.)

McFarlane published his memoir in 1975; this edition was republished this year in a format that resembles the Hardy Boys books themselves. And he tells the story of writing the book series in a highly readable and often funny way. He never thought of these books as “great literature,” but, like the Stratmeyer Syndicate’s other series, The Bobbsey Twinsand Nancy Drew, they constituted childhood reading for tens of millions of youngsters. Like me. 

McFarlane’s memoir isn’t only about The Hardy Boys. He’s telling his own story, how he became a newspaperman in northern Ontario in the early 1920s and how he eventually landed in Massachusetts, at the Springfield Republican. And it was this description of (relatively) small-town journalism in 1920s that took me by surprise.

With very small changes, he could have been telling the story of small-town journalism in the 1970s. I know, because I was there for a year, my first job out of college. From 1973 to 1974, I worked as a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. I found myself in McFarlane’s memoir so easily that I had to ask why. I mean, half a century separated his experience at the Republican and my experience at the Enterprise. How could they be so similar?

I think there are at least three reasons.

First, new computer technology only just started to seep into journalism in 1973, and then it was only in the backshop, where typesetters would retype the stories on computers for printing “cold type” and then pasting the stories onto pages. Reporters and editors still typed on typewriters, and layout designers still did their work by hand. No computer sat on any reporter’s or editor’s desk, simply because they didn’t exist.

Second, just like McFarlane’s experience, our primary sources of news were reporter-written or from the Associated Press or similar wire service. The newsroom had a television set, but we only watched it when there was some huge national story that was breaking. We weren’t competing against local TV stations. And social media was three decades into the future.

The stereotype of the reporter in the movies wasn’t far off from the reality.

Third, the people McFarlane worked with and for – his fellow reporters and editors – were eerily similar to the people I worked with. Like McFarlane’s experience, the older reporters and the middle and senior editors had not gone to journalism school (or even college) but either happened into journalism or somehow grown up in the business. And they were individual characters. They yelled a lot. They didn’t mind telling us how dumb we were – in front of our colleagues. Their heads held all kinds of esoteric knowledge and “background” information. And most of them were native Texans, which carried a whole additional set of eccentricities. 

I don’t think I had a boring day at work the entire time I was there. Not to mention the fact that the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and I even wrote the huge front-page headline “Agnew Resigns.” 

But to read Ghost of the Hardy Boys, a memoir by a favorite childhood writer, and to find myself and my own experiences, was a startling thing. I don’t think these newsrooms exist anymore. Everything is professionalized; reporters have degrees from journalism schools or similar backgrounds, not to mention advanced degrees in many cases. Despite the proliferation of individual bias into news stories today, journalism seems far less personal than it was 50 years ago.

Something’s missing in journalism today. But I’m glad to have been reminded by the writer of the Hardy Boys stories that he and I shared something important in common.

Related: My review of Ghost of the Hardy Boys.

“Bad News” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

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Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and co-hosts Newsweek’s podcast “The Debate.” Before joining Newsweek, she was the opinion editor of Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in the United States. She’s written for The New York Times and Washington Post. She’s appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and NBC. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is not the person you would expect to have written a book like Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. But she did.

Bad News is not a book written from a conservative, right-wing, or alt-right perspective. It’s not a hastily compiled mishmash of everything that’s wrong with the news media. Instead, Ungar-Sargon has published a carefully researched, well-documented, and well-written story of where American news media has gone seriously wrong and how that is harming the United States.

If the problem could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: the business model of the news media has shifted from reporting the news to giving its demographic the perspective that it wants. Some call this reporting the narrative instead of the news. Whatever it’s called, it’s making a significant contribution, perhaps the most significant, to destroying trust it itself, in American Institutions, and what Americans have believed about their country. And that has implications far beyond the 50 states

This is what Ungar-Sargon documents in Bad News:

The people who are the reporters and editors have not been working-class for two generations. The economic and social status of reporters changed fundamentally, and the author points to the Watergate scandal as one of the starting points.

The major news media have abandoned the working class, not unlike the Democratic Party did beginning with the Clinton Administration. The working class is still large group of people, and Fox News isn’t so much the conservative media outlier as it is the channel that covers what the working class cares about.

Social media and the internet, far from “democratizing” society, have been the mechanisms by which the major news media centered their efforts on narrative instead of news – and turned the narrative into a business model.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

The media’s coverage of racial issues fits its audience’s understanding about race and itself, but it is completely out of kilter with what most Americans believe or experience. One example: 81 percent of Black Americans do not want the police defunded. Ungar-Sargon argues that the media is besotted with race because a discussion of class, which she sees is the real issue, would undermine the media’s own position.

The media’s cartoonish coverage of Jews, crime, and Trump voters exemplify what is happening. She doesn’t say it exactly this way, but Donald Trump is like the drug to the news media’s addiction. It needs Trump, and not only to prop up its ratings and subscriptions but also to be the ever-present Bogeyman out to destroy America as the media understands it.

She doesn’t present a laundry list of how to fix the problem; the solution will take generations. But she does suggest things that Americans can do to stop the media from exercising the negative influence it has. And it’s not things like cancel your newspaper subscription.

Bad News is an important book, one likely to be ignored by the news media. But the rest of need to read it and understand it. It’s that important.

Related:

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

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A work colleague in a Latin American country sent an email, asking for help. A manufacturing plant had been proposed, and while most people wanted it, a small number of radical environmentalists did not. There had been protests, road blockades, and rallies. And then, when it appeared that both the company and the authorities were going ahead, the ante was raised.

Using anonymous Twitter accounts, the protestors targeted the company’s spokesman. Scores of people were tweeting. A bounty was placed on the spokesman head — $5000 US was being offered for the spokesman dead or alive. And the tweets included his home address. Stripes were published in the local media.

I was asked to contact Twitter, which I did immediately. Then, as now, Twitter and the other social media giants were difficult to reach. They were, and are, all about communication, except when you needed to communicate with them. The company spokesman and his family went into hiding. Twitter responded two days after being contacted. The tweets, Twitter said, did not violate their community standards and would remain. 

Think about that for a moment. A US-based company was allowing its platform to be used to threaten and possibly accomplish violence against an individual.

I should mention this happened in 2014. This continued to be Twitter’s policy until about a year later, when its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, received a death threat. On Twitter. Overnight, death threats were deemed violations of community standards. It’s amazing how that works.

In a very short period of time, roughly five or six years, social media had gone from the “great democratic experiment to give power to everyone” to something darker, more threatening, and more dangerous. The first few years had been something almost euphoric; very few people today would say anything about social media is euphoric. We’ve seen its ugly side, and we’ve seen it over and over again. Today it’s called cancel culture. 

But it’s more insidious that people ganging up on someone online. What is worrisome is that it’s becoming embedded as policy with the social media giants. The concern, usually expressed by conservatives, is that a progressive / leftist mentality guides the social media platforms when they determine what’s true, what’s false, what is “missing context,” and what’s “fake news.” The Wall Street Journal took a look and determined that left-wing factcheckers were controlling the discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic. A lawsuit by conservative journalist against Facebook brought forth a really curious statement in Facebook’s court filings – that its factchecking was nothing more than opinion. I wouldn’t call that the best defense. 

In general, Big Media is comfortable with the factchecking done by the social media platforms. That’s no surprise if Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others are aligned with your own narrative and view of the world. 

Consider what happened with the Covington Kids in January 2019. The power of big media and social media converged to destroy a bunch of teenaged boys whom they believed epitomized the prevailing media narrative. As The Atlantic pointed out, the media botched the story, and the damage to their credibility has been lasting. Not to mention costly. On that Friday and Saturday, I sat horrified while I watched online friends on Facebook and Twitter hysterically embrace the role of lynch mob.

Social media are powerful and influential. According to Pew Research, more than half of the people on Twitter get their news from that platform. For Facebook, the number has been declining to slightly less than a third. My own experience has been to stop considering Twitter as a source for hard or political news and discount most of what I see labeled as news on Facebook. I follow virtually no news accounts on Instagram or MeWe. 

We have to learn how to assert, or reassert, some control over what is called news.

Related:

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

When Journalism Began to Change

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When I read Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, I was struck with how much his experience at the newspaper tracked with my own experience in corporate communications. The worldwide web and what followed was upending his world at the newspaper at the same time it had begun to change mine – and for the same reasons. We began to deal with it earlier, while The Guardian and other newspapers were affected more quickly, but we were grappling with many of the same issues and at roughly the same time (1995-2015).

I left corporate communications for a time – almost four years. I felt worked to death, spun off, and finally laid off, and I was done. I set up my own consulting firm, and I was focused on two areas of communications – writing speeches and community relations. In late 2003, a friend dared me to apply for the top communications job at St. Louis Public Schools, which I did, thinking I’d never hear anything. I was wrong. They called, I interviewed along with nine others (we were all told to report at the same time and sat in the same room until we were interviewed). I got the job and started work the next morning.

The school district was in crisis. A reform board had been elected, an outside management firm was hired, the district was found to be bankrupt, and underway were layoffs, school closings, and staff restructurings. The old communications department had been 13 people. The new one was me and one-half of another person, and we shared a secretary with another group. 

I’ve never had a job like that one. On my first day of work, I was filling out papers in HR when I was told the news media were waiting for a statement. The teachers were having a sick-out to protest changes in sick-leave policy. I did five media interviews that day, three of them on camera. One of the reporters laughed when she saw me. “We heard they’d hired you. Welcome to St. Louis Public Schools.”

For the next eight months, there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t give a media interview. I was followed home at night by reporters. I was tracked down at a car dealership on a Saturday when I was having my car serviced. Sometimes it was national media calling and doing interviews by phone. I lived, breathed, and dreamed journalists and journalism. And sometimes the news happened right next to me, like when a school board member drenched my boss with a pitcher of water or people in the aisle next to where I was sitting were arrested at a school board meeting. A good meeting, my boss told me, was one where fewer than three people were arrested.

It was a crazy and rough-and-tumble experience, but I was dealing with journalism as I’d always known it, as I was trained in it, and as I had experienced it in corporate communications. A bit more intense, to be sure, but I recognized people who saw their jobs as getting the news and telling the story. 

By the time I returned to corporate communications in 2004, something had fundamentally changed, and especially with national media. I was working in a narrowly defined area, communications for so-called “legacy” assets. A spinoff from seven years before had declared bankruptcy, and the company had regained responsibility for all of the issues that had been spun off with the bankrupt company. I was hired because I had the background for it.

Generally, the reporters I dealt with specialized in business or environmental issues, or they were local media in various locations. I was in familiar territory, and the journalists were familiar. But with the company’s main line of business, the journalists were anything but familiar, and the people involved in media relations were going crazy.

Simply put, reporters were casting news stories in a broader context of opinion. It wasn’t all thinly disguised editorials masquerading as news stories, but it was close. And it wasn’t all reporters, but it was a few key ones. I’d sit in staff meetings, listening to the problems. And it wasn’t simply a case of “PR people always dislike reporters and vice versa” kind of problems. I read the stories, and I could easily see that the problem was serious. The media relations people had tried everything – from uninviting the reporters to events to traveling to meet with the reporters’ bosses. Nothing had worked. 

At one staff meeting, after yet another example of what should have been a balanced story had been turned into a disaster, I offered a suggestion. “We have a web site. You’re going to have to critique the story and publish the critique on the web site, showing exactly what’s happening.”

By the looks I received, they must have thought I’d landed from Mars. You didn’t do that with reporters. It would make it worse. They would hate you and get even. That was not a solution, and no one had ever done that before. “You don’t get into a spitting war with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

“Embarrassment at doing a shoddy job is the only thing I know you can do that might work,” I said. “Seriously, what’s the downside?”

My advice was not accepted. The problems continued. For years. Until the day a worse-than-usual outrageous story was published, inventing “news” out of whole cloth. It was all bogus. It was so bad that a major journalism school called out two reporters for what they had done. But only people following journalism had seen it.

By that time, one of my responsibilities included the company’s blog. We often published links to stories about the company. Without asking permission, I published the link to the journalism school’s statement, without comment, and lots of people saw it, including people inside the company. The offending reporters were pulled by their editors from covering the company for six months. 

Today, we have a phrase for the problem, and it is a serious problem. Many people will tell you that our national media no longer report the news, but instead maintain, promote, and defend the narrative (a post-modern concept if there ever was one), whatever the narrative happens to be. And it’s exacerbated by social media. 

How all of this might have started is unknown. A lot of things fused together – post-modernism, fundamental changes in university academics, the growing political divide in the United States, and more. The narrative is not an active conspiracy of publishers, editors, and reporters colluding to report the news in a certain way. It would likely be easier to deal with if it was a conspiracy. Instead, it’s group think, group think shared by many of the nation’s elites, and it’s killing journalism. And the rest of us

Related:

How Email Started a Revolution

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Lower photograph by Absolut Vision via Unsplash. Used with permission.