When I was young, I was privileged -- and thrilled -- to have access to great news writers and reporters. I started reading the Chicago newspapers every day, sometimes two or three different newspapers, when I was six years old! It was a wonderful experience, a formative experience.
People like Jack Mabley and Mike Royko displayed their talents daily, evaluating and opining on local, national and world events. I became a devoted reader of sports writers like the great David Condon, Warren Brown and Robert Markus and many others. Their respective styles illuminated and heightened the reporting and the events that were their focus.
Magazines, omg what a grand treat! Time, Newsweek, Life, Sports Illustrated...I was in awe of the reporting, the writing, the photography and the editorial presentations.
Journalists shared knowledge, shared opinions, and introduced the people and the circumstances that made the news. Often, they blew up the facades that had been erected to shape or even conceal the truth.
The people who reported on television were frequently veterans of radio news and the print news world, and they became fixtures in ours lives, in our homes. The power of their messages was magnified by the immediacy of their medium. Their reports could arrive within minutes of events. It was an amazing evolution.
One element that they all seem to have shared was a sense of the responsibility to report in an evenhanded fashion, an awareness that the event or events were the focus, and they were the conduit to the public. They seemed to me to prize their respective and collective integrity. That integrity was the backbone, the foundation, of their ability to be trusted as reporters to the world.
I have outlined this because I have just finished watching, at noon on this day, the President's news conference. Our nation and the world is under siege as it has not been before in my lifetime. The situation is fluid and evolving at great speed. There is no template to follow to know how to react. The President and the people who have been called upon to respond and protect us are challenged in a unique and enormous manner.
These news conferences are live on TV and radio and the internet. The questions posed by the reporters are the keys to our learning about the developments and the actions -- and the thought processes -- of the people in charge of our national well being.
So I watched in amazement as one reporter became shrill and strident in asking why someone in the administration, and by association, the President, used the term "Chinese virus". The reporter went on to suggest --stopping short, barely, of accusing-- that this was a racial slur.
Another reporter picked up the same questioning minutes later, wanting answers to the perceived racism inherent in addressing the issue.
Yet another reporter demanded to know if we should expect virus cases to increase 10% every 12 hours -- because the count, somewhere, went from 100 to 110 cases overnight. The obvious arithmetic of compounding, based on a tiny data sample, seeking to extrapolate it into an even worse scenario than we are all experiencing.
The economy of USA and the world is in a meltdown as COVID-19 explodes. Every resource available everywhere is being deployed by governments and industry across the globe to fight the disease, protect the populace and try to preserve our economic well being.
If ever there was a time for insightful questioning, if ever there was a time to demand answers, this is it.
That does not, in my view, include self-serving "look at me", off topic, nonsense questions that must be given due thought and response, lest that be inferred as yet another offense. These questions aren't being posed by reporters of the talent and integrity that the task and the profession demands, and the "sanctity of journalism" argument that is used as a justification for this asinine behavior is a further mockery of the dedication and greatness of those men and women who set the standards for ethical and responsible journalism.
We must be vigilant in the pursuit of the truth.
Sadly, that has come to include appraising the intentions of those who represent to us that they are seekers of truth.
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