Saturday, June 13, 2026

Setting Aside Bias


What is expected of journalists is very much like what we ask of jurors.

When the members of a jury are selected, they are asked whether they can be fair in coming to a judgement — whether they can put aside any biases or pre-existing opinions about the people and issues involved in that trial in order to come to a dispassionate, balanced decision based not on beliefs or prejudices but on the facts as established in sworn testimony.

They are also reminded of this pledge by the judge when they receive instructions just before they begin their deliberations.

The analogy is not perfect but what we demand of jurors is similar to what we insist of journalists when we send them out to gather the facts for stories.

Editors and news directors recognize that reporters are just like anyone else in that they have their own beliefs, opinions, biases, blind spots and flaws. That’s only human.

But what a good journalist, like a good juror, has to set that all aside in favor of an all-consuming commitment to get it right.

That this is hard to do is obvious, especially when the truths we discover contradict our core beliefs, prejudices or assumptions. But, as I’ve said many times to student journalists, you can’t discover the truth as you wish it to be, you have to report the truth as you discover it to be.

The integrity of our legal system depends on jurors who can follow strict jury instructions in a search for the truth. The integrity of our press depends on journalists who can maintain a similar discipline in their search for truth.

And our democracy depends on both.

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Friday, June 12, 2026

Starting Out: Peace Corps

One of the most consequential moments in John F. Kennedy’s candidacy for the Presidency was a spur-of-the-moment speech he gave in the early morning hours of October 14, 1960 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He was worn out from campaigning and had intended to go to bed upon arriving, but then he was told that 10,000 students had been waiting patiently for him for hours, so he decided instead to go to the campus of the University of Michigan and deliver what became a life-changing speech for many in my generation.

He proposed creating a new national service for students, and the youthful crowd roared its approval. After he was elected, he made good on that proposal by forming the Peace Corps.

A few years later, I was a naive young man of 22 when I went to Afghanistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1969, having never been out of the country before, let alone halfway around the world.

But by then, thousands of young people just like me were answering Kennedy’s call to serve our country not by going to war but by spreading messages of peace.

We were idealistic and naive, yes, but those of us who were male were also trying to avoid the draft, which would have sent us to Vietnam to fight a war we vehemently opposed.

Like others in my generation, I was radicalized in college to the point I considered U.S. foreign policy the imperial arm of an expanding empire.

Living in Afghanistan proved to be a rude awakening about some of my assumptions. I saw up close how mean and brutal people could be to each other in a poor society, including tribal wars, murders, bribery and cruelty like in the “Lord of the Flies.”

I also saw beauty, generosity and tenderness -- the whole range of human behavior was on display every day amid widespread illiteracy and ignorance.

The poorest people on the planet would welcome me into their homes to share the one good meal they would have that entire week. Strangers went out of their way to help me when I got lost.

When I taught high school in Taloqan, many of my students spouted political beliefs shaped by the five booming radio signals that reached our remote town -- Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and to a much lesser degree, Radio Kabul, the BBC and the Voice of America.

The brightest kids seemed attracted by socialist and communist ideas similar to the Marxist-Leninist thinking I was familiar with on campuses back home. At first I went along with their ideas about how U.S. imperialism was oppressing people in poor countries, but eventually, like any committed teacher, I began to challenge their assumptions, if only to get them to think more critically.

It was easy to see how Soviet and Chinese propaganda was distorting these young minds, and also how their views of America were affected by the worst of Hollywood. The stories they repeated about U.S. barbarism were overblown and simplistic.

U.S. troops had slaughtered innocents at My Lai, it was true, which was awful, but all armies do horrible things. Certainly no country had a monopoly on human rights abuses. Meanwhile, there were also many, many Americans like Peace Corps Volunteers who were opposed to the military and dispensing aid, food, clothes, medicine and education instead of guns and napalm.

But to be truthful, I more or less agreed with my students’ political analysis and wanted no part of the dark sides of U.S. policy, What I did wish to share were the better parts of our culture -- our beliefs in freedom, gender equality, and universal literacy.

Fewer than ten percent of the Afghans population could read or write. The infant mortality rate was the highest in the world. Women had little access to education, jobs or independent lives.

I knew my students needed a counterweight to what they were hearing on Radio Moscow, but the irony was not lost on me that here I was, an anti-war American, seemingly defending my country’s military as part of my role as a mentor.

Anyway, for Afghans in 1970, the problem wasn’t the threat of impending American intervention. The problem was that the Russians had troops massed right next door. And within a few years of my leaving Afghanistan, the Russians indeed invaded, bombing and strafing the country into submission, or so they thought at the time.

But that ended badly for the Soviets a decade later as they limped back to Moscow in retreat. Once they lost the Afghan war, the entire Soviet empire crumbled as well.

(I first published a version of this one five years ago.)

HEADLINES:

  • Trump claims peace deal ‘approved’; Tehran says not so (Al Jazeera)

  • Proposed Iran-U.S. deal would reopen Hormuz strait and lift oil sanctions, Iran state media says (CNBC)

  • Trump Retracts Latest Threats of More Strikes (NYT)

  • Iran’s Crude Production Slumped in May Under U.S. Blockade (WSJ)

  • The new precision weapon: Is the West ready for cellular drones? (The Hill)

  • Trump Picks New Intelligence Chief After Revolt Over Pulte (NYT)

  • Why Trump keeps avoiding Senate confirmation for top government roles (CNN)

  • World Bank cuts global growth outlook to 2.5%, warns of drop to 1.3% if war fallout spreads to markets (Reuters)

  • Business (Economist)

  • Trump has a new, surprising take on the higher cost of living: ‘I love the inflation’ (AP)

  • At least five states are bowing out of Trump’s ‘Great American State Fair’ (CNN)

  • Trump Officials Say ICE Won’t Raid World Cup Games, but Fans Are Worried (NYT)

  • Why Trump and Putin can’t escape their mistakes (WP)

  • Ukraine’s police chief has accused Russia of ‌recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to kill Ukrainian military personnel, following the arrest of a 17-year-old suspected of murdering a serviceman on the instructions of a Russian operative. (Reuters)

  • The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I (NYT)

  • El Niño Is Back. Here’s What It Could Mean for Hurricanes, Heat and Flooding (USNWR)

  • All clear given at Pentagon following after ‘hazardous materials’ alert (Al Jazeera)

  • Southern Baptists advance a formal ban on churches with women pastors (AP)

  • Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails (Verge)

  • Anthropic v. OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI (Reuters)

  • For a Second Time, Trump Muses About Americans Sharing in A.I. Wealth (NYT)

  • Taylor Swift Urges Travis Kelce To Whittle Down Trampolines On Registry To One (Onion)

 

at No comments:

Thursday, June 11, 2026

No Regrets

Last night at Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks staged one of the most amazing comebacks in sports history to defeat the San Antonio Spurs. The place turned into a delirious “Garden Party,” which brought to mind an old pop song with that name.

***

I once started a screenplay with the words: “I have two kinds of regret. Regret for things that I did. And regret for things I didn’t do.”

Regrettably, I didn’t finish that project.

When I started publishing daily essays on Facebook at the beginning of the pandemic, the most common feedback I received was that my memories resonated with people. But those memories were only one part of what I was trying to achieve.

My past, like everyone else’s, was littered with successes and failures, wins and losses, darkness and light. In retrospect, good and bad seemed roughly in balance over my eight decades. You could say the two kinds of regret were also therefore in balance, I suppose.

Which brings me to the story behind Ricky Nelson’s plaintive yet defiant ballad “Garden Party.” The song recounts the night that the ‘60s pop star played before a packed house at Madison Square Garden while trying to make a comeback in 1972.

While he was on stage, Nelson thought the concert was turning into a disaster because the crowd seemed to be booing him off the stage whenever he tried to sing one of his new songs.

It later turned out that most of the booing was in fact directed at the security guards, who were roughing up some rowdy members of the crowd outside of the singer’s line of sight. But by the time Nelson learned about that, he’d already written and released “Garden Party.” (Lyrics below.)

His assumptions about the boos may have been flawed; nevertheless he had a hit on his hands.

The key line in his song is “If memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.” 

That song turned out to be a very big hit, Nelson’s last in fact. Perhaps he regretted being wrong about the booing; or perhaps not. He died at age 45 in a plane crash on the way to a New Year’s Eve concert.

HEADLINES:

LYRICS (“Garden Party” by Rick Nelson

I went to a garden party
To reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories
And play our songs again

When I got to the garden party
They all knew my name
But no one recognized me
I didn’t look the same

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone
So you got to please yourself

People came from miles around
Everyone was there
Yoko brought her walrus
There was magic in the air

And over in the corner
Much to my surprise
Mr. Hughes hid in Dylan’s shoes
Wearing his disguise

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone
So you got to please yourself

I played them all the old songs
I thought that’s why they came
No one heard the music
We didn’t look the same

I said hello to “Mary Lou”
She belongs to me
When I sang a song about a honky-tonk
It was time to leave

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone
So you got to please yourself

Someone opened up a closet door
And out stepped Johnny B. Goode
Playing guitar like a ringing a bell
And lookin’ like he should

If you gotta play at garden parties
I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang
I’d rather drive a truck

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone
So you got to please yourself

And it’s all right now, yeah
Learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone
So you got to please yourself

at No comments:

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Old People Walking

As I drove to my pharmacy one recent morning, I noticed that many of the pedestrians along my route were elderly people. I watched how they walked — some upright and spry, others stooped, heads down, shuffling, moving slowly.

Some used a cane or a walker. Some had a companion who helped them on their way.

As I parked my car and got out to walk into the pharmacy, I became one of them. Just another old person walking.

At the other end of life, in infancy, we watch for a baby’s first steps. This is universally celebrated as a big moment.

But a person’s last steps are never celebrated.

***

There is a role for old people in our society that is often overlooked, and that is what we see when we look out at the world around us.

We see not only what is there now but what used to be there. We remember what is gone and what has been replaced.

To a certain degree, we can see where things are going based on where they have been.

It’s context and we might be able to provide some.

But in the eyes of those much younger than us, we may have always been old — only old. So they may think we don’t know about the kinds of things that concern them. 

Heartbreak, for example, we may know a thing or two about that. Losing someone you love can lead to excruciating pain. We know about that.

We also know that better times will come, and that while you may never fully get over certain losses, the world has ways of making things right again.

Just wait and see.

HEADLINES:

 

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)