7 Comments

Always appreciate your self-reflection. And thanks for sharing your insights on how Trump is a symptom. Simultaneously, he is also, even unwittingly, an accelerator of the disease. “Brandolini's law" is also aided and abetted by the explosion of social media in the past decade. To deal with this law and today's misinformation wars, I wrote Kyle Munson wondering what journalism schools are doing to combat misinformation and fake news. I think your modest, self criticisms would be healthy lessons for today's students.

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thank you, Ralph

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We're now in a weird phase where when a reporter holds their subject to account /that/ becomes news. I see the softball questions being asked, and wonder what would Mike Wallace think?

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Someone told me that the audience had a whole lot of unfamiliar faces. The people sitting next to him were from Oklahoma. Someone else said Trump was mean to the police. No matter. He won, although not the popular vote. Did you see the article about the Central College professor of data science who calculated that someone could win the presidency with 20% of the popular vote?

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This particular event was a media avail only on the plane. He came to Pella later. I recognized almost no one in the audience, which is strange for Pella. I've never been to a public event with hundreds of people in Pella where I didn't know lots of people in the crowd. This was a first. I didn't see him being mean to the police, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I saw him "short" with law enforcement. No, I missed that article, but would love to see it. I was in the media scrum where he yelled at us, "I hate them, but I wouldn't kill them..." and the crowd roared. When he left the stage an opera aria played, and I knew what it must have felt like to have been at a Mussolini rally in Italy in the 1930's.

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👍🏽 Spot on.

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