Author: Tom Doerr, President of the Press Club of Southwest Florida, Adjunct Professor of Journalism, Florida Gulf Coast University
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The Wicked Witch of the West sees Dorothy and her companions as a threat. So she unleashes her army of flying monkeys. The monkeys do not question orders. They do not examine evidence. They do not decide who is right or wrong. They simply carry out the wishes of whoever commands them. That is what…
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Living and working in Washington, D.C., was special. As a young VP of News 40 years ago, one of my favorite things to do was visit the Vietnam and Lincoln Memorials at night. I would take a visiting job candidate there after dinner. We’d walk over to the Vietnam Memorial Wall first. It seemed that…
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One can imagine what it must be like for a political party when the realization finally sinks in, that moment when it’s clear its actions fail to meet the promised expectations. It’s like a huckster realizing the mark isn’t buying the con. Worse still, it’s when the audience knew it was being played long before…
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“One of the things that will happen, as surely as the sun will rise, is that someone will lie: Your governments will lie to you. Sometimes unknowingly, but more often on purpose.” — Ben Bradlee The late Washington Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee made that statement to a group of journalists at a 1990 conference in Prague.…
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Hopefully, Will Rogers was watching from heaven when Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche was recently interviewed by Major Garrett on CBS Morning News. Blanche appeared on the program to discuss the grand jury indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. Garrett once again demonstrated he is a superb journalist. Blanche, however, showed something else altogether.…
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At the time of this writing, the gunman who attempted to crash the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night did so less than 12 hours ago. Already, the conspiracy machine is spitting out its usual slop: Trump’s “people” staged the event. Fine. Any story can fall under the umbrella of possibility. But our truth-based…
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I keep thinking about something the historian Yuval Noah Harari said recently, matter-of-factly, but with the weight of history behind it: In the contest between fiction and truth, fiction usually wins because “…the competition between fiction and truth, fiction least politically, usually wins because the truth is just too painful and too complicated.” Not because…
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Last week, a federal judge took a commendably principled stance for journalists and the public’s right to know. Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled in favor of defending the truth against corrupt power. In striking down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to control who reports from the Pentagon, Judge Friedman didn’t just rule on a policy;…
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My grandmother came to spend the Christmas holidays with me in Washington, D.C. It was 1987, and I was excited to host my sweet, gentle grandmother, who’d never been to the nation’s capital. There was so much I wanted to show her. To my surprise, she just wanted to visit Arlington National Cemetery. It was…