‘I say it here, it comes out there’

In the 1987 movie “Broadcast News,” the Albert Brooks character – a good reporter with the face for radio – is home on his couch, telling William Hurt’s pretty but stupid TV anchorman what to say by prompting him over the telephone.

He makes a statement to producer Holly Hunter who relays it to Hurt through his earpiece and Hurt repeats the comment on the air, causing Brooks to utter my favorite line, “I say it here, it comes out there.”

I’m not ashamed to say I have used that line several times myself when things I said to my wife or posted on my blog turned up later in the day on the news.

Albert Brooks, Holly Hunter and William Hurt
in a scene from 'Broadcast News'

Just yesterday, for example, I wrote an essay in which I compared the current administration’s media strategy to the way Richard Nixon had first criticized and later threatened the media, who dogged him after the break-in at the Watergate.

I wrote that from experience, having been hired as a brand new reporter in 1972 and working in the media through the Watergate scandal and beyond. I googled a few details just to be sure I remembered them correctly and then wrote an entry for my blog. After posting my essay, I scanned Facebook and some other sources and found several stories comparing Alternative President Donald Trump to Richard Nixon.

I say it here, it comes out there.

Also yesterday, I suggested only half-jokingly that the media should boycott the Correspondents’ Dinner, leaving no one in the audience but Breitbart and InfoWars. Again, after posting my blog, I read a Facebook story saying…wait for it…that media outlets were threatening to do just that.

I say it here…

The point is this: That’s what media people are supposed to do. They’re supposed to exhibit a constant curiosity about the people and things around them, apply their own experiences, read what others write, think about things that other people just accept as reality and wonder “what if this” and “what if that and “wonder why that thing happened.”

If they’re working journalists, they apply that curiosity to their work and they go out and get the answers to the “what ifs” and “wonder whys” and they never stop until they do. I wish there had been more of that during the Trump campaign instead of wall-to-wall coverage of every speech and rally in real time, which – to quote Bill Maher – made Trump “look like he was president before he was.”

I’ve often used the example of the media as Dr. Frankenstein, creating a monster and then acting shocked and surprised when it escaped and started roaming the countryside killing sheep. It’s an analogy that just never gets old for me.

Fast forward to today and the Trump monster has thrown down the gauntlet, basically challenging the media to catch him doing something he can’t pass off as “fake news” and then banning those outlets that persistently try.

As for retired journalists like me, there’s not much we can do to get in the game we love so much. We can sit back and complain about the world or we can find some small way to get involved in it, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do with my shieldWALL blog. I used to post really long political commentaries on Facebook until I figured out that most Facebook members don’t want to read 25 or 30 paragraphs at a time.

That’s when I decided to start a blog as a repository for my rants and raves and post only a link to them on Facebook. That way, anyone who’s interested can click the link and go off campus to read what I wrote, while everyone else can skip past it and go on to the cats and the grandkids and the photos of yesterday’s lunch.

Anyhow, I just wanted to come here today to brag a little bit about still having the right instincts to follow, comprehend and analyze the news and share my thoughts with people who might care. I also want to thank everybody who reads the shieldWALL and sincerely hope that you enjoy it.

I guess I’ll keep writing it as long as the ideas keep flowing and my “VIEWS COUNT” tells me that people are still reading, or at least until someone convinces me to stop. So, thanks for reading this far. If you did, I guess that counts for something.