Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 128, No. 161, Ed. 1 Tuesday, April 17, 2018 Page: 4 of 12
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4 - TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2018
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
Bygone booksellers,
poets and songwriters
i
Political bias festers in social media platforms, too
Letter to the editor
A
LOYALTY
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
Dalton Delan is an accomplished American writer, editor, television
producer and documentary filmmaker. His column is copyrighted by
Berkshire Writers Group.
Send your letter to the editor to editor@
gainesvilleregister.com. All letters are
subject to editing for clarity and length.
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
LEAKS, LIES, AND
PARTISANSHIP
There are plenty of troubling examples on the liberal side
that get responses ranging from applause to shrugs, because
that kind of bias has their approval.
The hottest ticket in Washington this past week was
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg submitting to
a ritual flogging before a couple of congressional committees
because his social media platform had allowed a company
hired by the Trump campaign to use data from an estimated
87 million users to try to shape their political opinions.
Zuckerberg was obviously unhappy about that, not so
much because of collecting and “sharing” the data — which
is the business model of Facebook and other social media
sites — but because it supposedly was a factor in Trump
getting elected.
Indeed, there is plenty of evidence — none of which
has ever prompted a congressional hearing — that
Facebook is hostile to conservative opinion.
As reported in the recent past, Facebook executives
i had no problem with the 2012 Obama campaign
collecting data not just on those who volunteered it
I — according to
L z some estimates, as many as 190 million.
Taylor Armerding
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@ whitehouse, gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068 , Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, 940-898-0331
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
mm:
•
wk but on all of their “friends” as well
That wasn’t a problem because, according to an
Obama campaign staffer, “they (Facebook) were on
our side.”
Just this past week, a columnist for a metro paper that
leans right wrote that while her columns are very popular on
some sites, they get zero traction on Facebook and Twitter.
Also, a couple of African American women, Lynnette
“Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, who
have become social media stars in part because they are
Trump supporters, were booted off Facebook because they
were deemed “unsafe to the community.”
I’m not a follower of either, so I don’t know if I would feel
“unsafe” reading their posts. But it’s hard for me to believe
they could be any worse than the scatological, obscene,
violently hateful attacks I see aimed at President Trump and
his supporters any time I go on Facebook.
This isn’t your typical political vitriol. This is open,
unvarnished, profane hatred, including expressed wishes for
Trump to be hurt, killed or, as one put it, “just die quietly.”
For Zuckerberg to claim in front of a congressional
committee that the “only” content his censors remove is that
which promotes terrorism or hatred is demonstrably false.
No, I haven’t seen the kind of creepy, robotic recitation of
a script on channels that obviously lean left, like CNN and
MSNBC. But while the script is not the same, they all read
from the same left-wing playbook, just as Fox News reads
from the right-wing playbook.
A robust diversity of views and philosophies in the
media is a good thing. But the Sinclair video is an ominous,
creepy example that eliminating that diversity through
consolidation is a bad thing - no matter which side is doing
it.
Taylor Armerding is an independent columnist. Contact him at t.armerding@
verizon.net.
The video montage created by Timothy Burke of Deadspin
would be funny were it not so creepy.
By now, surely you have heard about it or been among
the millions who have watched it. Several dozen local news
anchors from some of the 173 stations owned by Sinclair
Broadcast Group are all reading from the same script.
They decry “fake news” and other faults of the liberal,
mainstream media including “the troubling trend of
irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country”
and that “some members of the media use their platforms to
push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly
what people think.”
That, declared one liberal pundit, qualified as the “real”
fake news and put Sinclair ahead of Fox News as “the biggest
embarrassment in the media.”
Of course, the script was presented as opinion, not
news. But it was still creepy. How could the executives
of that many stations all across the country have
the exact same opinion, and express it in exactly the
same way?
Because, obviously, it was the opinion of only one
set of executives — the owners of all those stations,
who decide what their editorial stance will be.
Which, as a side note, is one more confirmation
that former Republican presidential candidate Mitt
Romney was correct when he said “corporations are people.”
Machines, money, cameras and buildings don’t have opinions
— people do.
And it was, in a very real sense, fake opinion dictated
opinion. It is right up there with the famed Russian “news”
(propaganda) agency Tass and other government-controlled
outlets in dictatorships like China, North Korea and Iran.
Not that there is anything new in the U.S. about corporate
owners of media organizations controlling the editorial
stance of their properties; they have and they do. But the
Sinclair video — dozens of anchors, who are robotic enough
as it is, even more robotically reciting the same lines — was
a stark illustration of why it is bad — very bad — for the free
exchange of ideas to have one owner controlling so much of
the local television landscape.
So, it has been encouraging to see that both Democrats
and Republicans have opposed Sinclair’s effort to acquire
Tribune Media. That kind of consolidation and control of
information is dangerous — even more dangerous than
having just one company making essentially all of a major
product, like vehicles. The marketplace of ideas is much
more important — and fragile — to be handed over to a
monopoly.
All that said, outrage over this sort of thing ought to
extend to other media abuses, and it doesn’t. I can’t help but
note that the outrage over the Sinclair script is selective,
which is dangerous itself.
The overwhelmingly liberal mainstream media and
their many millions of followers are outraged not so much
because of the corporate bias on display here, but because it
is conservative bias.
The gusts of April in a 21st century spring carry a hint
of honeysuckle in the air as I turn down Prince Street in
Alexandria, Virginia’s Old Town. That sweet southern
scent acts like a bite of Proust’s madeleine. The tap-tap of
my leather soles on the brick sidewalk is my knocking on
the door in 1977.
I look up at the entrance, and the simple sign “Irene
Rouse Bookseller” is gone. As she is now. She lived to see
the Internet, Kindle and all the other electrobabble that
consumes our lives today. When her ashes merge with
the sod of her native Virginia, the dwindling ranks of rare
book dealers will absorb her loss like water as a stone
sinks below. The surface will not reveal her
passage. #5
The association of antiquarian f
booksellers, in words one might expect of so |
quirky a breed, ranks among its members
“lighthouse keepers, poets, helicopter pilots "
and professional musicians.” Characters
all, and in Irene, larger than life. \
As I stepped through that doorway on "J*
Prince Street two score and one years
ago, little did I know that the shop’s
proprietor and her inimitable husband Bill would become
lifelong friends. In time, books would come to possess
me. But just starting out then in my bibliophilia, when the
Rouses would return from a book hunt in England with
a first edition of Dickens, it was always Christmas in July
with pages of snow falling all around me.
It wasn’t long after the bookseller’s house became
a second home to me that I caught the editor’s and
impresario’s bug. Though my own gifts were small and my
achievements scant—contributions to continuity books
from a nearby outpost of the Time-Life empire -1 could
use my skills to help bring out the best in others. Thus
were the “Positively Prince Street” readings born. With
the youngest of the Rouse daughters at the door taking
donations, and Irene in back pouring wine, laughter and
applause flowed from audiences and customers who came
to hear the latest local and itinerant talent.
That was a time, dear reader, when young people might
still aspire to be poets and singer-songwriters, and joining
a proud literary tradition was to walk in the steps of the
19th and 20th century greats. Little did we know that our
great expectations would surrender to time and technology.
Poets could still be heroes, not just permanently out
of work. We were standard-bearers for the humanities,
back when English degrees were prized, at least by some
foolishly romantic souls. Such an evening of word and song
was a page of heaven on earth. Like the ‘basket’ bistros
around Bleecker and MacDougal in Greenwich Village,
the little shop on Prince Street became a mecca for area
writers. We were the lost boys and girls of books, panning
for literary gold.
Today, if you get lucky spinning Amazon’s wheel, you
may yet find a scarce copy of an anthology sampling those
readings, painstakingly assembled with donated scraps
of Time Inc. paper, bespoke edges of a larger commerce. If
you do, and you open the pages of Positively Prince Street,
you might just hear coins jingling in the basket, voices
filling the evening air, glasses tinkling, laughter and hands
clapping, the warmth of hugs and goodbyes as footsteps
echo out into the night. Our youth and ambition traveled
outward as well into a world not yet rendered virtual and
immaterial, leather and cloth-bound more rarely today.
Now, in a digital century in which my record albums
languish in the basement by a disused turntable, if I look
too closely at my shelved shrine of signed books, most of
the authors I once knew are dead and gone. Their pages
are all that is left of them.
In the wayback machine of the 1960s, Bob Dylan sang,
“I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, that we could sit simply in
that room again; ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,
I’d give it all gladly, if our lives could be like that.” The
bard of Hibbing has grown long in the tooth, his voice a
smokestack shambles, croaking Sinatra tunes meant to be
crooned. The last echoes of a postwar boom.
I recall the “aha!” moment for a fireman summoned to a
used bookstore I once haunted. It turned out to be a false
alarm and, upon looking around, he notated the “old book
smell” that had been mistaken for an electrical fire.
One day I’ll take my place upon a shelf reduced to ash,
and the parade will move on. ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival,’
wrote Herman Wouk, and later Jimmy Buffett ascribed an
album to that sentiment. Somewhere in Margaritaville a
bygone bookseller par excellence is smiling down. It’s only
a paper moon after all.
Goodnight, Irene.
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Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 128, No. 161, Ed. 1 Tuesday, April 17, 2018, newspaper, April 17, 2018; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1324211/m1/4/?q=Lamar+University: accessed June 3, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cooke County Library.