Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

red bar

In Praise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Models, Problem Practices, , , , , , , , , , , ,

This administration wanted us to be repelled by values that were honored just days before.

For decades I worked in a professional environment that placed a lot of faith in honoring the ideas of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). For most of my years in college teaching these were part of the catechism of values to make higher education available to as many students and faculty as possible. We wanted more diverse students to choose our program. And we knew in the 70s that more women should be part of the faculty. Living by these standards was not always easy, but evidence of progress was all around us: the positive symbolism of an African American President, a woman taking over as head of the country’s largest automobile maker, and a revolution in the number university presidents, deans and provosts with diverse backgrounds. All were proof that higher education and the managers of innovative groups  everywhere were no longer a monoculture.

Who knew that in a few more years that on January 20th of this year the nation would suddenly be asked to abandon these progressive ideals that made these changes possible, This administration wanted us to be repelled by values honored just days before, not to mention an iconic statue sitting in the harbor in front of Donald Trump’s hometown.

Now, this government is centered on white guys and a few women seemingly selected by Trump for their fashion-magazine looks. I can imagine storage rooms in corporations stacked floor to ceiling with unused copies of employee training materials with titles like Fostering Diversity in the Workplace or The Multicultural Corporation. Could the implicit racism of this destructive change be mitigated if we shifted the language to celebrate “differences,” “fair play” and “cultural variety?”

Positive values can reside in good people, even when their traditional signifiers have been stolen.

When I first heard the pronouncement against DEI–followed so far with the termination of 120,000 federal workers–I thought it was a joke: akin to banning positive expressions about Santa Claus, puppies, or landmark civil rights cases. But the negative reactivity of the new administration is deadly serious and spreading. We know we are on a slippery slope when politicians think they can take ownership of traditionally eulogistic words and simply redefine them as dyslogistic. The mistake of confusing words with thoughts is a fool’s idea of governing, resulting in governments like Florida’s, where language, curricula and books are already censored. Thankfully, positive values can reside in good people, even when their traditional signifiers have been stolen.

This all seems so dystopian and retro. It is no surprise that golf next to a golf cart is the president’s game, or that his wife stays mostly out of sight, or that his country club decorated in the gothic style of Sunset Boulevard (1950) is his preferred setting. Even the temporary co-president of Elon Musk with roots in white South Africa has become an ersatz Norma Desmond who no one wants to see. I expect a new Executive Order may yet come to affirm all of this patriarchy by making Old Spice the official national scent, along with a preferred diet of a sandwich of white meat with mayonnaise on white toast.

In spite of the abundance of pale rich guys milling around the White House, beyond Washington there is a more inclusive representation of talented folks who still sustain so many successful institutions of this country. Thankfully, Emma Lazarus quoted at the base of the Statue of Liberty never imagined that the nation would ‘Deport the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’

black bar

The Murrow Play: A Timely Reminder

Problem Practices, Reviews, , , , , , , ,

The play is a timely and generous act of public service by the 63-year-old film actor.

George Clooney is appearing on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater next month in a theater piece adapted from his screenplay written twenty years ago with Grant Heslov. Good Night and Good luck is based on the successful 2005 film about Edward R. Murrow, easily the most honored news broadcaster in the history of the medium. Murrow’s name is still tied to references to journalistic courage that went from radio in World War II to the first full decade of commercial television. A group of young news reporters known now as “Murrow’s boys” saw him as a model, with most going on to develop important careers at all of the networks.

The action takes place in a tense CBS television studio in the bowels of Grand Central Station, as Murrow unleashes a broadside against Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. It is 1953, and Murrow and producer Fred Friendly are ready to take on the senator known for reckless attacks on scores of civilians and celebrities imagined as “communist sympathizers.” At this time in the cold war the charges stung: the rough equivalent today of passing state secrets to the nation’s enemies.

“McCarthyism” still stands for career-destroying accusations by the powerful that have little validity. Sound familiar? Then, the specific issue was over the senator’s false accusations of communists in the Army, State Department, and probably the Girl Scouts as well. If he were more self-aware, our current president would hotly deny the many unflattering comparisons made today. Delivering lies and false accusations with abandon never seems to go out of style.

The uncomfortable coincidences are a reminder that the Fourth Estate will to have to stand strong against our accusatory President and his followers. The banning of the Associated Press from the White House is a case in point. They are soldiering on anyway, along with The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others. Ditto for several cable news outlets as well.

The play is a generous public service offered by the 63-year-old film actor who has never done live theater, tackling the role of Murrow for the first time. In a clip from the 2005 film a younger Clooney plays producer Fred Friendly, and Murrow is played with uncanny accuracy of David Strathairn.

The film and the play involve two key moments in Murrow’s career: a single program setting the recording straight about a mistaken charge  by McCarthy leveled against Milo Radulovich, a former member of the Air Force. The second event is a few years later in the form of a speech to peers warning about not caving in to soft news stories.

To be branded “pink” then was to be a national pariah and a false charge against Radulovich.  A See It Now program carefully prepared by Friendly and Murrow was a chance to call out this particular conspiracy theory that included allegations of communist collusion. This was no sure thing. The network and its sponsors were mighty unhappy that Murrow and Friendly wanted to take down McCarthy in prime time. CBS Chairman William Paley liked Murrow best when he did celebrity interviews for the popular Person to Person. But he was less enthusiastic about CBS Reports and See it Now when the Murrow team aired controversial programs on subjects like the blight of farm workers, or the empty attacks made by the rabid senator.  Here is a sample of Murrow at work in the Radulovich program:

The second moment emphasized in these dramas is a speech delivered in 1958 to a gathering of Radio and Television News Directors in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. In my study of Murrow in Persuasive Encounters (1990) I described the speech as a the rarest and most interesting kind of public address: a warning—a Jeremiad—to peers and colleagues. Murrow made it clear that the young medium of television was failing in its most important mission of providing nationally important and significant news.  With a bit of sarcasm he told his peers that their work is worthless if it does not help their audiences sort out fictions from hard fact. The address infuriated Paley, who favored light comedy in prime time.  But it was typical of Murrow.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive. And I mean the word survive, quite literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then perhaps, some young and courageous soul with a small budget might do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done–and are still doing–to the Indians in this country. But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizen from anything that is unpleasant.

It might now be obvious to accuse television of “escapism and insulation from the realities of the world.”  But this was Murrow when the medium was still establishing its own conventions. And it suggests that his kind of journalism could still teach us something today.