Joel Mathis

A lot of talk this morning about President Trump's disastrous interview with Axios' Jonathan Swan. Here is one piece of feedback I found intriguing. I think Laswell put her finger on why you don't see these kind of interviews* with Trump more often, despite the fact the president does a fair number of TV interviews: It's hard to watch.  I don't enjoy watching combative TV interviews -- would rather read a transcript afterwards. For all the shouting of my opinion that I do, I'm not big on real life interpersonal conflict. So perhaps I'm projecting here, but I suspect a lot of people feel the same way. (A lot of other people clearly don't, for what it's worth.) Why does this matter to the Trump situation? Because -- as always -- TV news tends to be more about TV than news. Ariana Pekary , who just quit her job at MSNBC, explains this:  It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decisio

Channel 6 in Lawrence, Kansas airs its last newscast tonight . Once upon a time, I had the privilege of trying to become a TV reporter while still writing for print; I spent my 30th birthday ad-libbing crazy stuff on live TV because the city commission election results were very, very, very late coming in. And some of you may remember the time I went to Columbia MO dressed in KU gear to get on-camera reaction in advance of a "Border War" basketball game. You hear me say journalism will never love you. It won't. I thought at the time we were building something new, something that might survive the then-nascent turmoil of the business. Wrong. So many things I've tried to build during my career have disappeared. Poof. And I cannot lie: That hurts. A lot. My ego wants a legacy, and it's hard to leave a legacy in institutions that no longer exist. But what would I have done differently? Truth is, I enjoyed the hell out of being a jackass on Channel 6. I loved being a b

I'm uncomfortable with this : The Society of Professional Journalists, hearing an emotional plea from Rebecca Aguilar, a member of SPJ and of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, voted Tuesday to recommend that newsrooms discontinue using the terms "illegal alien" and "illegal immigrant." The resolution from the 7,800-member organization says only courts can decide when a person has committed an illegal act.  Aguilar argued that using those words insulted Latinos and all those who are or had once been in the United States illegally. She used the example of her mother, who became a "proud American" in 1980. Her mother felt insulted "every time she heard that word," Aguilar said of the phrase "illegal alien." The appropriate term? "Undocumented people." Ugh. The problem here, as I've written before , is that the 11 million "undocumented" people in the United States are here ... illegally . Have t

At right is today's front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a demonstration of why -- much as I'd like to support local journalism -- I can't bring myself to subscribe to this paper in print. The big main story ? The one that occupies the two-thirds of the space above the "fold" and is thus the main selling point to buy the paper off the rack? It's a two-day-old story. And it was written by the Los Angeles Times. The first issue is one that print newspapers will always deal with. They simply can't hit the news with the same speed as the web. (The story broke late enough Sunday that the Inky, apparently, couldn't or didn't get it on Monday's front page.) And the Inky's editors, in all fairness, went with a story that analyzes the fallout from the WikiLeaks document dump instead of reporting it as "new" news. The second issue, though, goes to the heart of the Inky's problems. It used to be one of the newspape

Seriously, it's hard to top this : A month after setting new standards for whiteness, the region is setting new ones for wetness. I mean: Ewwwwwww .