[Vision2020] students away from home

[keely emerinemix]

Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving, Visionaires --

I wonder if anyone else noticed a particular story in this morning's Daily News, which, as most of you know, is what the Alford family has decided will pass for print journalism on the Palouse but which once again has proved to be nothing more than a shill -- a flack, a PR job, a booster -- for New St. Andrews and all things Kirk-related.  If you think the D-N does a great job covering news from Latah and Whitman counties, you might be offended if you read further.  If, on the other hand, you recall ever having read a real newspaper, and kind of thought newspapers were a good thing, you might share my dismay.

I'm referring to a top-of-the-page spread reporting on the scintillating Thanksgiving holiday plans of two NSA students -- one from Texas, the other from Toronto -- who might have dinner today at Roy Atwood's place and then, you know, like, hang out and have a snowball fight and do some studying.  This gripping account of two nice, if somewhat bland, young men, neither of whose stories demonstrated any particular angle or interest except for the fact that they could free up time for an interview, covered a good 12 column inches and included fascinating revelations about how people from Texas and people from Toronto have different past experiences with snowfall.  Now, I want to be fair here -- perhaps the reporter was going for a lighthearted piece on "Thanksgiving Plans Of People From Places That Begin With The Letter 'T'," but I'd have to then point out, in the interest of consistency, that Texas is the state and Toronto is the city, and so Texas and Ontario are the parallels, and they begin with different letters, and so there goes the angle of the story . . . which kind of begs the question, then, of the news-feature value of the Thanksgiving plans of two out-of-state guys at a small college with a demographic that's remarkably, and purposely, similar in every respect.  Of course NSA might be the home of someone with a newsworthy or even feature-worthy holiday story, but in this case, it seems that simply being a St. Andy's guy in November was all that was required.  

The editors of the Daily News, dazzled as they are by our local Oxford Donnabees and their students' perspicacious views on snowfall and studying, might have forgotten that there is in Moscow another college -- a university, in fact -- that has nearly 40 times the number of students, many of whom are not upper-middle-class conservative, white, Christian Americans, and some of whom likely have really newsworthy Thanksgiving plans, even if they're not learning Latin.  I can't help but wonder if the away-from-home experiences of someone from Ghana or Guatemala, Poland or Papua New Guinea, might be at least as gripping, perhaps even as educational, as those of our Texas and Ontario students.  I wonder if, in a university community of eight or ten thousand students, there might be someone conquering enormous hardship during the holidays, or spending his or her week off rescuing endangered sea turtles, distributing AIDS medicines to the poor, or organizing a food drive for prisoners' families.  I'd even bet that there are folks in our community who open their homes to all sorts of different people for Thanksgiving dinner -- maybe even people they don't know, but who, as is always the case in university towns, are away from home for the holidays and need a place to feel welcomed.  There are a lot of interesting, uplifting, edifying feature stories available to newspaper reporters during the holiday season; I know because I've written quite a few myself.  But there's something terribly skewed when a local newspaper blithely skips over the rich fields of genuinely news- or feature-worthy stories and instead consistently runs straight over to the least-likely-to-be-significant and far-less-relevant arena of carefully groomed, judiciously packaged, and energetically promoted "movement" that is New St. Andrews.  I hope the two young men interviewed have a great Thanksgiving, but my hoping so is about as newsworthy as is the description of their plans for the day -- or mine.

I don't fault NSA for heartily promoting itself.  It's a disgrace, though, that its efforts are augmented so readily by a local institution that ought to exist to promote something else entirely:  The responsible, unbiased, and robust reporting of NEWS, not NSA.  

Keely
www.keely-prevailingwinds.com


 		 	   		  
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