💯A New Book I'm Very Excited About!

Published: Fri, 09/11/20

Author Mary Cronk Farrell

Stories to Inform & Inspire

September 11, 2020

Hello ,

Quick follow-up to last week's story From Fugitives to Famous!. It's sad news about a member of Sweethearts of Rhythm, the girl band that confronted Jim Crow in the 1940s, playing to overflow crowds across the country.

One of the last living members of the band has died of Covid-19. Lead trombonist Helen Jones Woods, the daughter of the band's founder, was eleven when she started playing with the Sweethearts. She died at 96.

Now for the latest, a new book that takes an in-depth look at fake news. I'm ordering copies of Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of News to donate to teachers.

Though it has been several decades since I officially worked as a journalist, freedom of the press is bone deep in my body. So, I've invited author Linda Barret Osborn here today to tell us about her new book, including the part about people living on the moon! No kidding!

A New Book I'm Very Excited About

Praise for the book—

"Deeply researched and beautifully written, Guardians of Liberty enlightens and entertains readers of any age." — Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post

Welcome, Linda Barret Osborn! Tell us how you came to write this book.

In 2017, I became alarmed at the way President Donald Trump was disparaging the press and questioning its validity.

I had some knowledge of the First Amendment, which reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”

But as with all my books for middle school and young adults, I learned a lot more about freedom of the press along the way than I knew at the beginning.

It seemed important that young people understand how today’s issues are connected to the beginning of our history as a country. Actually, I wish more grownups understood this history too.

One of the most delightful things I found in my research was that in 1835 the New York Sun reported that men were living on the moon.

These were no ordinary men.

A lithograph in the New York Sun illustrates the claim that life had been discovered on the moon.

“They averaged four feet in height, were covered . . . with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings” like bats. Unicorns also roamed the moon. So did a strange kind of beaver that walked upright on two legs.

The Sun explained that a respected South African astronomer had made the discovery using a huge telescope. New Yorkers rushed to buy the newspaper and read each day’s installment. When the story was revealed as a hoax—a great entertainment—sales of the Sun continued to rise.

The Sun’s moon story was an example of actual fake news. The paper’s editor knew it was false when he published it.

Fake news is not, as President Trump sees it, press about himself that he just doesn’t like.

By attacking journalists, by undercutting the idea of factual reporting, it seems that President Trump was going against the intentions of the Founding Fathers who wrote that amendment.

Men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison envisioned a press that would be a watchdog against government abuses of power.

Remember, they were reacting to the British royal government’s treatment of the colonies.

They also believed that a democracy needs an active, vital press representing all points of view: a press that would encourage debate and open discussion of ideas to create an informed citizenry.

Because Americans do hold widely differing points of view, no president can count on only “good” press.

So from the early days of our country, the First Amendment put the president—no matter what his political party—and the press at odds with each other. No president likes negative press.

Here was something else I wanted to explore and it soon became clear that combative, hurtful words about presidents are not new in our history. (Below, Author Linda Barrett Osborne)

John Adams, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as President Trump, have been ripped apart in the news.

Even George Washington got bad press. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson wrote that Washington had encouraged “political iniquity and . . . legalized corruption."

Sometimes the presidents remained silent. Sometimes they fought back against their critics.

Sometimes they let partisan newspapers fight it out for them.

But by 2017, the “press” did not just include printed papers. Radio, television, the internet, and social media had all changed the way the news was delivered.

The presses roll at the New York Times in 1942. Newspapers were printed this way from the early twentieth century until the rise of digital, computer-based printing."

And because the technology had changed, President Trump could bypass the press, using social media directly to reach the public. He could continually attack the press as often as he wished, tweeting many times a day.

Since I wrote Guardians of Liberty, people have asked me why I think Trump is different from other presidents and their attitudes towards the press. Nixon, after all, called the press “the enemy.”

But only Trump has called the press “the enemy of the people." "Don’t believe the crap you see from these people—the fake news,” he said to a VFW convention, pointing to the reporters. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

I think all press, no matter what the medium, has its biases. (Below, Author Linda Barrett Osborne)

In addition, more Americans get their news from social media. Much of that “news” is opinion. Some of it is definitely fake, though not in the way President Trump defines it. So we all need to become better judges of the accuracy of what we are reading.

In many ways, professional journalists, who have a standard of accuracy, are our best bet. But there are fairly easy ways to check anyone’s sources and statements. Tweets, press briefings, and speeches are on record. They are filmed and recorded. The White House itself posts the transcripts of speeches, so you can see what the president actually said and if and when he said the opposite.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court cases on press freedom I covered in my book have tended to uphold the First Amendment. The need for national security during war has been the biggest challenge to this freedom.

New technology has changed the nature of news. It should not change our belief in the importance of free expression in a democracy, the same belief the Founding Fathers held. I think we are at a turning point.

We can agree that disparaging and attacking the foundations of one of our most precious freedoms is acceptable; or we can believe, as a society, that freedom of the press is a principle we need to defend, practice, and value.

Thanks so much, Linda!

News and Links

Thanks to Sandy for sending book recommendations. She gave Echo Mountain by Lauren Wolk five stars. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review saying the book is an

"exquisitely layered historical novel set in Depression-era Maine.

After the financial crash forces a tight-knit family of five to move from town to build a cabin on Echo Mountain, a tree-felling accident puts 12-year-old narrator Ellie’s father into a coma. The family’s struggle to survive intensifies, made worse by fears about whether their beloved father—a tailor turned woodsman who, like Ellie, loves the wild—will ever awaken.

Via strongly sketched cabin-life cadences and memorable, empathic characterizations—including, perhaps most vividly, of the wilderness itself—Newbery Honoree Wolk (Wolf Hollow) builds a powerful, well-paced portrait of interconnectedness, work and learning, and strength in a time of crisis.

Sandy also recommends The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister, and Harry's Trees by Jon Cohen. I notice a strong theme of the the forest and nature runs through these titles, which appeal to me. Thanks, Sandy!

Until next week...

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