The most prominent newspaperman, book reviewer, and political commentator of his day, Henry Louis Mencken was a libertarian before the word came into usage. His prose is as clear as an azure sky, and his rhetoric as deadly as a rifle shot. Frequent targets of his lance were Franklin Roosevelt and New Deal politics, Comstocks, hygenists, “uplifters”, social reformers of any stripe, boobs & quacks, and the insatiable American appetite for nonsense and gaudy sham. But his life was not defined by negativity. He was positively enthusiastic about the writings of Twain and Conrad, the music of Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, and the victuals offered up by Chesapeake Bay. (googled)
Two days ago, I was called by Josie Kohler of The Weekly Newspapers about her interviewing me as part of her newspaper profiling all the candidates. I said okay. She asked me some questions about my campaign and then said she wanted to meet with me to take a headshot. She suggested we meet at a beach, since I am pushing for Key West to have a nude beach. When I asked which beach? she said Smathers.I said I’d meet her at the east end of Smathers, because that is where the Naturists wanted the City Commission to designate a nude beach, and it’s also where Commissioner Teri Johnston had brought a resolution before the City Commission asking it to designate a nude beach there on a trail basis. When Josie sounded like she didn’t know where I meant at Smathers, I asked if she lives in Key West? She said she did. So I said it’s the part of Smathers closest to the Airport, away from the bathrooms and Key West. When she still seemed uncertain, I said it’s where the east end of the beach plays out, there’s an entrance to the beach and a rock jetty where the parasailing companies sometimes pick up customers. Easy to find.
When I arrived at the east end of Smathers at the agreed time yesterday morning, Josie wasn’t there. I waited about five minutes and decided to call her on my cell phone to make sure she knew where I was. She answered, said she had come by but wasn’t sure and had gone all the way up to Double Tree Grand Tree. I said there’s nothing up there and to head back. She said was on her way back and said she saw me on the sidewalk talking on my cell phone. She drove up, parked. I gave her a campaign T-shirt, and then she took several photos. Then, she did an interview.
I found that I often had to repeat myself and correct what she read back to me off her laptop. She didn’t seem to have ever heard of someone getting a J.D. from a law school. Or an L.L.M. in taxation. I explained that J.D. meant Juris Doctor, a law degree, L.L.M. was a masters degree in law. I said I had as much education in law as a doctor gets going to med school. When she asked where the University of Alabama School of Law was, I said Tuscaloosa. When she asked me to spell it, I did. When she read it back, it wasn’t spelled right. I spelled it again. Again it wasn’t right when she read it back. I spelled it five times before she had it right. I said Tuscaloosa was named after a famous Indian chief.
She asked me a lot of questions and I answered them all. Some pretty personal, like how many divorces I’d had. I said why not ask me how many wives? So she asked, and I said seven, which seemed to interest her in a sort of, you’ve got to be kidding sort of way? I said, yep, I’d had seven wives and had gotten a PhD in female studies, they accredited me. She said I was really strange, or something like that. I said she had no idea. No idea.
It all seemed in good fun until I asked her to include in her profile my campaign website, goodmorningkeywest.com, and to mention the Sloan’s campaign platform file in the menu of the homepage, so her readers could go there and see my campaign platform, which I said is a lot more comprehensive than what we were discussing. She didn’t say she would do it, so I kept coming back to it as our talk continued and she kept sounding like she wasn’t going to do it. I said I had done a lot of marketing and advertising work, and I knew what it took to sell a product, and I‘d been interviewed hundreds of times on radio, television and by newspaper journalists, and I knew about that, too. She said she was a journalist and knew how to write an article and for me to leave the journalism to her. I said I’d have to read what she wrote before I knew how I felt about it. She didn’t seem to like hearing that.
I said I’d had a lot of trouble with journalists writing about me and not getting stuff right. I said they hadn’t seemed to mind that they hadn’t gotten it right, and any corrections that got printed meant nothing because they were put off in a corner some place and were out of context with and seldom seen by people who had read the original article. Josie seemed even more upset. She seemed even more upset, after she asked if I read her newspaper regularly, and I said no.
I said I’d asked her several times to mention goodmorningkeywest.com and the “Sloan’s campaign platform” file in her profile, and she had not said she would do it, and that’s why I had gone into all the other. She said if I wanted people to know about my website, I should take out a campaign ad in her newspaper. Stunned, I asked if that was why she had scheduled the interview, to get me to buy a campaign ad? I reminded her that she had called me for the interview and that a journalist is supposed to give readers what they need to know.
She said what she was going to do was tell her readers to go to her newspaper’s website, and there all the candidates would be profiled and weblinks to my website would be provided. I said she was making it too hard for the readers. She needed to make it easy. I said she should do the same for any candidate who had a website, it was part of the news story. She said she wasn’t promoting candidates’ campaigns, she was promoting her newspaper.
I said if she does it that way, eighty percent of the people who read what she wrote about the candidates in her newspaper will go no farther. They will not learn what’s on her newspaper’s weblinks. I maybe should have said maybe none of the readers would go any farther because they wouldn’t be at a computer to go online and wouldn’t take the time later to do it.
When she said she was a business woman, I said she wasn’t a journalist. Very upset, she gathered her laptop and other stuff and left. I got on my bicycle and pedaled off, wishing I had not agreed to the interview. I should have been tipped off by her not knowing where the east end of Smathers Beach was. Yet I supposed it somehow fit into the big scheme.
Journalism, like the law, like medicine, like teaching, like the ministry, is a calling. Yes, in the past few decades all of that seemed to change. But it wasn’t that way in the old days, and it’s still not that way in the spirit. You cannot worship two masters. You cannot worship God and mammon. I told Josie during the interview that I’m a priest. It was the last in time of the job descriptions I gave her, after she asked for my work history.
Tom Tuell, Editor of Key West Citizen, Larry Kahn, Editor of the Keynoter, Dennis Reeves Cooper, Publisher and Editor of Key West the Newspaper, and Bill Becker, News Coordinator of US 1 Radio can’t stand my guts because of stuff I’ve written about them online. Josie may clobber me in what she writes. If so, it won’t be the first time and I doubt it will be the last.
Meanwhile, when I dropped by Sippin’ Internet Café last evening to play chess with some amigos, I looked to see if Sippin’ carried copies of Josie’s newspaper. I had told her they didn’t, but I was mistaken. A stack of Key West Weekly lay on the credenza, and I opened one right to a folksy editorial by the paper’s editor, Jason Koler. A Katie Koler was listed as Director of Sales, and Josie Koler as Roving Reporter. A family business.
In his editorial, Jason reports a conversation with a journalist from a national newspaper who’d just finished an interview with Monroe County Commissioner Mario Di Gennaro about diving in the Keys. She and her crew
had a huge array or underwater camera and film equipment and the standard questions were flying at DiGennaor and Vandenberg godfather Joe Weatherby . . . Her words went something like this . . .She said, “We are down 50 percent . . . Moral is at an all time low . . . I don’t understand . . . We are doing everything exactly the same . . .”When I replied with, “That’s funny, our numbers are up this year, she smirked at me and said, “Well, then you must be a weekly.”
Here investigative journalism skills must have been at their peak. I had no expensive camera hookup, and did not conduct a single interview.
“That’s right, we are a locally owned community newspaper and every time I put DiGennao’s name in the paper our ad revenue for the next week dips 20 percent.” (Having known Di Gennaro long before his days on the dais, we can enjoy the joke, but that old journalist at me in horror — much to my own delight).
I recommend that everyone try to find and read Jason’s editorial, because it was written by a journalist about how his small newspaper adapted and prospered in a time that is sending many newspapers, including some huge newspapers, to the cemetery. Jason has been on my email list for quite a while, and will receive a copy of this post.
I also recommed that everyone keep ever in mind that Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson and Mario Di Gennaro are bosom buddies, and that after Morgan was re-elected in 2007, he and Mario sprung a surprise and tried to hijack the Tourist Development Council. This surprise wasn’t mentioned by M & M during the 2007 mayor’s race, because M & M wanted M to be reelected. Wonder what M & M are up to this time that they are not telling us?
I also recommend that you read this morning’s Key West Citizen front page piece about the recent Hometown! PAC Call to Candidates, “City Commission Candidates line up,” and ponder what they wrote about me, which had nothing to do with what I said at the Hometown event. Nothing at all. Campaign advertisement, approved and paid for by Sloan Bashinsky, mayor candidate
(Mayor Morgan McPherson’s photo from Key West City’s website)
Not your Saville Row candidate
