Tuesday marked my first day of class at Orange Coast College.
I can’t believe it’s been six years since I began teaching an introduction to journalism class there, and I’ve met a number of great young students along the way. Some of the more talented ones we’ve even hired.
What I enjoy is, every semester I get to meet a crop of new faces who do their best not to snore through my stories and lectures.
Usually, it’s a lot of fun for me to teach these kids about this career I love so much.
Usually.
There was the one semester I faced an unusual battle. A number of students entered with preconceived notions of the press and the conspiracies they believed we in the media all concocted.
One particular student insisted, among other things, that reporters pay money for stories regularly and the big bosses at major media organizations like CNN regularly tell reporters what they can and cannot report.
And interestingly, these students didn’t believe CNN was too liberal. On the contrary, they believed CNN was too right wing. That it was towing the Bush administration line in Iraq and not properly reporting what they believed were the atrocities of the war.
When I told the student she was simply wrong, mainstream reporters don’t pay for stories, CNN bosses, or Fox News bosses or newspaper bosses don’t order reporters to take a particular slant, she argued with me.
Finally, I asked her, “Have you ever been in a newsroom?”
Of course, she had not.
So that brings me to my main point.
I was scanning through the Daily Pilot website after two weeks of vacation and ran across a particularly mean-spirited back and forth taking place on the reader comments for a story titled, “South of the border etiquette.”
There were 85 comments, mostly about illegal immigration, on a story that actually had nothing to do with that topic.
And one of the comments from a reader named Andrew Dorian reminded me of that OCC student. Dorian was responding to another reader who cited a Los Angeles Times article on illegal immigration.
“Note to ‘you must be kidding’ — the LA times is not a paper to reference for balanced views on illegal immigration since they are a pro-illegal institution,” Dorian wrote.
Now as most people know, the Los Angeles Times is the Daily Pilot’s sister paper, also owned by the same parent company, Tribune.
