The great writers do it alone. It’s exhilarating. It’s frustrating. It’s fun. It’s maddening. Writing demands the best of our creativity. It makes us push ourselves to express ideas and emotions. Sometimes it’s things we can’t say out loud, but can pour onto the page. We can re-write it until we get it just right. Find the right word until it sounds good when we read it, both silently, and out loud. As much as writers love to immerse themselves in their work, all the great ones struggle. James Joyce said, “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for the sins committed in a previous life. The English reading public explains the reason.”

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Guns. We love them. We hate them. We can’t live without them. We can’t live with them. They dominate our lives. Stories about their use and misuse dominate the news on many days. They are at the core of our political discourse about crime, terrorism, race, constitutional rights, national security, personal security, immigration. It seems the most important and divisive right we have as Americans is our right to have a gun. Most people agree with other rights guaranteed by the constitution like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to peacefully assemble, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to a fair and speedy trial. But the right to bear arms divides us like no other.

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Words are a journalist’s most important tool. For broadcast journalists, I would argue they are more important than the video we use to tell our stories. It’s how and what we say about the pictures and the people we interview that has the greatest impact on the viewer. It’s because that’s how we normally interact with each other. The choice of the wrong word can change the meaning of our story, and damage our credibility. Once we lose that, our most critical bond with the viewer is lost.

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My wife noticed some weeks ago that there didn’t seem to be anyone living in our neighbor’s house. The only lights that came on appeared to be on a timer. There was no sign of anyone leaving for work in the morning, and no cars in the driveway. We wondered if everything was alright. Another neighbor told my wife that she had seen a moving van in our neighbor’s driveway. My wife finally spotted the neighbor outside the house, and went over to ask if they were okay. He said they had moved to a house they had bought about three years ago. They had been fixing it up, and finally moved in, and were going to sell the house next to us. We were never very close to the neighbors, but found it strange that they didn’t tell us they were selling the house. They had lived next door for over 30 years. But they left something behind. They left an American flag flying from the front porch.

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The difference between men and woman is never more dramatic than the weeks leading up to Christmas. Once Thanksgiving is over, women start the process of planning and preparing for the biggest day of the year. It’s their Super Bowl. This requires a strategic and multi-pronged approach. It can take on the characteristics of a complex military campaign aiming toward a successful landing on Christmas Day. This is a grueling test of a woman’s ability to multi-task. One of the biggest challenges is dealing with the man in their life. This the most dangerous time of the year for our relationships. Men should be very afraid.

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The fear and hate being spewed over us by Donald Trump, the man the majority of those Republicans polled want to see become the next president, can be heard in the echoes of history. For a country founded by people fleeing religious persecution and an oppressive British king, some of us want to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of our country, and ban all Muslims from coming in because we are afraid. The attacks in San Bernardino and Paris by radical Islamic terrorists have shaken us all. We are engaged in a different kind of war with an enemy that festers from within, and can strike any time in any place during the course of our daily lives. But reacting out of fear and prejudice make us complicit with the enemy we want to defeat. (more…)

Just about all of us are walking around with a camera on our smart phones. There are millions of pictures being snapped everyday, probably more than ever before in history. They can be posted instantly to be seen around the world in seconds. Photography has always been a hobby of mine. In some ways, I find it more interesting than video. That sounds strange from a journalist who spent his career in television news always searching for the best video to tell a story.

Photographs make time stand still. Whether your taking pictures of your family, or pet, or an accident scene, or the beauty of nature, or a news event that split second is preserved, and will never happen again. Some pictures you will remember forever. The bad ones can now be instantly deleted. The ability to take a picture at any moment can make us more engaged in the world around us. We are able to share our experience as we saw it. But can good photography be considered art?

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Reporting is about the search for the truth. What is the truth? How does it affect the viewers or readers? The toughest truths to uncover are the ones people don’t want you to know. So reporters sometimes have to get through the cover up before they can get to the truth. The newly released movie “Spotlight” is the story of a group of investigative reporters in the Boston Globe’s Spotlight unit that uncovered the sexual abuse of about a thousand children by almost ninety Catholic priests and the church’s systematic cover up. They were pushed by a new editor who thought the paper hadn’t dug deeply enough into the scandal that had broken in Boston in the early 1990s with the conviction of one priest who had molested children and was moved around from parish to parish. We all now know that the Catholic church’s sexual abuse scandal involved hundreds of priests and thousands of victims worldwide. “Spotlight” is the best movie about reporting since “All The President’s Men”.

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The rhetoric is hot when the times call for cooler heads in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris. Men who want to be president like Donald Trump saying we should consider closing mosques. Rand Paul asking people to sign petitions to keep Syrian refugees out of the country. Ted Cruz telling college students it’s “absolute lunacy” to accept Syrians refugees. Ben Carson asking Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to pass legislation to block funding for the president’s Syrian refugee plan to allow up to ten thousand of them to enter the country in the coming year. If Republicans try to take this out of the budget plan that must pass by December 11th, we could be threatened with another government shutdown. Even more than a dozen governors are saying they would close their states to the refugees. Immigration experts have told CBS News that states do not have the power to refuse immigrants with refugee status. So they are just blowing hot air. The president responds by saying that refusing Syrian refugees is “not who we are”.

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