The get-it-right blues

The other day, while the echoes of insults still resonated between my ears — “you idiot” is one of the less vulgar aimed at columnists, in my case a salutation not always unjustified — I received the following note.

“Roger, could you speak to two FGCU News Literacy classes this semester? A suggested topic might be fealty to accuracy. But it’s up to you.

“And could you bring your harmonica?

“Thanks. Glenn.”

The invitation itself is balm, a flattering compote from a man who comes attached with a single brand: Glenn Miller.

An extraordinary reporter, once upon a time Glenn probably emerged from a sac of printer’s ink, not amniotic fluid, wielding a baseball bat. To say Glenn loves baseball is an understatement. He’s addicted to it, and to books and movies — has been since birth, apparently.

He spent his decades-long first career in the newsrooms of daily papers giving other Americans a chance to understand accurately what really happened — what happened on a high school ball field or on the windy edge of a World Series fastball. What happened in any of countless other places central to our culture: sports places for the most part because in those days he was a sports writer.

But all manner of American places, too: in the arts, business, politics, the environment, education, health, crime, local history and the ceaseless rhythms of lives lived and lost in what they used to call the obituary pages.

Glenn was typical of many journalists I knew in my years as a daily newspaper reporter only in a couple of regards: If a story offered conflicting interests and opinions — whether or not they were contentious — he described both or all sides of the issue in that story. Also, he loved accuracy in everything to a fault, which is like loving a solid frame of hardwood to a fault; none of it can be warped, not even a single two-by-four, bye and all of it must be plumbed precisely precise great in the building of a great house, or any house.

Also a published novelist, Glenn’s now teaching this thing called “News Literacy” at Florida Gulf Coast University, and I haven’t figured out if it’s a second career or just an extension of the first.

News literacy might be what and how much you know about the local community, the region, the state, the country and the world around you on any given day or week. It might also require that “fealty to accuracy” Glenn describes — that insistence on getting it right in all things.

If I were to go talk to students in those classes, I might have to confess that my fealty to accuracy, while theoretically energetic, has been known to falter occasionally, starting even before my journalism career.

Sure, there was the time in the black ink of a news page I wrote the word “public” to describe a state agency, but left out the “l.”

And having lived in Florida for about 25 years, on another occasion, I misspelled Marjory’s name — you know Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of “The Everglades: River of Grass.” That’s like being a devoted Christian and misspelling Jesus, or a Buddhist and misspelling Buddha.

For me, the plague of inaccuracy started before journalism.

There was the time I spent a semester in graduate school studying English literature and wrote a final brilliant brill paper on the 16th century English g poet, Edmund Spencer.

If you see any thing wrong with that, you’re right — and you’re probably literate. Ol’ Edmund didn’t spell his last name that way. He spelled it with an “s” in the middle, not just at the beginning. Spenser, like that. But that’s not how I spelled it. My version was singularly inaccurate.

Woops.

Spenser with an s wrote lines like this: “It is the mind that make good of ill, that make wretch or happy, rich or poor.”

While that might be true, the mind doesn’t get to just arbitrarily decide what’s accurate, or what’s true. Reporters like Glenn know that. So when they report the distance from Miami to Utqiagvik, Alaska, for example, a place formerly known as Barrow, they don’t say it’s 4,000 miles.

No. Not if the information is available, and if it comes from a dependable source that can be verified by another dependable source — they call that corroboration. In that case, they say the distance is 4,220 miles.

Accuracy, it turns out, is a thing riddled with facts. There are no non-facts in accuracy.

Does that mean that if it’s accurate, it’s true?

Well, no. The truth is trickier. To say the distance from Miami to Utqiagvik is 4,220 miles will always be accurate, but to say that it’s a long damn way, may or may not be true.

It’s a long damn way if you’re walking. But if you’re setting off from Florida or anywhere else sometime in 2025 en route to the space station to retrieve two hapless astronauts who were told back in June 2024, inaccurately, they’d be spending eight days in space, it isn’t. That’s just not true.

Here’s what is accurate, and true: the harmonica Glenn refers to is also known as the 10-hole mouth harp. You can blow the blues on that little scorcher from Miami to Utqiagvik, and right through the News Literacy classes at FGCU if you choose. Maybe to lyrics like this:

“I woke up this mawnin, I forgot to check the facts/ Say I woke up this mawnin, Lord, I forgot to check the facts…

“Well my baby done left me when the boss done fired me, Jack/ Yeah, my baby done left and the boss, he fired me, Jack!”

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