LAWRENCE, Kan. - This past Friday, KU's school of journalism, in its infinite wisdom, awarded the William Allen White Award to Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. I became familiar with Pitts' work a little over ten years ago via my hometown newspaper, the Lawrence Journal World.
I like Pitts because, though his politics tend to lean left, as mine do, he's not a knee-jerk liberal, either. His columns offer a sort of horse-sense, real-world analysis of events that appeal to me in a very personal way. Often when I read his columns I find that Pitts is the only commentator saying exactly what I'm thinking. If only I could write those thoughts as eloquently as he.
Pitts gave a great talk to a packed room in the Woodruff Auditorium of the Kansas Union. (Packed in the middle of the day during a snowstorm, I might add.) He talked about days gone by when phones were of the rotary dial persuasion, there were only three networks on the television and facts were facts.
He talked about a time when Americans all worked with the same set of "actual, factual facts," while today there are an increasing number of people who prefer to live in their own ideological world with their own sets of facts. And though he acknowledged that the left is certainly not immune from this phenomenon, a disturbing amount of the right has embraced it fully and is basically creating a separate America.
He talked about how there's a hardcore constituency of the right who, no matter how much evidence is presented, refuses to believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and instead contends that he is not even a U.S. citizen. He talked about how hard right conservatives have created their own online encyclopedia called Conservapedia.com, because Wikipedia.com is supposedly fatally tainted by a liberal bias. (You should check out Conservapedia's definitions of "liberal" "homosexual" and "atheism." You'll either laugh your head off or be chilled to the bone, depending on your disposition.) He talked about how some conservatives continue to push to have so-called "creation science" taught in public schools because they refuse to believe in evolution and how some conservatives are trying to rewrite school history textbooks to teach our kids that the Civil War had absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
Unfortunately, Pitts didn't really have any solutions, except to say that reasonable thinking people should continue to expect only real, factual facts from their news outlets and public schools.
I guess I don't have anything clever to add to this analysis. It was a great speech and the award was well-deserved. And I got to see one of my all-time writing heroes in person. Man, I love living in Lawrence.
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