No rush to judgment on MU

Matt Pearl

If you want to read my thoughts on the University of Missouri hunger strike, you’ll have to wait a week. Unlike the larger media surrounding us, I’d rather not jump the gun and declare anyone a saint or sinner before a bit more of the truth has surfaced.

The event does give us occasion to think about a more general flaw in our race, and that is our habit over being ruled by our kneejerk reactions to everything.

If the moment calls for a response, we give little (if any) thought to the long-term repercussions of our words and actions.

It’s a sensationalized-nightly-news-fueled phenomenon. We get our information quickly, and so we in turn react to it quickly.

The truth is supposed to come from those reporting our news to us, and so the just-add-water brand of flash journalism satisfies us.

It makes me regret that the weekly news magazine has fallen by the wayside in our society. After a week of day-to-day, deadline rush journalism, it was refreshing to have a weekly periodical that could take a breath and present the news to us after a few days worth of perspective.

But for the most part, the weekly national mags died, or they’re sick and waiting out the days until the end.

We were impatient. We wanted our ideas fed to us now, and the art of reflection has been lost.

You remember reflection, right? It’s when you take a self-critical look at what you have done, or what you have seen, and then make a calm evaluation in the time following the blur of daily activity.

Yeah, we’re not fans of that in our society anymore. We read it or hear it, (re)post it on social media, give our two cents worth — but then we rarely look back and consider how rash we have been, how over hastily we have reacted.

But The Saturday Evening Post let you slow down — get a look at the headlines from a bit more of a cumulative perspective.

It’s the way things are, and I won’t look back, but it’s a change that I’m not sure we made for the better.

So we will read all sorts of rush-to-judgment literature on Mizzou in the next week, and the waters will still be muddied with the polluting presence of racism, pseudo-racism, media bias, credited and discredited sources and other human garbage.

Do you know how I know that this is so?

Because we don’t hold anyone accountable anymore. When everyone has a mobile device capable of reporting and re-reporting the world’s events, you have tens of millions of people who think they’re journalists.

I’m not the journalism degree-holder in my family: my father and sister are both bachelors of that science. But I minored in the field, and I learned enough from my 101 courses in mass communication to know that a journalist is responsible for reporting the truth.

If it is not truth, he ought not print it or broadcast it.

But the rules of journalism don’t hold on Facebook or Twitter, do they? Yet the power of social media equals — rivals — that of the traditional press. It’s terrifying, and it’s a dangerous trend in news reporting.

So, before we all re-light the Ferguson debate with Columbia as our context, let’s take a minute to think about things, to consider how irreplaceable truth is. If we must do so, let’s allow others to shoot the harmful back-and-forth debate, and save our words for later, when we have more of the facts.