Saturday on the Video Channel

You Tube! Love it and hate it. Like most social media, it can be a conduit for hate and misinformation.

But it provides an old man who honestly is of the TV generation with an addictive and pleasurable screen experience.

I grew up on TV. I hate to admit it, and I know my young life would have been better spent with less TV. Television is not called the “boob tube” for nothing. I was lucky, in a way, that I grew up in a bookish family, so at least I did start reading young, and although I’m a slow reader, I do enjoy it and still do it. Art Cullen, I’m working my way through your book “Storm Lake,” and I’m sure it’s doing me a lot more good than anything on TV or YouTube ever did.

But maybe “working my way” is an implication that reading is cognitively more complicated than the experience of having pictures flash before your eyes and hearing sounds that are pleasurable, for some reason.

Anyway, back to YouTube. Part of the issue with TV is that, even in longer programs, it’s flashes of quick images. While it’s possible to follow a longer plot and some complicated thought through the tread of a TV story, for the most part, I think, my brain is not that engaged by most videos. I tend to consume YouTube at times of rest—at night after completing a task (like tonight, for instance) or while eating lunch.

What have I been dipping into while editing images and preparing world-famous blog posts? A mix, which is what YouTube tends to provide. It’s quick snacks, which can be satisfying if not always mentally as stimulating as a book about Northwest Iowa can be (I’m ¾ of the way through “Storm Lake,” and I do recommend it).

So here is just a rather random look at what I’ve been mindlessly hanging with on a Saturday night:

Tunes—I use Pandora on several computers, but sometimes let YouTube play DJ for me. A small smattering of my Saturday playlist:

1-Taylor Swift, “You Need to Calm Down.” This 2019 song is probably not that musically sophisticated—pop songs usually aren’t, I suppose, but I’m not really a music person. I just enjoy the music I enjoy, and for whatever reason Ms. Swift hits my buttons with this one. It’s an “I need to smile, let’s play some Tay-Tay” song for me:

2-Garbage, “Empty.” A 2016 video from these 1990s rockers. Not exactly as bright and playful as Taylor, but still this song often sums up my mood when I’m frustrated (as who isn’t in 2020) and makes me feel better:

3-4-"Bailo En Mi Cuarto" by Anne Reburn, Dubax, HarryU and Debi Gutierrez; and "Bored" by Tessa Violet and MisterWives. OK, I do like male singers, too. I’ve played a few Red Hot Chili Peppers tracks in my Saturday jam, too. But I do have an appreciation of the female voice, for some reason. Anne Reburn does many entertaining covers and her own original music, too. Tessa Violet is the same, in a way, in that she has done many covers, although she’s further in her career and does more of her own original music. Anyway, both of these talented women teamed up with others on two songs that are both resonate with my life in 2020. Come Monday, when classes start, I may be a bit less isolated than I want to be—but 2020 has featured lots of alone time, and these two artists teamed up with other singers and with fans to collaborate on social musical videos about 2020. Maybe YouTube does have something to offer:

Music is, of course, personal as well as social. You like what you like and it may or may not appeal to me. I will credit YouTube partly with expanding my musical horizons a bit. I think we all have a special relationship with the music that was popular in our formative years, and I feel that YouTube playlists both can bring me back that music whenever I want (Simon and Garfunkel have some great videos), but also bring me new music.

And YouTube bring me video blogs. As a blogger, I particularly appreciate the Vlog Brothers. So:

5-Hank Green, Vlog Brothers, “Go Play!” The next book in my reading cue, right behind “Storm Lake,” is the second novel by this bright writer, who is also a YouTuber, along with his brother John. And I just really like this video. It made me think of my son Ben, who has a PhD in Math from ISU. I’m curious about what he thinks about the joy of math:

I use YouTube to watch some news content, now and then. But I do like some quirky content that isn’t available elsewhere. I read “The Gazette” for news, listen to NPR and let Rachel Maddow explain the world to me a few nights a week. I have CNN and Reuters on my phone. So YouTube is for “news” that’s a bit more, well, different.

For example, what do you know about bird penises? Don’t think Joe is about to get weird on you—I love a YouTube channel called “SciShow” and they give me information on all kinds of topics, including updates on COVID-19.

6-SciShow “Why Did the Rooster Lose Its Penis?” Besides posing a clickbait question, the video is interesting to me because it basically does not answer the question. The true answer is that science doesn’t know why—but evidence shows ancestors of most birds probably did have external male genitals, so somewhere along the line many birds lost theirs. I think it’s just fun to listen to the SciShow people explain interesting, quirky topics like this (and Hank Green, by the way, is one of the driving forces behind this channel and hosts may SciShow videos, but not this one):

I like several informative YouTube channels. Dr. Emily Zarka on “Monstrum” is a favorite. I watch most videos on PBS Eons, too.

So that’s it, my Saturday six. It’s not a complete list of my YouTube habits, and one of the dangers of the internet site is that its addictive nature challenges a viewer to not over do it. I didn’t get into “The History Guy,” for example, or Jim Gaffigan or Taylor Tomlinson, two of the several comedians I like to enjoy on YouTube. I often sample videos from the late night talks shows—I miss your “Colbert Report,” Stephen, but still enjoy your stuff.

I’m not trying to cover all of my liked videos. I just decided to post a bit on what I happened to be enjoying tonight while thinking about the nature of this hugely important internet site. Like all social media, an issue with YouTube is that it is, in a way, user constructed—what I watch tends to lead to what I’m fed. That means that rather than an open world where I might see anything, I’m actually seeing a rather narrow neighborhood crafted from my personal preferences.

I don’t hate that. But I do need to be aware of it, to, and actively break out, now and then, of my own neighborhood. So besides trying to ensure I don’t spend too much time on YouTube, I also am interested in suggestions that don’t come from the internet algorithms.

Consider this post, to some extent, a few suggestions for you if you too are taking a break this Saturday night. And based on what you see here or what you may know about me, what would you suggest I sample next?

Horray and Boo: Iowa Wins a Pulitzer

From Pulitzer.org--the prize.

Well, it’s a great day to be a journalism professor in Iowa. It’s not every day someone wins a Pulitzer Prize and I get to say: “Hey, I know that guy.”

I lived in Early Iowa, a small town 15 miles south of Storm Lake, in the 1990s. I can’t honestly say I subscribed to The Storm Lake Times for all of those years—but for much of my residency there, I was a Times reader.

And now Art Cullen, the Iowa newspaper editor most likely to be mistaken for Mark Twain, has won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for editorial writing. Bravo.

A journalist's mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Cullen wrote his prize-winning editorials about the lawsuit between the Des Moines Water Works and agricultural counties, including Buena Vista in northwest Iowa, that pollute the Des Moines River, the source of drinking water for Iowa’s largest urban area, due to the county's agricultural runoff.

Cullen spoke with the Sioux City Journal about the importance of small-town journalism in a video report that I hope you will watch.

The Des Moines Register made a video of its own, too—but despite being flashier, it lacks something without Art speaking in it.

From the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, Art or Mark.
Photo by Allison Bradley for IowaWatch.org.

I stated before that Art Cullen looks a little like Mark Twain. He’s like Twain in a bit more than looks. Twain was, in his time, an acerbic critic of social norms. Recall the prayer he wrote in 1905 ("The War Prayer") that was a harsh satire of war prayers in general. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking of Twain as a warm, fuzzy storyteller—when in fact he was a clear-eyed curmudgeon, and could be sarcastic.

Cullen doesn’t mince words, either. See his editorials. As he noted, anybody with a nose knows there’s something wrong with water in Iowa. And Cullen is a fierce progressive voice in the extreme conservative King country of western Iowa.

The Storm Lake Times is a family business. In news accounts of the Pulitzer Prize, Art Cullen credits his son Tom Cullen as a co-winner of the prize because the son’s reporting fueled the father's editorials. Art Cullen also says his brother John Cullen, who founded the Times, taught Art Cullen to write.

Well, congratulations Art Cullen. You proved that good, clear, strong writing can come from a newspaper of any size, and you did something that should make Iowans proud.

But even as we celebrate, we need to recall hard realities.

The Iowa legislature is controlled by a virulently conservative Republican party. Terry Branstad is still governor, soon to be replaced by his GOP Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds. Donald Trump recenlty appointed an EPA chief who in the past has sued the EPA, and Trump's administration shows no taste for environmental regulation.

The only power that can change the rules to stop the pollution that caused the dust up that led to a Pulitzer Prize is government—and right now, government doesn’t seem to care much about pollution.

Yes, I know, Governor Branstad made a halfhearted try last year to fund an inadequate plan to reduce water pollution, but it was killed by his own party. Rights now, Republicans at the state and federal level are in no mood to tackle any pollution, whether the result is dirty water or global warming.

The big story that the Cullens have been telling is not that a Des Moines water utility sued Buena Vista County. Nor even who paid for the county to defend itself.

After all, that lawsuit has already been dismissed.

No, the big story is that nitrates are still today leaking into Iowa water, poisoning not just Des Moines but also small towns. And a dead zone grows in the Gulf of Mexico as chemicals from Iowa farm fields make their way downstream.

In recent decades, farming as an industry has changed in ways that are not sustainable nor compatible with our collective health and well-being. And, while we can wag our fingers at farmers, they are, for the most part, just a part of a giant system whose rules they don’t set and whose trends push them to this style of fertilizer-intense farming. And farmers are facing tough economic times. Farm incomes have been hit hard as commodity prices fall—and as nitrogen is pumped into the soil, as the waters grow poisoned, and as Iowa slowly turns foul and unhealthy.

As Cullen noted, anybody with eyes and a nose knows.

That’s a big story. It’s not a pleasant one. We need brave journalists like Art Cullen to continue to tell it, even when we don’t want to hear it.

Congratulations to the Cullen clan on being recognized for their good journalism. And please get back to work.