I didn’t like the freshmen dress code for the dining room at college. We had to wear these stupid beanies on our heads at the start of the first semester if we wanted dinner. No blue jeans were allowed. Shirts with collars were mandatory. Socks, too.
And this was at a public university. But it was 1968 in Indiana, which seemed more like living in the 1950s.
I also remember something about having to sing the school song to gain admission to the dining room in the dorm. I was 16 years old and the only songs I knew were not ones that would get me a seat at any dinner table — college or home.
The school handbook didn’t say I had to sing for my dinner if I wanted corn fritters and fried fish.
It all seemed wrong to me. I paid for college, and I paid for the dorm and my meals. Well, I borrowed a lot of the money, but same thing.
So I did what any aggrieved person would do. I looked for a way to fight back.
Only it wasn’t a fair fight. I took a poll of students at the dorm, asking what they thought of the dress code. It’s called a “push poll,” where the answers are crafted to purposely produce the answers that the pollster wants. I was determined to show the world — or at least the Purdue University community — that the dress code was more unpopular than losing a Big Ten football game or getting assigned to a 7:30 a.m. chemistry lab.
Poll results in hand, I went to the college newspaper and said I had a story about student dissatisfaction at the dorm and wanted to write about it. A perfect topic for the late ’60s. They said yes, I wrote the story about my own poll results, and my journalism career was underway.
That was 56 years ago this month. It was the last time I made the mistake of creating my own news and then reporting on it. I learned that such juvenile actions, while maybe entertaining, damaged my credibility and that of the newspaper.
Humans, like any other animal, learn from their mistakes. Most of the time. Fish still take the bait and bite the hook. Ducks still respond to a hunter’s call. And mice still go for the cheese on a spring-loaded trap.
People continue to swallow the lure set out by get-rich-easy promotions, fall to frauds and scams, pay for worthless miracle cures and believe political candidates when they promise everything for nothing.
The role of journalists is to help people separate fact from fiction, so that anyone can learn from everyone else’s mistakes and not repeat them. Newspapers, radio and news websites strive to give people the information they need to avoid taking the bait.
To do that, readers, listeners and viewers need to trust their news sources. Only then will they allow themselves to accept the facts, dismiss the falsehoods and avoid mistakes.
Sadly, public trust in news is eroding. People are turning to social media sites to get “news” that matches their attitudes. Increasingly, they unfairly attack traditional news outlets as biased, as if the word justifies what they want to believe. Too many bloggers, TikTokers and websites are opinion pages, not news, though they promote themselves as factually accurate.
A good newspaper will not tell you how to think or how to dress. It will give you the facts and let you decide. There’s no mistaking that.
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