{"id":222,"date":"2010-08-01T19:11:06","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T14:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/?p=222"},"modified":"2010-08-01T19:18:16","modified_gmt":"2010-08-01T14:18:16","slug":"journalist-as-interpreter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/2010\/08\/01\/journalist-as-interpreter\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalist as Interpreter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our daughter “me” just drew my attention to another geriatric blogger. In fact, Donald P. Irish is almost twenty years my senior. Makes me feel very junior. I was totally taken by his recent post Why Is There Terrorism? Part Three<\/a>, a very powerful and profound analysis of one of the most\u00a0acute threats to civilisation as we know it.<\/p>\n

Professor Irish argues very\u00a0convincingly what I have felt all along but was unable to formulate so elegantly. OK, so I agree with him, or maybe, he with me. Is that the end of it? The post isn’t easy fare. Apart from the suboptimal visual layout, the sentences tend to be complex. They deal with abstract ideas, and much of his supportive evidence is not part of the common man’s experience\u00a0nor education. His prose, while elegant,\u00a0is far beyond grade six reading level. In short, he talks like one academic to another.<\/p>\n

But is this enough? He doesn’t have to convince me – I already am. To have real impact, political impact, historical impact, he has to convince people of Sarah Palin’s ilk. He has to talk to the mass of Tea Party members. He must get John Boehner to listen up and say “Yeah, halleluja”. But few of us have been educated in classical rethoric. Cicero could do it and so could George Washington.\u00a0Unfortunately, rethoric hasn’t been taught in our school system\u00a0for the past 100 years.<\/p>\n

But there is one profession trained to talk to Joe Bloe, Mr. and Ms Middle America and even to Sarah Palin – journalists! When they aren’t\u00a0 satisfied with feeding the plebs\u00a0pulpy pablum, they can really\u00a0capture people’s attention. There must be enough\u00a0serious and eloquent\u00a0journalists out there, who\u00a0can give Donald Irish’s powerful ideas a powerful voice! Where are they?<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Donald Irish: what we need is more mirrors and fewer gun sights!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can journalists translate Donald P. Irish’s powerful analysis of the causes of modern terrorism for the unwashed masses? Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[22,23,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232,"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}