Mark Knows It All

                    At my office Christmas gathering today we talked about our Christmas traditions.  Family is very important in the Mahoning Valley resulting in many traditions traversing the years through our very large, extended ethnic families.  Third generation Americans have turned up the volume on those traditions as we see our children marry outside of our ethnic group, have our grandchildren, and move out of the area in search of greener pastures!!  They have become Americanized as the Feast of the Seven Fishes morphs into beer and wings at Quaker Steak and Lube. For people like me, the transition has been somewhat difficult.  Those of us from very large families also attend lots of funerals.  My parents, aunts and uncles and many of my cousins are now gone. What began in my life as two huge Christmas gatherings on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day has become what restaurants are open on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!!!!  My wife has a brother and sis

University of Virginia students protest in front of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity  Yellow journalism is a term coined in the late 19 th century to describe the battle between the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers in New York City.   They used yellow ink to exaggerate their headlines.   Using trumped up stories loaded with factual inaccuracies has been around since the invention of the printing press.   After all, if the goal is to sell newspapers, you have to give the public a story they want to read. With the advent of radio, and television, and now the electronic media, the American public has come to expect, and even believe, that the press is doing a good job by reporting the news that needs to be reported in an accurate and objective manner.  That is misplaced trust.  Today’s press is anything but. Today’s rule of reporting is to define the political narrative you want the public to hear, then bend the facts of the story to fit the narrative.  The proof of that approach was