Having crossed the mid-century mark a few years ago, I’ve been surprising myself lately. I quit a job, a career, slamming the door after fifteen years, saying never again. I am sans insurance for health and life and without consistent income. It’s very freeing yet a mix of optimism and hopelessness. Not realizing at the time, I abruptly resigned to pursue another direction in life, perhaps a new career. They say we go through several in a lifetime. A new career would be my third.
After a month of wondering in the wilderness, I did find that third career. The job was everything I could have wanted: programs coordinator for a start-up nonprofit advocating for journalism and journalists. The mission fueled my soul. I had been a newspaper reporter and dealt with the skeptical masses who don’t believe what they read in the papers. Nowadays the powerful refuse to answer reporter questions—tossing aside serious matters of national interest as ‘fake news’—to the detriment of our country, our democracy, and our future. Part of the new job was to follow top news events and find unbiased and biased reports of the same story. Given the internet, that would not be hard to do. We can practically separate straight shooters like The New York Times and The Washington Post from the intentionally right-leaning cable line-up of Fox News.
Ultimately the goal of the pro-journalism nonprofit was to educate the public, starting with school students, on the importance of distinguishing legitimate news from fake accounts and the social harm that comes from biased and slanted reporting. The issue is relevant today as the Russians continue to infiltrate elections not only in the U.S. but in every democracy. Chaos is the name of the game, and it’s created by making up stories or telling half truths posted online with some emotionally stirring imagery. Today people don’t know what to think, what’s the truth, who to believe. The old Soviets used to say about living in their communist country: “You see one thing, hear a second, and think a third.” Misinformation and controlling language and news will tear a democratic nation apart. So my new career path was like a national duty, my small part in saving our country from further decline when it comes to news.
The glass menagerie
The small staff included individuals with marketing, education and nonprofit backgrounds, mine in journalism. We worked out of a posh office building in downtown Dallas. Employee amenities were alluring: on-site health club, yoga and meditation classes, daily breakfast, fresh fruit and afternoon snacks, free sparkling water and soft drinks, weekly happy hour. Each office suite was surrounded in glass, used to write on like a whiteboard. We got busy planning our new nonprofit. We built out the website, already online but needing additional pages and relevant images instead of stock photos. The web designers worked out of New York.
A small group of us would monitor national and world news reports to place on the website’s news digest each week, distinguishing between nonpartisan accounts along with biased reports. Each of us also would contribute a weekly article researching the mass media. I wrote one about the very few online sources that monitor news coverage, such as PolitiFact, All Sides, ProCon.org, and Debate.org. I titled my article “The Great Divide: How to Find the Other Side.” Here’s the opening:
American democracy is all about opinions—allowing citizens to hear issues of the day and then decide if they are for or against, pro or con. But in the internet age, finding political websites that are nonpartisan—neither liberal nor conservative—and present more than one side of the issues requires quite a bit of research and time. Below is a list of non-biased websites that present more than one point of view. They are nonprofits, though some accept advertising along with donations, and promote themselves as the go-to sites when researching all sides of controversial subjects. Most have a blog for readers to post their agreements and disagreements. Some sites seek readers’ suggestions on new and timely topics to explore as well as poll. As our journalism nonprofit researches ways to educate and encourage the public to use multimedia in order to fully understand issues and viewpoints, these internet sites are a great place to start, as we also believe in reformatting media, in this case political news websites, so controversial issues are viewed side by side—creating equality and respect for a nation of many voices.
I loved the opportunity to work supporting journalism and journalists. Another part of our job was to ‘harvest’ journalists nationwide by collecting their emails and work phone numbers. In time we would e-mail everyone to promote our nonprofit and invite them to join for $50 annually. In addition to these work duties, we also were to attend journalism camps and conferences, sponsored by other longstanding journalism nonprofits, to talk about our mission and build membership. It seemed logical and harmless. I was learning a lot about the inner working of nonprofits.
Our boss was like others, somewhat friendly yet aloof, poised above the workers as is the normal work relationship. He stayed busy contacting national and international journalists and media professors to serve on the board of directors, writing their names on the glass wall. We had written many aspects of our burgeoning nonprofit goals on the glass. With a few more workers joining us soon, we moved into another set of suites without the ninth floor city view from our original office space. All was going smoothly for two whole weeks. I never expected the nonprofit to survive more than six months or a year but enjoyed being a part of the mission and goal: Making Americans news savvy again. My motto contribution was “Separating news from views.”
Phlth, he was gone
We loved our jobs so much, and of course the wonderful work space, that when we didn’t receive our first paycheck, we kept right on working. So dedicated were we to the cause of journalism and eradicating fake news, we believed our red-faced boss when he explained he did not realize he had to release funds from the nonprofit account to a human resource organization that provided us with health insurance, 401k, and direct deposit. We would be paid the next day, he assured. Smiling politely, understanding this was his first nonprofit venture, we kept doing the work—my last assignment being to email everyone in Congress to serve on the nonprofit’s political committee, this to ensure our website would remain nonpartisan. The goal was to have an equal number of democrats and republicans on the committee, if they would grace us with their service. I must have emailed a few dozen elected officials starting with the Texas House and Senate representing the Dallas area.
Each of us had been set up with a Cloud phone service and gmail accounts. We were assured we’d be reimbursed for using our own cell phones for work. The next morning I checked to see about pay and saw no deposit. I pursued to email the boss, but all my work accounts had been dismantled. So were those of my co-workers. I arrived to work extra early only to be met by the solemn faces of my colleagues. The night before, our boss had taken our work laptops, cleared his office, and left the key on his desk. We were victims of an elaborate and professional scam.
Dutifully, we waited at the office a couple of hours, hoping we might have misunderstood something. We were a team, and he was our leader. We were bonded emotionally. He had hand-picked each one of us after very intense interviews. He knew us better than we knew ourselves.
I reported the incident to the police, remarking stupidly: “He played on our idealism.” There are people who sincerely and truly believe that media in the digital age has become politically dangerous. And we believed all that was needed was to build trust between the public and the media again—if it ever existed in the first place.
Instead, we very nice and kind employees were duped, missing the real fake news in which we were working: This guy had us believing we could help save media and democracy, such a high and mighty goal coming from a player. A good con man is a philosopher, and he needs people who believe in his latest scheme. Oh he made sure to surround himself in smoke and mirrors: swanky offices, overwhelming perks, his ever-present ‘therapy’ dog that we felt obligated to adore, posing for pictures by holding his chin in a scholarly manner. New employees know better than to ask nosy questions of a boss. Given my age and occasional sarcastic tone, perhaps I might have come across as catching on to his true motives. Along with my laptop, he removed all my notes taken on the job—covering his tracks. After he split, I searched the internet for quite awhile but found who he really was: an identify thief.
New nonprofits are created out of hot issues, like eradicating fake news, and therefore obtain grants and other funding, as he claimed to have acquired. All along, I thought I could run this journalism nonprofit. The timing is not exactly right for me, but I’m looking into it, doing whatever I can to turn bitter lemons into sparkling sweet lemonade. Having survived the death of a job, I hold in my mind and heart the keys to resurrect this noble endeavor … in the name of journalism, for the sake of truth, to keep us a free people.