America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

1. Watch the caffeine and the nicotine. Even decaf coffee can keep you up, since it has trace amounts of caffeine, so finish your coffee drinking by 1 p.m. or so. If you can’t quit nicotine, at least limit it to the daytime.

2. Turn your bedroom into a sleep-inducing environment. Keep your bedroom as dark as you safely can—I recommend blackout shades—and keep it on the cool side as well. Use it only for sleep (or intimacy) to keep your brain from associating it with anything else.

3. Nap early or not at all. If you need to nap, try to do it as early in the day as possible, and keep it to 20 or 30 minutes or so. Taking a nap in the evening can keep you from falling asleep at night.

4. Establish a soothing pre-sleep routine. Try things like meditation, soft music, a warm bath, or stretching.

5. Go to bed tired. Going to bed early in hopes of getting more sleep rarely works. Better to delay bedtime until you’re truly tired.

6. Keep a “worry” journal. A few hours before bedtime, write down each worry in one column and its solution in another. This may help reduce stress.

7. Stick with it. The benefits of these changes and others may take a few weeks to kick in as the body adjusts to them.

See Related Feature: Solving the Mysteries of Sleep

Describing all this nighttime cleanup and repair work, Dr. Daniel Barone makes one thing clear: There’s a lot we still don’t know about slumber and the disorders that impede it.

But he makes other things clear too: Better sleep is attainable for those who seek it. And, in our sleep-deprived society, more people need to do that, he says, citing dangers ranging from disease to traffic accidents to everyday fogginess.

“I have a lot of patients come to me and say, ‘You know what, I’m just not as sharp as I used to be,’” he tells an audience at Webster Library on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during a presentation in July. “‘I’m not as quick as I used to be. I go into a room, I can’t remember why I’m there,’ that kind of stuff.

“There’s other reasons for that, possibly, but one of them is sleep,” says Barone, assistant professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine and associate medical director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Barone, a 2001 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill, serves as an increasingly public expert on sleep, appearing in media outlets and giving talks around New York. He’s finding receptive audiences and many opportunities to speak, given the growing concern about sleep deprivation, labeled a “public health epidemic” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because of its links to depression, anxiety, hypertension, obesity, and cancer.

If sleep is essential, however, it’s also frustratingly hard to attain for many, one reason Barone recently authored Let’s Talk About Sleep: A Guide to Understanding and Improving Your Slumber (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Written with Lawrence A. Armour, it tells the stories of patients who found their way to better slumber through considerable patience, persistence, and trial and error. Despite all the recent scientific and technological advances in the field of sleep, there are no quick fixes or standard solutions. As Barone describes it, the quest for better sleep involves not only science, medicine, and proven practices, but also a certain amount of faith.

Discovering Sleep Science

Barone grew up on Long Island, in Franklin Square, studied biology on a premed track at Fordham, and earned his medical degree from New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. He first learned about sleep medicine when he was in residency at Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in New York City. A visiting lecturer spoke about it, and Barone was fascinated.

He went on to complete a one-year fellowship in sleep medicine at Stony Brook University and earned board certifications in neurology and sleep medicine from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

In a way, sleep medicine is still a “great frontier” because of all its unknowns, he says. Some aspects are well established: When light dims, nerve cells in the eye signal the brain’s pineal gland to release melatonin, which readies the body for sleep. While we slumber, long-term memories are solidified as the brain pares back some nerve connections and strengthens others, Barone says. And because it is a powerful antioxidant, melatonin also cleans up free radicals, metabolic byproducts that could damage cells and pave the way for heart disease or cancer.

Other functions of sleep have only recently come to light. In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center discovered the glymphatic system, a kind of “shadow plumbing system” in the brain, according to a university statement. It fires up only during slumber, flushing out toxins that build up during the day, including those linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Some brain cells actually shrink to accommodate this outflow, Barone says.

But many aspects of slumber are still poorly understood, like the tipping point between our waking and sleeping states, as shown by the fact that “we never remember the exact moment at which sleep onset occurs,” Barone writes in the book.

Sleep disorders offer up plenty of unknowns as well. Barone’s research focus is REM behavior disorder, in which people act out their dreams during the rapid-eye-movement stage of sleep. Other scientists are studying restless legs syndrome, one condition that impedes the slumber of Barone’s patients. “We know so much about the brain, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about restless legs syndrome,” he says.

A Concern for All Ages

Some sleep disruptors are better understood, like blue light from computer screens, which keeps nerve cells in the eye from triggering the release of melatonin. One of the most common disorders is sleep apnea, in which the tongue repeatedly falls back to block the airway, interrupting sleep and causing daytime drowsiness. It afflicts as many as one-quarter of middle-aged men and 9 percent of women, according to Barone, although its severity varies.

His patients have often been sleep deprived and exhausted for years. They may struggle to fall asleep, wake up too early, or wake up tired after a full night’s slumber. Some only learn about their disorders after spending a night in the Weill Cornell sleep clinic, hooked up to monitoring equipment.

Let’s Talk About Sleep includes a variety of stories from patients (identified only by first names) who volunteered to be interviewed for the book. They tend to be middle-aged or older, as sleep tends to degrade with age because of weight gain, hormonal changes, prostate issues, or other things, he says.

But young people are hardly immune to sleep troubles. As Barone describes in his book, one patient’s sleep disorder—narcolepsy—emerged in high school, causing her to fall asleep in class. And sleep needs to be a big priority for college students, no matter how overstuffed their schedules are, Barone says, noting that sleep loss is linked to anxiety and depression, and can also get in the way of one’s studies.

Barone has some experience with this. After studying all night for tests as an undergraduate at Fordham, he found that he didn’t remember much of anything unless he found time to sleep. In fact, a quick nap was enough. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s pretty amazing—just a little bit of sleep actually helps you to retain the information.’ Without it, it was almost impossible.”

Treating Sleep Loss

Treatments vary from patient to patient. Medication is just one, often short-term, option. Behavior changes, like avoiding electronic screens before bed, are also important. For insomnia, one of Barone’s preferred techniques is mindfulness meditation, which activates the relaxing parasympathetic nervous system, improving not only sleep but also one’s general mindset, he says.

Technology also plays a role. Sleep apnea patients, for instance, may use a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, mask that feeds pressurized air into their airways overnight, allowing them to sleep uninterrupted. Their other options include a dental device that pulls the jaw forward, keeping the tongue away from the back of the throat, or positioning devices to ensure they sleep on their side. One new option is a device implanted in the chest that electrically stimulates the hypoglossal nerve to keep the tongue from collapsing backward.

Whatever the sleep issue, the patient’s attitude is key, Barone says. Another patient mentioned in Let’s Talk About Sleep, a 61-year-old married mother of two, was waking up at midnight or 1 a.m. and tossing and turning for the rest of the night. This problem had persisted for 15 or 20 years. Then she heard an expert speak about the ill effects of sleep loss. The presentation hit home; she realized that she was in fact noticing some of the effects, like rising blood pressure, so she changed her “tough it out” attitude and sought help.

In consultation with Barone, she devised a regimen including progressive muscle relaxation, regular bedtimes, and the use of an alarm clock. Over time, her sleep improved. “It has made an incredible difference in my life,” she says in the book.

One of the most important changes she made was psychological. She developed what she called “an overall appreciation for the importance of sleep.” This appreciation doesn’t always take hold easily in the U.S., where the ability to do without sleep is viewed “almost like a badge of honor,” Barone says. “I’ve been guilty of that myself.”

Slighting the Sandman

Adults generally need seven to nine hours of sleep per night on average, according to the National Sleep Foundation. But, as stated in the book, more than a third of Americans are regularly getting inadequate shuteye. And some 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders and periodic sleep problems, according to the National Institutes of Health.

People can be blind to the impact of sleep loss. Barone noted that one 2003 study by researchers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania found that people limited to six hours of sleep or less for several nights were just as impaired in a simple attention test as those who had missed as much as two whole nights of sleep.

All the same, the participants thought their bodies and minds were adjusting to the sleep loss, and that they were “doing OK” on the attention test. “In reality, they were not doing OK,” Barone says. “They were making a lot of mistakes,” and “this is just a small scale. You can imagine what’s happening when sleep deprivation is much more chronic,” he adds, naming motorists’ impaired reaction times in particular.

Such concerns are one reason why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described sleep deprivation as a public health epidemic, and why Barone has accepted so many invitations to speak publicly. He hopes that it will eventually be recognized that “lack of quality sleep for a long period of time is as bad for us as smoking,” he says.

Dreaming of Better Sleep

One of sleep’s greatest mysteries is dreaming, a particular interest of Barone’s. He and other researchers are in the midst of a privately funded three-year study of REM behavior disorder, caused by a failure of the sleep paralysis that usually keeps people from acting out their dreams. Someone dreaming about being in a fight, for instance, might thrash about in bed, Barone says. While this kind of thing is alarming, the real concern—and the focus of the study—is the link between this disorder and Parkinson’s disease, he says.

The possible benefits of dreams are the biggest question mark of all. “There must be a good reason” for them, given the amount of brainpower they require, Barone writes; the sleeping brain not only generates the content of dreams but also the slumbering mind’s experience of them, a level of activity that indicates that dreaming “is not some random thing,” he writes.

Theories abound: Dreaming may prepare us for the stresses and threats of waking life by providing a kind of dry run during sleep. They may provide a “theater of the mind” in which we work through problems, or allow us to test out emotional reactions to various situations. “There’s probably 10 different theories as to why we dream. Nobody knows for sure,” Barone says. “The brain is beyond complex,” with 100 billion neurons interacting in uncounted trillions of ways.

In Let’s Talk About Sleep, he conveys respect for sleep and the need to give it its due. Rather than serve as a medical text, the book is meant to stimulate interest in sleep, Barone writes; he urges readers to talk to a doctor about their particular sleep troubles and medical concerns. In his July presentation, he offered some tips for getting better sleep generally, like exercising and setting regular bedtimes. And he made it clear that being patient and putting one’s expectations on the shelf were also important. “None of these things are going to change your sleep overnight—pun intended,” he said.

His patients may work for weeks, months, or longer, trying different approaches and laying the groundwork for better sleep, which he describes as something to be encouraged, coaxed, cajoled. Or won over, perhaps.

“I always say, sleep is kind of like love,” Barone says. You can do all the right things and put yourself in a position to make it happen, he says, but ultimately it follows its own timetable. “I always tell patients, ‘Let me worry about your sleep. You just concentrate on doing the right things, and eventually sleep will happen.’”

See Related: Seven Tips for Better Sleep

It begins in February 2008 with her then-19-year-old son, J.P. Vericker, being handcuffed by police outside their suburban New York home, high on drugs and ensnared in an addiction that made him desperate and sometimes violent. His hand was broken from punching a wall in a rage the day before.

It was not the first time the police had responded to the Verickers’ home because of trouble with their son. As officers restrained J.P. by holding him against the side of the house, an officer gently posed a question. The police department would keep responding as needed, of course, but “at some point, you have got to do something.”

“We have enough on him to arrest him,” the officer said. “What do you want to do?”

And, just like that, the Verickers were face-to-face with a decision they had seen coming but deeply hoped to avoid.

Nancy recounts this story in Unchained: Our Family’s Addiction Mess is Our Message (Clear Faith Publishing, 2018), which she co-authored with J.P., now eight years sober. It relates not only the course of J.P.’s addiction but also its impact on his family, and the spirituality that was a lifeline for both Nancy and her son. “I really did, honestly, feel this sense of calling” in co-authoring the book, says Nancy, a spiritual director and youth minister and a 2009 alumna of Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

In it, she charts her journey to accepting a seeming paradox, one that ran against her every instinct as a parent. To help J.P., she had to stop trying to rescue him. As she puts it in the book, “You must surrender to win. You must let go to get your loved one back.”

“My Manzo”

The second-oldest of the Verickers’ four children, J.P. wanted for nothing when he was growing up in their tight-knit family. He was a charming, kind, energetic child known to his mother as her little man, “my Manzo.” When the Verickers brought their adopted daughter, 2-year-old Grace, from China to their Westchester County home, J.P. was the first to quell her tears and make her laugh.

Things changed in eighth grade. He struggled in school and felt listless and depressed, and fell in with a partying crowd during his first year of high school. By sophomore year, he was drinking and smoking pot daily. He grew belligerent, cutting class and staying out past his curfew and getting into trouble with the police.

His parents saw a series of counselors and psychiatrists, looking for answers. They unsuccessfully tried to help J.P. by sending him to a wilderness program and a boarding school. Then, in senior year, he dropped out of their local public high school and started using cocaine and Xanax, sometimes together, a toxic combination that put him in a “manic state,” as he puts it. Mixing a stimulant and sedative, he writes, “can easily kill you.”

Family life moved forward in other ways—the Verickers’ eldest daughter, Annie, was in college and enjoying it; their next-youngest daughter, Molly, was a high-school freshman, making friends and playing field hockey; and Grace was doing well in her new elementary school.

But Nancy’s life was mostly consumed with J.P.’s addiction. Grappling with insomnia and worry, she realized he was stealing from her to pay for drugs. Bitter confrontations ensued, and in February 2008, in a rage, J.P. accosted his parents at home because of money he thought he was owed.

At the end of their rope, Nancy and Joe Vericker moved forward with the option they had been dreading, the one they had warned their son about: They decided to press charges of harassment. As Nancy stood by, distraught, Joe quietly gave permission to one of the officers who had responded to their home: “You can arrest our son.”

Tough Love

In order for J.P. to overcome his addiction, he had to suffer its consequences, she and her husband were told by the treatment professionals they consulted. He had to hit bottom, and they had to let him, counter to their every parental instinct. In addition to letting him be arrested, they had to refrain from rescue efforts like providing shelter and meeting his expenses as he continued to use.

After J.P. was arrested, his parents got a court order of protection and told him to stay away from the family’s home unless he agreed to seek treatment. Viewing it as a vacation, J.P. agreed to go to a treatment center in south Florida, chosen by his parents because of the wealth of post-treatment options in that area.

His story entered a new phase: detoxifications, relapses, halfway houses, flophouses, and homelessness. He struggled toward the realization that he needed help. Today, he has a clear view of his warped thinking from that time.

“Being addicted is like having rabies,” he writes in Unchained, which includes first-person accounts by both him and his mother. “To me, in my addicted mind, my life was normal,” and others were to blame for the strife and altercations in his life.

In lucid moments, he felt a deep yearning to stop using. During a brief trip home from Florida, he broke down in tears for two hours, “flooded with both anger and sadness,” he writes. “I was starting to realize I could not stop on my own.”

Nancy, meanwhile, alternated between hope when he seemed to be recovering and anguish, tears, and sleepless nights when he relapsed. She often didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

And yet, life went on. Family responsibilities beckoned. She gained solace and strength from family, friends, and community, but also from her degree program at Fordham.

Ignatian Lessons

A former journalist, Nancy Vericker first enrolled at Fordham at the suggestion of her spiritual director during a time when she was tending to the children at home, doing occasional volunteer work, and spiritually searching. She spent more than a decade earning a master’s degree, and the studies would help pull her through difficult times—in part, because of the Ignatian teachings in the curriculum.

“There was this thing that was oppressively suffocating the life out of me and my family, and Ignatian spirituality helped me push back,” she says.

In keeping with the Ignatian view of the soul as a battleground, she fought against feelings of desolation—depression, fear, anxiety—by finding consolation in the joys of family life and moments of grace, holding on to those as a way of building generosity of heart and fueling hope.

“Ignatian spirituality saved me in many ways,” she says.

What also helped her were the relationships built up during the program. When J.P. was homeless, she considered quitting, but she persisted with encouragement from a classmate, Mark Mossa, S.J., who went on to become campus ministry director at Spring Hill College in Alabama.

And she became close to Janet Ruffing, R.S.M., then head of the spiritual direction program. When graduation day came for Nancy, she decided to instead go to her daughter Grace’s First Communion, which fell on the same day.

“I knew how torn she was, having made that choice,” says Sister Ruffing, now a professor at Yale Divinity School. “She was consistently making those kinds of choices for her family.”

So Sister Ruffing drove to the Verickers’ home and brought her the degree, entering the house in the midst of a post-Communion party. “They all screamed,” she says with a laugh. “I just felt she deserved to get her degree on graduation day.”

It was a powerful gesture, Nancy says, because she was in despair at the time. She had her doubts that J.P. would survive.

Refusing him help was painful. During one Christmas season, J.P. was calling home over and over from Florida, saying he was homeless and hungry, asking for money. “You cannot under any circumstances send him money,” J.P.’s treatment program director said. He told the story of a woman who, faced with a similar plea, wired money to her addict son, who then spent it on drugs and died of an overdose.

The Verickers kept saying “no,” even on Christmas Day, a few days after J.P.’s 21st birthday. “We will help you when you are ready to get help for your addiction,” Joe Vericker told J.P. on the phone. “We love you, remember that.”

Recovery

J.P.’s recovery began in a low moment, just after he had been jailed in Florida. “I was fearful for my life if I went on using,” he writes. He surrendered his false pride, his sense that “I knew all the answers,” and reentered treatment and joined a 12-step program.

For many addicts, he says, recovery is like dragging rocks in the beginning because they’re physically wrecked, their lives are in ruins, and drugs offer instant relief from the physical agonies of withdrawal. “Their mind is under the impression that they need [drugs]to survive,” he says.

He overcame these obstacles through meditation, help from a support network, and prayer—a crucial defense in the moments when his addiction was banging at the door.

“It was like alarms were going off,” he says. “I was scared that I was going to be, like, possessed and just pick up drugs and use them, because it felt like what had happened sometimes.” He would instantly stop and pray, over and over, “God, please remove the obsession.”

The stark choice he faced in those days has stayed with him. Any passing temptations to accept a drink are quickly quashed by one simple thought: “I don’t want to die.”

The spirituality of his Catholic upbringing helped him stay centered and clean as he earned a GED diploma and a bachelor’s degree in addiction studies, and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. In his mother, he had someone who could relate to his struggle; nearly three decades ago, she had to overcome her own addiction to alcohol.

“The twelve steps are a bond I love having with my son,” she writes. She and J.P. don’t act as each other’s sponsor, the person who “takes you through the steps and offers guidance based on their own experience, strength, and hope in the program.” But they do “share a love of the fellowship,” she says, “and we can give each other advice—as a mother and son would to each other.”

Today, as a board-certified substance abuse counselor and co-founder of the outpatient Northeast Addictions Treatment Center in Quincy, Massachusetts, J.P. spends his days overseeing the center’s operation and counseling people addicted to opioids that are far more deadly than the drugs he was using. And, since the publication of Unchained, he has joined his mother in spreading the book’s message of hope and recovery and trying to reduce the stigma addicts face.

They shared that message on NBC’s Today show and on the SiriuxXM radio/television show Conversation with Cardinal Dolan, among other programs. Their story has spread through word-of-mouth, and some mothers have contacted her to say “I felt like I was reading my own story,” Nancy says.

“I get up every morning and try to think of ways to get this story out there. It’s just to let people know that help is available. I will answer every email, we’ll talk on the phone, I’ll call people back,” she says, “because I feel like this is part of what I’m supposed to be doing with my life right now.”

Does it feel odd to get a lifetime achievement award with, hopefully, a lot of career left?
Yes! I’m wondering if someone is trying to tell me something. A few days prior to the Scully Award, I was inducted into the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame. I guess it’s a good thing to get them while I can still enjoy them.

Did you always know you wanted to go to Fordham and then become a sports broadcaster?
I knew I wanted to be a Yankees announcer since I was nine years old, and when my sister Debbie attended Fordham and told me about WFUV, I knew that it was the best place for me to pursue that dream. I actually wanted to be the Yankees first baseman, but I realized I couldn’t hit and didn’t enjoy getting hit by the baseball.

Are fears about the future of baseball overblown, or is the game actually in danger of losing its place as America’s pastime?
It’s not overblown. The game pace is too slow-moving. I love it the way it is, but I am not the future of the game. You have to capture young people who have come from a “microwave” society. They want things happening instantly, and baseball is not that. They need to figure out how to appeal to the younger audience while keeping the integrity of the game in place.

Why are there still so few female MLB announcers?
I wish I knew. I think sports is slow to change. And it’s not so much the decision-makers, although they have to take some of the blame, but rather the viewers and listeners who complain when something is different in their broadcast. But people like Suzyn Waldman and Doris Burke and Sarah Kustok are changing all that.

You’ve said that the “stick to sports” idea doesn’t make sense, because the political elements of sports are there, so they need to be talked about. Do you feel like, on the whole, people understand that now more than they did five years ago?
I think people have selective outrage. They want you to stick to sports when you give an opinion that they don’t agree with. Now, I would rather not go into things other than sports, but when the president brings sports into the equation, it’s hard not to talk about that.

When it comes to journalism, you expressed your disgust with last year’s layoffs at the New York Daily News. How do you convince young sports journalists—and young journalists in general—that they shouldn’t jump ship and think about another industry?
It would be hard to be honest and tell them that. The print industry is not exactly thriving, and I think that’s a bad thing for this country. If we don’t have a free, independent press, then those in power simply cannot and will not be checked. That’s dangerous. I would tell all these kids that if you become proficient at writing, there will be a job for you in the industry, either in print or behind the scenes in TV. And, of course, a good writer can always go to a thriving website, like The Athletic, and earn a good living.

How has having two young children changed the way you approach your work?
It has put it all into perspective. In the past, I was a workaholic and would take any job or new opportunity. My workaholic past certainly played a role in my present success, but now I’m happy with what I have professionally because I’m so happy personally.

What has it been like for both you and your friend from Fordham, NBA announcer Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, to succeed in the ways you have?
He is one of my best friends in the world. We are the same two guys who used to sit in the campus center at Fordham and tell each other about our dreams. He wanted to be the Knicks’ announcer and I wanted to be the Yankees’ announcer. The fact that we were privy to each other’s dreams and know how starry-eyed we were makes it sweeter to enjoy each other’s success.

You’ve been a mentor to Ryan Ruocco, FCRH ’08, and many other young announcers. What do you enjoy most about your role as a mentor?
I just like to provide whatever help I can give to a young person. I never really had that entrée into the business when I got out of college, so if I can provide a little help or lift to someone, that would be awesome and would maybe provide a couple of more speakers who have kind words at my funeral.

How did you develop your style as an announcer? Did that come out of those who taught or mentored you?
I think it happened organically and was a combination of those I listened to growing up, those I spoke with along the way, and those I worked with. You end up becoming an amalgamation of hopefully the best of the people you came across in your life.

What’s the most memorable game you’ve ever called?
Probably Game 1 of the 1998 World Series, when the Yankees scored seven runs in the seventh inning against the Padres at Yankee Stadium. After the grand slam by Tino Martinez, the stadium was literally shaking and I just leaned back and took it all in. It was pretty special.

Ringing the room were enlargements of front pages. They conveyed the scope of events covered by the paper across the decades: world wars, McCarthyism, civil rights, student protests, Watergate, 9/11, and more.

Then there was the front page of the very first issue of The Ram, published on February 7, 1918. The layout is crisp and the tone is serious. Alas, the viewpoint expressed by the lead headline reveals the perils of composing first drafts of history. It quotes Joseph A. Mulry, S.J., then president of Fordham, who had a reputation for fiery sermons on patriotic themes: “This War Will Purify Soul of the Nation.”

Father Mulry was referring to World War I, then deep into its fourth year, which was time enough to have figured out that rather than a rite of purification, the stalemate in Europe was more like mindlessly mechanized slaughter, an exercise in futility and stupidity. With hindsight we might forgive Father Mulry, especially given that his underlying thesis was that “no part of the body politic shall oppress another.”

Practicing the Discipline of Verification

The Ram‘s first editors were trying to speak to a cause then vital to Fordham students, some hundreds of whom were serving on or near the front and whose need for news from campus was the reason for founding a weekly in the first place. (That’s right, The Ram began as a chronicle for troops overseas of academic doings in the rural northeast Bronx.) But as any journalist will tell you, it’s often difficult to interpret events in the midst of their unfolding.

“If you’re a news reporter, you need to hope for humility,” said former Ram editor-in-chief Jim Dwyer, FCRH ’79, to more than 100 guests at the paper’s centennial dinner. “And own your own mistakes.”

Dwyer is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a columnist for The New York Times who has written on everything from the Byzantine machinations of the MTA to improving care for HIV-positive pregnant women. If anyone could get away with tossing bouquets of self-congratulation, it’d be this guy on this night. Instead he extolled “the journalism of verification, where you can see the structures that hold up the stories, where sources are named and facts are corroborated.”

Journalists have a phrase for such high standards: a pain in the rear. But insofar as journalists practice them, even revere them, it’s because they came across someone early on who insisted they be followed in their novice attempts at editing and reporting—or in managing a newspaper, as slapstick and earnest an enterprise as humans have devised. For the people in Bepler Commons, that formative education would’ve occurred while scrambling on deadline to put out The Ram.

Dwyer also name-checked his former professor and long-time mentor, Ray Schroth, S.J. Beginning in the late 1960s, Father Schroth taught journalism at Fordham and other Jesuit colleges for almost 50 years. A kind of anti-Mulry, Father Schroth instructed students to question official statements from powerful people in justification of their actions—on issues ranging from potholes to low-level weed arrests to war. Not that these explanations are always wrong, just that they need to be checked.

One way journalists do this is by examining a policy’s concrete effect on the lives of non-powerful people, and then amplifying the voices of these people in the press—after checking their claims, too.

Calling Out Untruths, Winning Trust

That was a theme of the speech by Louis D. Boccardi, FCRH ’58. He’s a Ram alumnus and former president and CEO of the Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization. Boccardi started his career when newsrooms racketed with the sound of manual typewriters and ended it by transitioning AP into the internet age.

“’Fairness and accuracy’ is a piety, but it’s the start of what we do,” he said. “And when we find an untruth, we should label it clearly so. In the end, our only claim on the reader’s or viewer’s attention, and on their support for what we do, is that they trust what we say.”

The value of telling the truth against all obstacles was another theme of the night. Solid reporting requires familiarity with the methods of pursuing truth. That’s where The Ram and its equivalents come in. Students sign up to practice the full menu of journalistic skills, from rapid fact-gathering to investigative techniques. Students then put their stories out into the world, where sometimes they stand up to scrutiny and sometimes they don’t. Either way, lessons learned.

The result can be high honors. Besides Jim Dwyer, two other Ram editors went on to earn a Pulitzer Prize: Arthur Daley, FCRH ’26, for sports reporting at The Times, and Loretta Tofani, FCRH ’75, for her Washington Post series “Rape in the County Jail.” Tofani was one of the first women to serve as editor-in-chief of The Ram. Many women have since followed her in the role.

The latest is Theresa Schliep, a 21-year-old Fordham senior and editor of The Ram’s 100^th edition. Schliep presides over more than a physical newspaper. She manages a multimedia platform that, more often than not, lives up to the standard of pain-in the-rear reporting.

When asked why she goes to the trouble, she says, “It’s our right as Americans, and as people, to say what we want to say—factually and accurately.”

There it is: evidence that a new generation has submitted to the practice of digging up and offering the journalistic truth, of winning trust through verification, corroboration, and clear prose. In closing, a benediction: May they prosper as they make their mistakes and publicly correct them, and as they doggedly call the powerful to account. It’s an especially hostile time to aspire to be a journalist. God bless those who would do it. 

—Jim O’Grady, FCRH ’82, a former Ram reporter and editor, is a features reporter at WNYC.

UPDATE: In December and January, several New York elected officials—from Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and Mayor Bill de Blasio to Governor Andrew Cuomo (FCRH ’79), U.S. Rep. José E. Serrano, and Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand—saluted The Ram on its 100th anniversary. Congressman Serrano’s message was published in the Congressional Record on December 20.

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Loretta Tofani as the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of The Ram. She was preceded by Mary Anne Leonard, TMC ’70, who achieved that distinction in 1969.