Prof. Bill Kovarik , PhD

About the Jprof ...


Bill Kovarik is a Professor of Communication at Radford University in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwestern Virginia. He was recently named as the 2009 Canwest Media Fellow at the University of Western Ontario.

Kovarik is a journalist and historian who has worked with wire services, daily newspapers and national news magazines. He teaches science and environment writing, journalism, web design, media history media law, and peace studies. He currently writes for Appalachian Voice and other environmental publications. More >>

The news isnt going away, but the delivery mechanism is evolving as usual ...

REGIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Larry Gibson is one of our heroes. A West Virginian without a lot of formal education, he is fighting for his mountains and for the future. Here's what he said to RU students:

"I say to you, and to you, what do you hold so precious in your own circle of life that you don’t have a price on it? What would it be? For me, it’s Appalachia. For me, it’s the mountains. For me, it’s a whole way of life that they’re wiping out here, and nobody seems to care” --- (Left -- Gibson shows RU journalism students the impacts of mountaintop removal mining on Kayford Mountain in central West Virginia in 2006. Photo by Bill Kovarik)

See the I love mountains web site to see what you can do to save the Appalachians.

I just wish someone would document a visit of one of these city speech 'inspectors' who order students to take down their fraternity or sorority signs. We could post it on YouTube for the benefit of the Chinese and Russians who say this idea of a free speech is nice, but nobody in America really believes in it."

FREE SPEECH

These Greek letters may seem innocent enough, but putting them in the wrong place at the wrong time is a crime in the City of Radford, which carefully regulates student speech -- for the students' benefit, of course.

Free speech is something that no one in the US should be able to take away. But somehow the City of Radford has managed. Get this -- fraternities and sororities have to get "permission" to put up their Greek letters, and then only on certain days. It's hard to top that, but in December of 2008, the city council even told all the poor people of the city who were holding these horrid, unsightly yard sales that they could only advertise on their own property and only with one sign.

HIDE THEIR PRIDE WEB SITE
Students standing up for free speech

-*12

This is a photo of the crowds outside the Merrimac Rd. Blacksburg poll at 6 pm on Nov. 4, 2008. About 3,000 Tech students had to drive 2 miles to get to this obscure little church way out in the country in order to vote in the US presidential election. The idea, rather obviously, was to keep as many students from voting as possible.

VOTING RIGHTS

It's hard to imagine that, in this day and age, the ability of a college student to vote in any election would be denied. Yet that is what has happened in recent years, as hundreds of students had their registrations cancelled over flimsy excuses bureaucratic concerning their "intent" to "domicile" in one place or another.

Legislation meant to change this situation passed the General Assembly but is still being debated at the regulatory level by a task force of voter registrars.

The real disaster turns out to be how ill-equipped the news media was to knowledgably question an agency that was deliberately leading the public astray, not just accidentally in the initial phases of the response, but as an overt matter of policy, in the weeks and months that followed.

The Tennessee media was grossly incapable of asking the most painfully obvious question or providing the simplest analysis of scientific data.

No member of the regional media even compared TVA's scientific results with test results of other organizations. None questioned the parameters of what was known about coal ash in general. And no one even dreamed that all the placid assurances about drinking water safety were being made by people who hadn't the faintest idea whether or not the water was safe.

If the regional news media had made ignorance the study of a lifetime, it could not have graduated with higher honors than it did covering the TVA disaster in the winter and spring of 2009.

LOCAL ENVIRONMENT