Support for Donnybrook Last Call is provided in part by Design Aire Heating and Cooling Thanks for joining us for Last Call good to have you with us Amy it's also great to have you back uh when you were with us in February you talked about uh the need to kind of regulate phones in schools and as it turns out maybe the people at Parkway schools were listening to you because Parkway has announced uh that at the high school phones will not be allowed in the classrooms although when passing which I guess goes from classroom to classroom you might be able to use them and at lunch but the phones will not be allowed for students in Parkway schools at the middle school and grade school level do you think this is going to go statewide or even nationwide i think so i think eventually and I it is the adults unleashed this technology on this younger generation which I mean it's like heroin the phones the social media it's like heroin the different parts of your brain that control emotional response that your your motivation it deadens those uh kids their brains are needing instant gratification and it really is like being addicted to a drug when you take phones away from some kids who are very addicted have actual withdrawal symptoms so in schools I love that Parkway is doing this and if you are concerned about your child not having a phone in the case of emergency the phones will be in the room in the classroom you know they'll be gathered they'll be all together so if you have like a medical condition where maybe you need to hear an alert or if something were to happen at the school they they can get to their phones quickly but they'll be away from them during class time i I am so on board with this i do think it will go nationwide i wish they had gone farther i like what Normandy did which is a bellto bell ban like you have to log that phone when you get to school and you are not allowed to have it out at all for the rest of the day they were having a lot of fights in the hallways kids were filming it it was just escalating things they took away these phones and it has apparently gone swimmingly over there so I'd like to see more of that yeah we did a story on that and and and then followed up yeah and the reason he really didn't hear much was because like oh it actually worked for all the people that went to that you know they had like a little town hall meeting and we're oh my right my kids it's been going on for months now at the Clayton schools they started this last June it's almost exactly the same I'm told as Parkway but they're going to revisit it in May because there's a little fly in the ointment and that is during the passing or at lunch the phone comes out but then what happens when that kid who's addicted to it like heroin brings it in the classroom the burden is on the teacher to enforce it and that is apparently turning into a pain in the neck at times well because we're not giving teachers enough to do now they're I mean they're educating the kids they're disciplinarians in a perfect world and now they're phone police it's and I'm sure that eventually there'll be some sort of mechanism you know some something that would help the teachers in this regard but it seems awfully unfair to burden the teachers with this kind well and that's why would have to be consistent across the school and I like Sarah's bell-to-bell idea i don't know if maybe you introduce it to kids to parents by going classroom by classroom like you said it turned out to be a fly in the ointment but there are schools in California that graduated their first classes all four years without a phone in during school hours and not only were grades better behavioral problems went down but kids were socializing they were talking to each other one again once again and I am all for removing the phones as much as possible maybe they will find that the per classroom doesn't work alvin removing phones is one thing but what about removing members of the media the new St louis re the new real St louis real St louis real St louis uh was banned for 30 days by the Metropolitan Police Department the St louis Police Department because uh Mitch McCoy a spokesman for the police said they were making so many mistakes we were spending so much time correcting their errors but also Elliot Davis legendary anchor and reporter for Channel 2 now retired say says that the president of the board of alderman Megan Green was trying to blackball him from the city hall uh in his new role as kind of a uh about town social media reporter who has apparently quite a few followers um he says he learned that from sources she denies it but is this kind of Trumpian where uh the Trump administration kicked the AP out of the briefing room because it wouldn't call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America he Yeah he wouldn't call it the He called it the Gulf of America right it is the Gulf of Mexico bail me out of this one yeah it is the Gulf of Mexico i'm no Hall of Famer right exactly i'm I'm sorry Mr president you are a Hall of Famer bag of people it's the Gulf of Mexico okay um I think the 30 day you know they got 30 days for being irresponsible they should not really h be credentialed to be there because they really aren't journalists i'm sorry i I'm just going to be on King Journalism Mountain here and be the one that says like you know just because somebody declares themselves a journalist does not make them one and just because you know what in other words I can't you just can't be walking down the street and say like I want to cover the Brito 500 so if they don't give me a credential cuz I'm I'm a scream like "Oh you're blackballing me for like no you're not even with a real publication or or Okay I'm going to argue with you here i I think they are journalists and I think they have made some errors in their journalism i get why city hall has been very frustrated they have a bigger following than anyone at this table i'm sorry guys so they do because they're so good at doing the social media thing and let's face it the stories that are more sensationalized tend to do better on social media the facts often get in my way as a journalist and they don't always let them get in their way but I think they're kind of earnestly asking questions and filming things that happen around town often they're getting things that are then followed by TV news outlets and I think the city would do better to try to work with them rather than to cut them off from information because people are watching what they're doing i think you and I'm clutching my pearls in case in case Sarah wants to accuse me of clutching my pearls but I think you just answered your own question they don't let facts get in the way and the police always dead backard yeah i mean it's like and the police Mitch McCoy I thought he was incredibly measured you know the in the way he addressed this because they're the police we have these ongoing conversations about all of the things that we need from the police and now the police are running down these bogus calls they're having to put the public's minds at at ease i just I think it it's again we're burdening the police when they're too busy doing the job that they're I got to tell you I used to edit a newspaper that frequently irritated people in power right i mean the Riverfront Times was known for that and people would call us fake news and you know the idea of like trying to get a credential but you wouldn't let your reporters you're still an editor and you wouldn't let your reporters just I would not but I don't want the government making the decision of who is a journalist and who is not a journalist i will not allow that because they do not want critical voices and I'm not saying Mitch McCoy did this i have a lot of respect for him i don't think he behaved wrongly here but I wouldn't have done it i think to Sarah's point that's the thing you can't you can't legislate or outlaw stupidity you can't and when stupid people do stupid things or if people aren't telling the truth you're going to have to work around that but if you like to to Sarah's point if you start saying "Okay you don't count as a journalist we're allowing everyone else."

It does you you are having the government pick and choose like Charlie brought it up is it Trumpian trump could say "Well the AP are liars."

CNN are liars and then not let any of we wouldn't have any of the major outlets because I mean we know that that even the legacy media has made like a lot of mistakes we know which ones which ones lean left which ones lean right we know that we've all takes the thing that's different we've all made mistakes but this is not mistakes this is clowning and I'm not including Elliot Davis on that part but this other outlet this has the ring of yelling fire in a movie theater it's like just because you feel like it there's there's just something very distasteful and unsafe about this story i think it is unsafe unsavory it's it it could cause issues but I'm always very careful when you're looking at how do we prevent stupidity and it's really hard and it could be a stupid outlet i'm not saying that they are i'm just saying so if I decide I want to perform surgery I mean if I decide that I want to perform surgery I should have that that's that's the difference between journalism and uh the college of surgery we do need to have our surgeons regulated not by the government but by these private boards that regulate surgeons i don't think anyone can regulate journalism the genie is out of that bottle the fact that anybody with a camera can end up with a bigger audience than any of us at this table means that battle has been lost it is true we are not credentialed we are not licensed and we don't go through formal training really we just try to do the best we can every day and try to get it right what's Tucker Carlson now now that he's not with Fox News wouldn't couldn't Mitch McCoy go like I don't like that guy he's talking about tanning his genitals so we're not gonna have him on and on that note I guess that'll be the last good night everybody thank you so much for joining us and uh we will catch you next week at this time thanks Amy it was covered everywhere