Our guest for the hour is Matthew LaPlante, USU Assistant Professor of Journalism. LaPlante served a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf as an enlisted military intelligence specialist in the U.S. Navy, and returned to the Middle East as a war correspondent for The Salt Lake Tribune. He also covered veterans affairs for the Tribune. In an Op Ed piece in the Logan Herald Journal he says that in the wake of revelations that NBC anchor Brian Williams has long been telling an apparently fictitious story about being in a helicopter that was struck by a rocket in Iraq, he got thinking about issues of memory and war.
He says "I have been covering military and veterans issues for more than a decade now, and if there's one thing I've come to understand, it is this: Many war stories are fictional ... Over the years, I've listened to a teary-eyed veteran talk about watching the death of a man who didn't die. I've heard a soldier describe shooting people he did not shoot. I've heard an airman detail war wounds he received in a war he wasn't in. I've heard a military commander describe burying a subordinate he did not bury ... In most cases, though, I don't think I was being lied to at all. Rather, I have come to believe that in most situations I was being told an untrue truth - a fiction that helps its creator make sense of things they felt in times of physical, psychological and moral stress."
We'll explore issues of memory as they relate to journalism and to today's digital world.
Matthew LaPlante is the son of a newspaperman who was, in turn, the son of a newspaperman. After serving a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf as an enlisted military intelligence specialist in the U.S. Navy, he began working as a newspaper reporter in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and ultimately returned to the Middle East as a war correspondent for The Salt Lake Tribune. Now an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Utah State University, his work has appeared on CNN, The Washington Post, Christianity Today and numerous other publications. In 2014, he co-authored "Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives - And Our Lives Change Our Genes" with geneticist Sharon Moalem. His work with photojournalist Rick Egan on ritual tribal infanticide in Ethiopia was honored with the 2012 Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism. An avid snowboarder, Matthew lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Heidi, and daughter, Spike.
