TIMELINE
2001
April 2001 – CMJ listing
May 14 2001 – CMJ listing
July 19 2001: Letter to the Editor of Daily Iowan, regarding smoking ordinances, notes that San Jose’s law helped him quit smoking:
July 2001 listed again in CMJ:
IA 89.7 FM James Tracy /Cory Ingle DUBCHEK BRENT BERRY RISING LION MAX ROMEO KING TUBBY SAXSEMILLA BEENIE MAN
KRUI Iowa City, IA 89.7 FM James Tracy /Cory Ingle SCIENTIST DUBS CU LEE SCRATCH MICHAEL ROSE JACK RUBY PRESENT BRENT BERRY MAD PROFESSOR ISRAEL VIBRATION GONDWANA 10 FT. GANJA PLAN WORLD SHALL SEE
July 2001: “Smile While I Cut Your Throat” – Mass Media, Myth, and the Contested “Harmonization” of the Working Class (journal article published in Journal of Communication Inquiry, July 1 2001)
This paper argues that local media coverage – or lack thereof – was key in weakening the labor movement, by siding with big business.
In addressing this issue, this article also considers the political economy of communication, information, and culture in the present historical moment. The antilabor advertising campaign considered herein would have gone completely uncontested had it not been for the Dubuque Leader. When true alternatives to mainstream commercial newspapers and electronic media are not available, however, the legitimization of existing authority and power relations is more readily maintained, and the myths that act to place primary reason in abeyance (i.e., the inherent good of the “free market,” economic competition, U.S. nationalism, etc.) are invariably perpetuated by the powers that control the means of discursive exchange and dissemination
Aug 2001 – CMJ listing
Sept 7 2001: Daily Iowan op-ed – Tracy returns, and note that he is now going by “J. Frederick Tracy” and has his hair slicked back, and his column is called “Firing Line.” Looks like he was rebranding as a more edgy/troll-like figure for his last year at University of Iowa. (Also, the paper went through a format change).
Note from FAU deposition, from Tracy, regarding this time (note that William F Buckley would have been the political opposite from the perspective he was writing from in these columns, but the tone and erudition was somewhat similar):
“At the Daily Iowan when I had a column in the Daily Iowan I fashioned myself to a certain degree after William F. Buckley, and I had a picture of myself with a pipe and what have you, and I called myself J. Frederick Tracy, and my column was Firing Line.”
Sept 11, 2001: 9/11 attacks (Tracy would go on to become a 9/11 Truther before SH)
Sept 21, 2001: publishes an article about 9/11 (reprinted in 2012 on globalresearch) – it contains mild trutherism but this is very early (the 9/11 Truth movement doesn’t really take shape until after Loose Change in 2003ish)
https://billtotten.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/september112001/
Oct 5 2001 – Daily Iowan op-ed “Fueling violence through bargain-basement leadership”
Oct 8 2001: Letter to the Editor suggests Tracy should be fired for 10/5/2001 op-ed:
October 10 2001 Letter to the Editor calls out Tracy for his conspiracism in his 10/5/2001 op-ed.
Nov 2 2001: “Stepping Up with BUDS!” op-ed about local anti-binge-drinking program. It’s satirical but doesn’t seem to have a point, other than perhaps that Stepping Up is ineffective. It also may be the first appearance of the “with pipe” photo:
Nov 16 2001: Daily Iowan Op-Ed, he talks about his father’s service in WW2, and tells the story of visiting the airfield with him in Tucson in 1997. He reverts back to his hard-ass photo for this one.
December 21 2001: “A modern-day update of a Charles Dickens classic” envisions A Christmas Carol in 2017:
2002
Feb 1 2002 op-ed “The awful inaccuracy of Dr. King’s historical legacy”
February 28 2002: “Wizards rule, muggles abound”
March 14 2002: “Letting ‘freedom’ ring, from Disney to MTV”
April 18 2002: Daily Iowan op-ed “Determining the hypocrisy in reparations” argues in favor of slavery reparations in the U.S.:
May 2 2002: Op-ed “The Not-quite-ready-for-prime-time machinations of UI-COMgate”:
May 16 2002: “Guard UI Integrity – keep the administration in check” Op-ed – this time, complaining about treatment of KRUI (the radio station he hosted a show on recently) and describing himself as “A thorn in the administration’s side.” (NOTE: This appears to be his last op-ed for The Daily Iowan).
Summer 2002 (presumably) Tracy finishes his pHd
June 2002 CMJ listing (last one, probably)
(Start of FAU section)
June 18 2002 Tracy is hired as an associate professor in the Communications department at FAU
http://www.upressonline.com/2013/01/jamestracythemaninthemedia/
http://academicwriting.wikidot.com/james-tracy
(Note his wife Maris Hayashi also joined FAU in 2002, as a reference Librarian)
Indeed, per : http://memoryholeblog.org/2019/03/09/the-fau-press-advisor-who-came-to-dinner/
“…My spouse secured a faculty post with the FAU library just months after my 2002 appointment. The following year we bought our first home together within walking distance to campus. We were, in short, here for the long haul.”
2003
March 2003 – Start of Iraq war. Tracy would later recall that while teaching about propaganda and censorship during the war, he “came to believe Americans were lied to about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
December 2003: FAU appoints Tracy as one of their Arts and Letters Fellows for 2004-2005 (per Tracy’s complaint v FAU):
2004
April 22-25, 2004, St. Louis, Missouri, Tracy attends a conference “The Axis of Empire”. The paper he presented is “Intellectual Labor and the Strategic Enclosure of the Info Commons: A Case Study of Reed Elsevier” and is credited to “James F. Tracy and Maris Hayashi, Florida Atlantic University”:
2005
Feb 2005: Another academic paper, continuing his interest in reggae/dub music that has been present since at least high school – “James Tracy. ‘Popular Communication and the Postcolonial Zeitgeist: On Considering Roots Reggae and Dub’”. Popular Communication 2.1 (2005): 21-41.
July 2005, per Tracy complaint v FAU:
October (probably) 2005: Tracy turns 40 years old.
2006
Sometime in 2006: FAU and its faculty union agree to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which includes a “requirement to report outside activities.” This requirement is later revised/expanded, leading to Tracy’s ouster (see Tracy deposition 2017, Vol 1 pg 76-77)
2006 Bio : https://web.archive.org/web/20060908200908/http://www.fau.edu/scms/tracy.php
2006 selling shirts as editor of peer reviewed Democratic Communique
http://www.democraticcommunications.net/conference/pastconferences/udc2006
Jan 21 2006 – delivers presentation at Deerfield Progressive Forum, on “Confronting the Corporate Media”
http://deerfieldprogressiveforum.org/schedules/past.html
Deposition statements on this group from 2017:
April 2006 – scholarship per complaint vs FAU:
June 2006: The “9/11 Truth” movement has taken shape by this point and is attempting to make inroads into academia. At the “Face the Facts” 9/11 truth conference in Los Angeles, Tracy’s future collaborators Jim Fetzer and Alex Jones both appear.
Tracy was likely following the “truther” movement by this point, or soon after, as he conveyed to Elizabeth Williamson: He remembers that in the mid-2000’s, he noted people online were questioning “everything”, and that as of the 2010’s, “what was the ‘truth movement’ a few years ago is becoming much more mainstream.” (110)
State of Tracy’s faculty page as of Sep 2006:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060907153344/http://www.fau.edu/scms/faculty.php
Reviews “Our Unfree Press” in July 2006 “Journal of Communication Inquiry”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0196859906287904
Roughly around this time – Tracy becomes a father (timing is inferred since he has noted that his first child – out of five – is roughly the same age as the Sandy Hook victims are in 2012). He would later note that fatherhood “made him more politically conservative” (Williamson, 110)
2007
2007: Publishes academic paper, “A Historical Case Study of Alternative News Media and Labor Activism: The Dubuque Leader 1935–1939”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/152263790700800401
March 2007 is editor of the Vol 21 of Democratic Communique, again drawing on the conference from May 2006. He mentions his wife in the introduction, apparently a joke about using windows?:
Fall 2007: Account of a student in Tracy’s course Media, Society and Technology (from 2017 trial):
https://www.upressonline.com/2017/12/commentary-james-tracy-probably-wont-get-his-job-back/
Former students of Tracy’s believe he changed during his time at FAU.
“He came across as a little harsh, and a little conspiratorial, but not full-blown crazy,” FAU alumnus Brandon Ballenger said.
Ballenger took Tracy’s fall 2007 Media, Society and Technology course.
He added that a lot of what he taught in class made sense and was “backed up and there were some genuinely interesting discussions.”
As a professor, he was known to challenge how students think.
Tracy was FAU alumnus Jacob Desjarlais’ academic adviser while he attended FAU’s communications grad school in 2005.
“We had lots of disagreements … in front of classes because he repeated a lot of conspiracy theories about journalists and I, as someone who had just taken a full-time job at the local alt-weekly, didn’t share his opinion,” he said.
Tracy was also known to be impatient, stubborn, and argumentative with those who didn’t agree with his point of view.
“He seemed annoyed to be teaching graduate students that would question his positions and statements,” Desjarlais said. “[He] started becoming very critical of local paper and local journalists to the point where we would have long verbal arguments about it.”
Oct 2007: Is listed as a UFF Officer (the faculty union at FAU):
December 2007: Tracy writes a book review, covering “Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics and Social Movement Scholarship” and “The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism form the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle”.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14742830701667036
His review is later criticized here in 2013:
Students say the guy went off in class. And his academic work hints at how someone could go so off the tracks. In a book review, he talks about how academics don’t get social activism — how they are disengaged. With annoyance, he describes the “intellectual remove from the interests of social activists.”