Clippings 2001
December, 2001
The Journalist's Job: 2002
As we mark the start of a new year, let us celebrate the journalists struggling to work honestly under difficult circumstances. They are next door and they are across the world. They have a job that is both impossible and wonderful, to ask the questions that no one else can ask, and sometimes to pay the price. They are the nervous system of democracies everywhere. Their job is to teach us what is real, and what we can do about it.
The best journalists aren’t the ones peddling gossip and gore as idle entertainment. Instead, they are trying to find out what is going on beneath the headlines of the day; who is making things happen. They take up the problems of the powerless and the social outcasts; they don’t forget the prisoners on death row or the homeless folks living on the church steps; they expose the lies of charismatic zealots and challenge the despair of the peacemakers, even as others have moved on to the next big thing.
The best journalists are advocates for ordinary people and common decency; it is on their behalf that they hold accountable those in power.
All journalists need to be more serious about what they do, but less serious about what they have done. There is no place for sanctimony, but lots of room for self-criticism. And citizens, especially those with any modicum of education, money or influence, should honor these efforts. The owners of media companies need to rediscover their central importance to the quality of life around them, and empower their employees to ask the right questions and report the truth. It can’t be just about money, or civilization is dust.
The journalist’s job is always there, in fat times and in war: to tell the story of our times, tell it honestly, over and over, in new ways that teach people what they have and can do. If journalists carry a bias, let it be the insistence that there is always hope, that progress is not doomed, and that good acts can redeem us from evil ones.
November, 2001
Are U.S. news companies in financial trouble?
People are watching television news and reading newspapers much more now than they did before Sept. 11, but their companies are not making more money as a result. In fact, they are losing money on the expanded coverage. "The advertising business has capsized," concluded New York Times analysts. At a Harvard conference recently sponsored by the New Directions for News Project we considered what should be done to finance real news. The conversation focused on newspapers. Some insights included:
--There is enormous pressure for more media mergers to compete with the giant AOL/Time Warner company. Dwarfing all other media enterprises, AOL Time Warner is a $144 billion company, compared to, for example, the New York Times ( $6.5 billion) or Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal ($3.9 billion.) This is not good news for regional newspapers. "Elite newspapers with national franchises will be in great shape, local newspapers in touch with their communities are in a great place, but be afraid for the middle size papers. Their pricing power is not great" with advertisers, concluded Jeff Flanders of the Harvard Business Review.
--The recent staff cuts at American newspapers are not because they are not profitable companies, however. In fact, most are running 28 to 30% net income increases before taxes. "The public thinks were a struggling business, but in fact, compared to other businesses, we're doing very well," concluded veteran newspaper editor Geneva Overholser.
--So why the staff and budget cutbacks, then, which are making it hard to cover the news properly? Because Wall Street analysts, who shape the fate of news company stock values, demand that profit levels keep up that same "cash cow" model that newspapers have offered in the past few decades. They measure this on a quarterly basis, so newspaper executives are not encouraged to make deeper investments in news staff or coverage, and in fact, are not encouraged to "build the business" in any long term way. Short term numbers are what is driving a lot of business decisions, and for the moment, advertising is off so costs have to be reduced.
--These investment decisions are not made on valuing news as something other than just an advertising vehicle. News is just a "commodity." The numbers do not tell the real story of journalism--that it is something of value to community, to democracy. There is no Wall Street value placed on that civic value of news and therefore, there is no pressure for continued investment in a high quality news division by the corporate owners of news organizations.
--One of the most disturbing conclusions from a participant at the conference: "The public hasn't noticed when we've cut back the quality and scope of news coverage." While this comment referred to news before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it is likely that we will see a return to that cheap, shallow and entertainment news on TV and in newspapers unless news business managers change their definitions of success.
September, 2001
What Bin Laden Wants
The media "hearth" has brought us together to reflect, after drawing us to witness the horrors of last week. As we struggle to figure out what to do next, a commentary from Tamim Ansary, an Afghani-American writer, is worth considering:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering.
Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble?
Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
--Tamim Ansary
August, 2001
Media Literacy
As school starts again, teachers are competing with popular media as they try to shape students' understanding of the world. "Media literacy" enables people to move from passive recipients to active information-builders. It is important to help students assess the media messages they are getting and figure out how to find the most reliable information. We discussed these issues this summer at Harvard's Media and Democracy workshop for high school teachers, sponsored by the Harvard School of Education and Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Here are some ideas I shared with the group:
- Ask your children/students: "How is your view of the world being shaped by what is presented to you?" Encourage them to keep "media watching diaries" to observe how certain subjects (such as the role of women in politics, for example,) are handled.
- Ask them what the word "public" means to them. Does it mean "government" or does it mean "of the people"? How is the term used by politicians and journalists? Does it define something valuable? Or something discredited? Is it something we should reclaim in a positive way? How?
- To teach media literacy, first help them deconstruct the messages they get, which often are self-interested or commercial messages rather than disinterested, impartial information. Why are all the girls in the ads super thin and young? Why is the news so preoccupied with Gary Condit and other sexual scandals? This is only stage one-don't stop there. If you do, you have simply deepened the young peoples' cynicism.
- Next, teach students and children to build up their competence in selecting the news and information that they really need, and to identify quality that deserves greater credibility.
- What are the hallmarks of that quality? (Transparency, identified sources, a track record that matches the stated mission, relevance , an openness to correcting mistakes as publicly as one made the mistakes in the first place, etc.
Here are some ideas brought to the seminar by others:
- You get a lot of news you want, but not a lot of news you need-Larry Grossman.
- In 1952 only 50% of Americans had tv sets. Now there is total penetration; the average American household has the tv set on for more than 7 hours a day.-Gary Orren
- There are more phone lines in metropolitan Tokyo than in all sub Saharan Africa today.-panel on technology
- The ideal for women and minorities trying to find equal opportunity is "the identity you embrace is your choice, and is costless." -Lawrence Bobo
June, 2001
Online Journalism
Are you an online journalist? We have a new link for you, the Online News Association: http://www.journalists.org/.
In the early days of online journalism, some news organizations put their scoops onto the Internet even if the stories hadn't been fully checked out and were still too raw to put into their newspapers or newscasts. Somehow, the risk was smaller that they would be held accountable if the story was wrong, but they still could get credit for the scoop if it was right. The strategy had a down side. Example: The San Jose Mercury News, in publishing its since-discredited expose of crack and the CIA on their website before they were willing to put it in the newspaper, sullied their news brand in all media.
How does online journalism differentiate itself from everything else on the Internet? How does it differ from news programming in old media formats? Who is doing the best online news? How will online journalism survive financially? To explore these issues check out our new link to the Online News Association, which is open to online journalists around the world.
April, 2001
Journalism's Basic Principles
In their new book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001) Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel offer the following basic principles of journalism:
1. Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens.
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
I think these are excellent. What do you think? Let me know!