InkTank

Fighting Over the News

Tony Danza becomes a tenth grade English teacher, Lady Gaga goes political and Steven Colbert is a main reason people tuned into the recent immigration hearing.

I read an article the other day titled The World’s Most Influential 16-year-old Bloggers. One of these ‘kids’ made $5, 000 in the first month of launching his blog.

Now I don’t know about everyone else but I feel semi-defeated.

I didn’t spend four years day-dreaming through math classes about becoming a journalist so that I could compete with celebrities and 16-year-olds with a smart phone.  

What is going on?

More importantly what can we do to revert the attention to the actual news media? There is such an availability of mediums and information that I’m beginning to wonder what being a journalist is going to mean when I graduate. I also feel like I have no right to complain because I still have a fighting chance. There are people in news rooms who have spent their post-grad lives making a name for themselves and now have to compete with me; a kid with less experience but a better understanding of converged media.

Are We Missing the Point?

I finally understand why they call it service learning instead of just service.

Food and Friends is an organization in Washington, DC that feeds specialized, nutritious meals and groceries to people living with life-challenging illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, cancer and diabetes. The services are free of charge.

First thought? I have to be up with the roosters. Second thought? Wait, there’s a shuttle?

This place is impressive. Every aspect of this organization from the punctuality of the staff, to the accessibility of transportation, to everyday tasks works better than clockwork. 

At first the tasks appeared routine and gave me as much of a rush as any assembly line could. Then I looked up and began reading all of the thank you letters written and illustrated by children and the children of individuals who rely on the service Food and Friends provide.  Blown up pictures of chefs who dedicated their time to cooking massive amounts of specialized food, volunteers working hard day in and day out and people actually receiving the food, hung from the ceiling.

Goosebumps.

My initial feeling was ashamed. I was entirely too focused on getting the “experience” that I was missing the impact of what I was doing. Just because I’m not listening to the testimonials of the people we are affecting doesn’t mean they don’t exist. After all seeing isn’t always believing right?

The next place of service learning I found in the urban Southeast of DC at a place called Cornerstone School. This day I was prepared with a real understanding of true service and a mindset to make a difference no matter how mundane the tasks may be.

But things never go according to plan—a lesson I keep forgetting along with the lesson that things aren’t always what they seem. These clichés are sadly the best way to convey what I gathered from my time at Cornerstone.

Pumped and metro card in hand we boarded the bus. On our way off the bus an unfortunate misstep caused my shoe to ripe clean apart rendering it impossible to wear functionally.

Where stories go to die

News in D.C. is a funny thing. There is definitely no shortage of it. Everywhere you turn, there are press conferences, hearings, fundraisers, talks and various other events going on in the city.

So why am I having such a hard time nailing down a story?

Last Thursday, my editor at The Washington Examiner, where I am an intern, came to me with a press release and told me to go to the Alexandria Detention Center. There, the former Alexandria police chief, who retired after being arrested for a DUI, would be giving a motivational talk to the inmates. This sounded interesting, so after some brief research and an intense session with Google Maps, I went out to get the story.

After a long ride on the Metro and a half-mile hike down the road, I arrived at the detention center and took a seat in the waiting area next to a guy with a lot of camera equipment who looked like he knew what he was doing. Our waiting was rewarded with the news that the press would not be allowed at this talk, although we were welcome to stand outside the detention center and wait for the speaker to come in. I called my editor, who did not answer, and waited a bit before deciding it was time to give it up because a) the camera guy was leaving too and b) the mosquitoes were biting really badly.

Review: "The Arab Press"

For the basic themes of this book, read this, then subtract two decades.

That said, “The Arab Press” is the original study of press in the Arab world. Rugh notes in this book, which looks across sixteen Arab countries, that the press in the Arab world reflects and takes the shape of the country it’s in.

There is an intimate, organic relationship between the media institutions and society in the way those institutions are organized and controlled. Neither the institution nore the society in which it functions can be understood properly without reference to the other.

This is certainly true in the Arab world. The news media there, in fact, are particularly interesting in this regard because of the roles they have played during the third quarter of the twentieth century as most of the Arab countries gained their full independence and developed their own national institutions (Rugh xxvi).

The main thesis of Rugh’s book is that arab news organizations take the shape of, and reflect the country their in. It’s hard to generalize about Arab press because there are some countries with significantly freer press than others.

Review: The Press in the Arab Middle East

Press freedom was problematic in the Arab world for much of the 19th and 20th century. Press censorship wasn’t just legislated and economically motivated. Many times the harshest censor was the press itself.

Culturally, many Arabs saw freedom of expression as a weapon that could either be used beneficially or destructively. Rafiq- al-Maqdisi, a Syrian author, told the following story to illustrate it’s destructiveness:

It happened in 1908, following the restoration of the Ottoman constitution, in the Banyas district of the province of Ladhiqiyya. An angel walking from the town to the country met a villager on his way to Banyas, who asked him:
“What is new in town?”
“Freedom has been declared.”
“How come?”
“Our lord the Sultan has restored the constitution and imparted freedom.”
Whereupon the villager shouted at the top of his voice: “The world is free then!” and immediately grabbed a stick and started beating the angel for the world had become free! (Ayalon 132)

Why Journalists Deserve the Newseum

Leave it to a journalist to see both sides of a story even on a monument to journalists.  In the May 5th  Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson takes some easy shots at Washington's newest museum, the Newseum while admitting it's nice to get some positive press on, well, the press. The enormous $500 million structure holds it all:

The actual mouse pad used by Peter Jennings is down the case from a red sweater that Helen Thomas wore to a presidential press conference, across from a notebook jotted in by the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff during the Lewinsky scandal.

I haven't been to the Newseum, but I think we deserve a little credit. Perhaps even more credit than Ferguson gave us in his recent story.

YouTube gives banned RCTV (Venezuela) its voice.

By Richard Potts, Assistant Director of the Washington Journalism Center

YouTube's technology has given the world a new kind of political refugee: the dissident television station. 

When Hugo Chavez was elected (in a landslide) as president of Venezuela back in 1998, he promised to bring a democratic revolution to the people of Venezuela.  But it turns out he's more of an autocrat than a democrat, and he has begun to try to reign in his critics in the press.   

This culminated with Chavez "not renewing" (i.e. banning) the broadcast license for RCTV (Englishbackgrounder on RCTV here), which has been highly critical of Chavez.  Chavez says RCTV is "inciting unrest" in the country.  A classically vague charge worthy of China or the Soviets in their day.  It certainly has no place in a modern, Western demcracy. 

On the positive side, Chavez has turned out to be a very entertaining and vocal critic of the U.S. and George Bush (check out his infamous "Bush = Devil" speech at the UN).  The guy just has no filter.  He calls opponents names and uses amazing hyperbole.   Miami Herald Latin-America columnist Andres Oppenheimer has given Chavez the hilarious title of  "Narcissist-Leninist". 

But how RCTV has responded to the Chavez challenge is amazing, too.  The station has simply "gone YouTube."  The LA Times reports that RCTV hasn't even laid off any of its 3000 employees.  It's still producing soap operas, community-service material, and Chavez's-thorn-in-the-flesh program "The Observer" all on YouTube.  Some of RCTV's programming is also carried by international cable providers. 

To my knowledge, this is the first time an entire analog media operation has moved online in this way and for this reason -- and with virtually no loss of staff or production. 

But the big question is how RCTV proposes to generate revenue over the long run, after its cause is no longer in the news and when it can't control the distribution channel.  This is especially key in light of the $1 billion lawsuit Viacom has filed against Google/YouTube, which essentially sees YouTube as a threat to old-media revenues (interesting new theories on Viacom's reasoning here). 

RCTV's experiment is less than a month old and too young to judge.  But it will have important consequences if it's successful -- and not just for dissident media.   

The Pitch is Struck Out

One of my favorite papers to grab occasionally when I’m back home in Kansas City is The Pitch. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I read it more often than the Kansas City Star (which covers more news, both locally and internationally), because I like checking out info on art exhibits, theater, and music news, and, of course, good old KC political gossip. It’s sort of like the Washington City Paper, only with more reviews and a stronger music section. We even have our version of the “Loose Lips” column, although it’s called “The Strip.” (Get it? K.C. Strip? Yeah, we are sort of obsessive about steaks and barbeque in Kansas City)

Anyway, I was flipping through some back articles and was shocked to find that recently a judge in KC that barred both The Pitch and the Star from publishing articles. Basically, what happened was that The Pitch/the Star obtained, legally, an important confidential document that was a piece of correspondence between a law firm and a major utility entity of Kansas City, Kan. that pointed out how the utility company had failed to comply with EPA standards in repairing/updating its equipment at coal power plants in accordance with the Clean Air Act. The judge issued a temporary restraining order in response to a Pitch reporter asking BPU, the utility company, to comment on the letter. The article was put up on their website March 2.

“Friday evening, Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Kelly Moorhouse ruled in favor of the BPU and ordered the stories taken down, saying the BPU would be "irreparably harmed" if they remained on the papers' Web sites.”

I may be way off base, but it’s not the paper’s responsibility that BPU didn’t do what they were supposed to and are now reaping the consequences of this, which will include some hefty fines if all of the allegations are true. It is, however, their responsibility to break this news to inform the public as to what is going on with their tax dollars, not to mention the responsibility to accurately tell the story. While I’m admittedly not as well-versed in media law as some of my cohorts here in the WJC program, I’m still sort of at a loss for how a judge can ban a major news story from breaking, essentially.

This is huge. To say that a utilities company knowingly profited by not complying to Federal standard is a HUGE deal. Hello? Hasn’t the judge who ruled in this case heard of a little thing called the First Amendment? The freedom of the press in breaking news like this is so crucial to the public, because if the newspapers are revoked from taking risks and bringing this information to public attention, who is harmed? What are the ramifications of this for other major issues that may surface? This is exactly what we are covering in this class—the issue of “How can there be public discourse if there is no public information?”

“The ruling doesn’t just threaten the freedom of the press, it hurts the people of Kansas City,” added Pitch editor C.J. Janovy. “They deserve some answers. Moorhouse’s ruling clearly goes against the public interest.”

I whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Janovy. My journalism prof back home always stressed that the best defense is the truth. A major role of journalism throughout the ages has been to expose what is really going on, beyond the facades and zombie-like P.R. people. Thankfully, when the matter was sent to an appellate court, it was overturned.

"Disappearing" the plank in our eye

By Richard Potts, Assistant Director of the Washington Journalism Center

In Guatemala in 1996 things were looking up, finally. 

I was there just as the government signed a historic peace accord with rebels, ending years of civil war that had resulted in thousands of civilian deaths--to say nothing of the combatants.   

But as awful as those deaths were, I sympathized even more with the families I met whose loved ones simply vanished into thin air.  No record of what happened to them, and no bodies.  All they were left with were bulletin boards of old photos of their kids and husbands. 

These were almost always politically motivated kidnappings, an act that has come to be known in the human-rights community as "disappearing" one's opponents.   And it was a popular tactic all across Latin America in the 70's and 80's among Communists and Capitalists alike. Argentina's government used to actually fly its disappeared miles out over the open ocean.  And then from about 10,000 feet up, they would push people -- alive -- out the door of the aircraft.

Some of the prime targets of disappearing were (and in places still are) journalists.  If you're interested in free-press issues globally, this should be a huge concern for you.  It's been proven that it's hard to write a story when your reporter has gone missing.   

So, when "disappearing" has such an awful history right in our own geopolitical back yard, you'd think it would be a cinch that the U.S. government would support a treaty banning this activity.   

USA TODAY has an article this morning describing how the US government in fact refused, along with several other Western governments, to sign this treaty on January 31. 

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called the treaty an important step both in preventing injustices common years ago and barring newer abuses that often fall through regulatory loopholes.

Arbour said the United States had expressed "reservations" about parts of the text, but declined to elaborate, and she urged U.S. officials to sign and ratify it. She noted that America often backs activities of the UNHCR without formally signing on to them.

She called the treaty "a message to all modern-day authorities committed to the fight against terrorism" that some past tactics are now "not acceptable, in a very explicit way."

The reason the U.S. didn't sign this treaty is simple.  Friends, it's hard to fight terrorists without using a little CIA-sponsored kidnapping now and then.   Gotta break a few eggs if you're gonna make omelets, you know? 

In other words, we are disappearing people, but it's tolerated for now because the threat to our security is so grave. By no means am I suggesting that the U.S. is pushing people out of airplanes alive, but let's be honest and admit that we can rationalize a lot when it's our own skin on the line.

We can sit back and judge Argentina and Guatemala for their atrocious behavior but they were in fact only fighting against factions they had defined as terrorists, too. 

By the way, Argentina has come clean about and abandoned its use of disappearances, and was one of the primary supporters and signers of the UN treaty.   Maybe we don't hold the moral high ground on this issue anymore.

Free Speech in the Middle East! Well, almost.

Now that China’s gotten rid of all those pesky writers who try to preach their crazy ideas to the public beneath Mao’s radar via the blogosphere, totalitarian regimes in the Middle East are facing the same problem.

 Officials at Saudi   Arabia’s Ministry of Culture and Information recently met to discuss ways to monitor and censor the flow of information that has found its way into their oppressive theocratic kingdom.

 As the blogosphere becomes more prevalent throughout a country that denies women equal protection under the law, has one of the highest capital punishment rates and adheres to traditional Islamic law, the people in charge have grown a bit worried. With blogging, an individual can post an idea, and as soon as the government shuts it down, another blogger will post it again on his own site.

 These brave souls who live under despotic rule are true beacons of hope and democracy, proponents for freedom in a land that despises the ideals that we hold dear.

 Or are they? 

The Washington Post reported that bloggers in Saudi Arabia who have formed a group called the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Bloggers recently met to discuss writing a charter for their new organization. 

Within their charter, they have discussed banning criticism of religion online and debated whether they would tolerate erotic blogging. 

Look guys, make up your minds. These are the folks that are at the forefront of challenging a thousand year old tradition of censorship, and it seems that they too can’t allow absolute freedom to take hold. 

If the most radical avant-garde  thinkers of the Middle East cannot allow free speech, then how on Allah’s green earth can we ever hope to convince everyone in the Middle East to immediately drop their time-honored traditions and embrace the ways of the Red White and Blue? 

The bloggers discussed the writings of female blogger (who gave a woman a computer? Heresy!), and found it to be questionable. In a sense, they have replaced the censors employed by the Saudi government and are attempting to act as editors of an un-editable medium. (Does anyone else see the inherent contradiction here?) 

In the words of Andrew Sullivan, here’s the money quote from the Post article: 

“My definition of freedom does not cover the type of content she writes.” 

Maybe you didn’t get that. I’ll let you read it again. This time really read it. Digest it.  Ruminate on the meaning behind the words spoken by this “freedom blogger” in Saudi Arabia

“My definition of freedom does not cover the type of content she writes.”

If that sentence doesn’t make you more frustrated than Lewis Black stuck in a Britney Spears concert, well then you probably need to retake elementary school civics. Or maybe you can start by waking up for that 8:00 am logic class you keep sleeping through. Or perhaps you can get a dictionary and look up the words freedom, censorship and contradiction. (No, I won't hyperlink it for you).

As much as it pains me to say this, at least this is a start. The Bill of Rights didn’t just appear overnight. Perhaps these men who are indeed risking their lives for quasi-freedom will inspire others to take it a step further.

Either way, tyrannical regimes in the Middle East have a lot of work on their hands as they limit all of this free speech that is going around. It just goes to show you that no matter where you are in the world, technology will always shape content.