Belai Habte-Jesus, MD, MPH
Global Strategic Enterprises, Inc 4 Peace and Prosperity
www.globalbelai4u.blogspot.com
Focusing on 7Es:
Sustainable Education, Empowerment, Energy, Ecology,Economy and Enterprises for a better future
Our Passion to Succed towards our individual and collective potential!
Re: Bringing Good Governance in Journalism?
Good Governance (GG)= SAT (Stakeholder's Accountability and Transparency! who is the stake holder in Global Journalism as described by Doug McGill of Minnesota?
Doug McGill has declared himself as a Global Journalist and writes passionately about the plight of the Global One Billion Poor. It is mostly the account of Refugees from the Billion Poor in Minesota, USA. Most of it is a translation and not a first hand account or a description of events as they occur. These are important stories but need to be coroborated with alternative sources to ensure even if the translation is correct.
Yet, they are very impoortant stories of modern day refugees in search of Good Governance, transparency and accountability.
Does mcGill's journalism base its stories on facts corroborated with evidence with at least three independent different sources and does he make his own personal trip to the world of the Global One Billion Poor or does he reflect the opinion and `propaganda stories of his selected audience in one part of the United States, Refugees of Minnestota?
McGill needs to travel to the abode of the Billion Poor and espceially the Horn and make his own personal obeservation and corroborate his stories. He perhaps will make lots of corrections to his stories if he makes the effort! Yet, his contributin cannot be ignored!
Please read below his blog or what he calls Global Journalism and ask yourself what are the standards and parameters of the operation of Global Journalism? Are they accountable to any standards of journalism any where in the globe?
How can we trust their opinion when they do not give fair as Activist political oriented propaganda journalism or is there merit to this type of one sided propaganda.
We have to read with our eyes and ears open and with our social and cognitive intelligence intace, why is this group reporting in such a way to give a bleak future for the One Billion Poor? Who will raise their hopes and aspiration and who can compete with such level of highly organized propaganda machine?
May be we should demand for Good Governance that is transparency and accountability to touch the world of Global Journalism too whatever their motive and aspirations are.
Here are the comments and reports of Doug McGill and let us give him the opportunity to educate us about the new world of interactive journalism that does not have border.
The Bottom One Billion People deserve a balanced and hopeful perspective that needs to be matched with facts and good will. We need to bring Good Governance to Global Journalism and Blogs too? We need an independent group that verifies and testifies about the accuracy of some of these new mushrooming blogs and indpendent journalism!
The question is how? This remains the challenge of modern interactive journalism and perhaps this is the blessing in disguise where we can have access to independent sources and it is socieities and gloval citizens duties to verify such stories. All the same, the Global One Billion Poor need attention and redress to their suffereings and bleak future. We need hope and transformation soon.
The African Millennial Good Governance is trying to address this challenge and more ideas and win-win parttnerships are needed! Any one with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Appropriate, Realistic and Time Sensitive ideas?
with regards
Dr B
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Minnesota's Coffee Shop Warriors
Around the World in 80 Papers
A Sri Lankan Monk of Mankato
The Asian Tigers of Minnesota
A Chinese Journalist Meets MN
Minnesota's Ya Ba Crisis
Little Johnny Atop the World
The Guns of Minnesota
A Merry Sudanese Christmas
A Supreme Minnesota Patriarch
Somalis for Howard Dean
From Kathmandu to Clark's Grove
More Columns
THE "GLOCAL" BOOK
HERE: A Global
Citizen's Journey
An anthology of Doug McGill's
international journalism from
Minnesota. Reports, analysis,
opinions, essays. To learn more
or to buy, click here.
Listen here to Doug McGill
explain glocal journalism on
NPR's "On the Media"
Mark Kramer, Jay Rosen,
Sandy Close & Jeremy Iggers
comment on HERE.
Philip Gourevitch, McGill and
Dan Cohen discuss "Rehab-
bing the Fourth Estate."
A Darfur Victim: The Anuak
The Pochalla Refugees (TNR)
The Minnesota Anuak (MPR)
"Targeted Killings" (HRW)
400 Feared Dead in Massacre
Ethiopia's Bloody Sunday
Anuak Massacres Widen
Minister of Genocide
Jay Rosen: Why the Anuak Genocide Story Matters
ANUAK SLIDESHOW
The Pochalla Refugee Camp
and Ajwara, Sudan
Please also visit ... www.globalbelai4u.blogspot.com for further information.
July 9, 2008
As Ethiopia Boils, Minnesota's Ethiopians Feel the Heat
FRIDLEY, MN -- Ali Abdifatah is a little out of is mind right now, understandably so.
He is desperate to discover the fate of his brother, who was abducted by men with guns last Saturday evening. Since then, he hasn’t been seen or heard from and Ali has sat by his telephone and computer at his home here, calling and emailing, gathering small scraps of information.
But that’s a difficult task because his brother, Sultan Fowsi Mohamed Ali, is a clan elder in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, a half a world away. A renowned peacekeeper in the troubled Horn of Africa, whom Amnesty International has called a “prisoner of conscience,” Sultan Fowsi has been held in the giant Ogaden Jail in the town of Jijiga since last August.
Then, last Friday afternoon, according to Minnesota Ethiopians who have spoken to eyewitnesses in Ethiopia in cell phone conversations, Ethiopian troops barged into the jail and shot several prisoners on Friday afternoon. They then left, but on Saturday evening they returned, grabbed Sultan Fowsi and one other prisoner and vanished into the night.
Razor's Edge
As a result, this week in Minnesota hundreds of immigrants from the Ogaden region of Ethiopia are firing up Internet sites and spending hours on their cell phones every day, trying to learn the fate of a beloved leader.
“It’s shocking, it’s bad,” Ali said, thumbing through stacks of human rights reports written over the years, many of them praising his brother as one of the few figures capable of negotiating peace in the Horn of Africa.
Yet as bad as it is, Ali’s story is only one of hundreds of similar tales told these days by Minnesota’s nearly 20,000 Ethiopian immigrants, who come from all across the country and not just the Ogaden region.
What is happening in the Ogaden region is the most immediate, urgent, and largest-scale atrocity occurring in Ethiopia today.
But simmering conflicts that have been brewing for many years are flaring up today all across Ethiopia, and these are keeping Minnesota’s Ethiopian community, composed of many ethnic groups, on a razor’s edge.
U.S. Citizens
“What’s going on in Ethiopia is the government is trying to silence all opposition,” said Robsan Itana, director of the Oromo American Citizens Council, based in St. Paul, which represents immigrants of the Oromo ethnic group, the largest in Ethiopia. “They are killing people.”
When the present Ethiopian regime came to power in 1991 under the banner of “ethnic federalism,” there was widespread hope that Ethiopia’s nine major ethnic groups – and dozens of smaller ones – would for once begin to live in harmony with Ethiopia’s central government.
Instead, today, the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi finds itself fighting counter-insurgency campaigns against “liberation fronts” across the breadth of the country.
Fleeing these violent counter-insurgency campaigns, immigrants from virtually all of Ethiopia’s major ethnic groups came to live in Minnesota over the past decade. Many are now U.S. citizens.
But as they still have families and loved ones back in Ethiopia, when violence flares up over there, tempers and temperaments get riled here in Minnesota, and Ethiopian troubles soon become Minnesota’s.
Attacks-by-Proxy
Another example that is having repercussions in this state is a bloody clash that occurred in May between the Oromo and Gumuz ethnic groups in western Ethiopia, that left more than a hundred people killed.
On the surface, the inter-tribal nature of the Oromo-Gumuz conflict left little trace of Ethiopian government involvement.
Yet Oromo in Ethiopia and in the Minnesota diaspora have charged – as one or another party nearly always does in such cases – that the Ethiopian government instigated the conflict by various means, such as ceding land belonging to one party to another, as a way to foment violence and launch a brutal attack-by-proxy on a targeted ethnic group.
“It’s a nightmare what Oromos are subjected to in Ethiopia,” says Lencho Bati, a professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota, and a native Oromo. "It’s exactly what blacks in South Africa suffered under apartheid – lack of access to resources, education, power, cultural enrichment and the right to self-determination.”
Locked Out
Like Ali Abdifatah, Lencho Bati also has a brother who was “disappeared” by the Ethiopian military.
“My brother was abducted in 1992 by the then-new regime of Meles Zenawi,” Bati said. “He has been missing since then. My family is living this trauma that has left a big hole in our hearts. It’s a single story but it is also common among so many Oromos in Minnesota.”
Bati spends much of his free time researching conditions in Ethiopia and working on behalf of Oromo rights. He is a member of the Oromo Liberation Front, a political opposition group highly active in the Ethiopian diaspora.
The Anuak of Ethiopia are another case in point. A black African tribe of only 100,000 living in Ethiopia’s western Gambela state, roughly 1,000 Anuak today live in Minnesota. They came here after fleeing ethnic cleansing attacks carried out both directly by the Ethiopian army, and in proxy conflicts instigated and then left unpoliced by Ethiopian troops, often pitting the de-armed Anuak against armed groups of the Nuer tribe.
Fertile Land
“Pushing the Anuak out of the region is part of the Ethiopian government policy,” said Apee Jobi, a Minnesota Anuak who lives in Brooklyn Park. “A government official once called the Anuak ‘scum.’ Gambela is a fertile land and if it was developed it could help feed all of Ethiopia. So the government likes the land, but it doesn’t like its people.”
The Ethiopian military has conducted four major attacks on the Anuak tribe since the Meles regime took power in Ethiopia in 1991, Jobi said. The largest one took place on December 13, 2003 when uniformed Ethiopian troops killed some 425 Anuak men in a massacre that Human Rights Watch called “crimes against humanity” that targeted the Anuak tribe specifically.
Employed at a local bank, Jobi devotes virtually every weekend to Anuak causes, organizes meetings, helps raise money for Anuak refugees, and edits a web site, Gambela Today, which runs news stories almost daily.
Stark Contrast
In stark contrast to the picture painted by Minnesota’s Ethiopians, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, in interview after interview, portrays Ethiopia as a country that has its problems but is inevitably marching towards peace and democracy.
“A peaceful, strong, viable opposition is part of any vibrant democracy,” he told the Washington Post in 2006. “We wish to have a vibrant democracy and therefore we wish to have a vibrant, strong, peaceful opposition.”
But of the dozen Ethiopian immigrants interviewed for this article, only those quoted in the story above were willing to give their names for publication.
The others said that the Ethiopian government pays spies in Minnesota to report the names of people here who criticize the government, and that family members who still live in Ethiopia would be punished.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/minnethiopians.htm
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July 2, 2008
With Spies and Cellphones, Ethiopian Terror Touches Minnesota
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – The four men sitting at a downtown coffee shop here recently told me a story that sounded too far-fetched to be true.
Could a humanitarian crisis following the pattern of Darfur, Sudan actually be unfolding while capturing hardly a second of the world’s collective attention, or Minnesota's?
Even worse, could it actually be true, as these four Minnesotans insist, that this unimaginable massacre is substantially being sustained by U.S. tax dollars and moral support?
Is it possible that entire African villages are being wiped out Darfur-style by marauding helicopter gunships belonging to a close American ally, and that new refugee camps are being formed virtually overnight, as we speak, thanks to Uncle Sam?
Superpower Struggles
This sounded like the vilest strain of anti-American propaganda. But after a few hours speaking with these gentlemen, and doing a few more hours of research and checking, their story seems all too definitely, tragically, true.
The four men are in an ideal position to know. They are members of Minnesota’s community of immigrants from Ogaden, Ethiopia – a Montana-sized patch of desert that has been the scene of global superpower struggles for many decades.
Every day for the past several months, these four men, along with hundreds of other Ogaden immigrants in Minnesota, have spent hours every week on their cellphones talking to loved ones who give them seemingly endless eyewitness accounts of crimes and horrors in a war zone.
“We hear about mothers being forced to betray their own sons to the Ethiopian Army, of fathers being handed guns and ordered to kill their own sons on the spot or to be killed themselves,” one of the men said.
Minnesota Spies
“Every Ogadeni in Minnesota has friends or family who have been jailed, tortured, or killed. It seems there is no end to it. We could tell you stories all day for a whole week and still have more stories to tell you.”
The men asked that their names not be published, because they said Ethiopian government spies live in Minnesota who would help the Ethiopian authorities hunt down their family members in Ogaden to jail them, torture them or worse as a punishment for talking with the press.
Having the second-largest population of refugees per capital of any U.S. state (after Florida), and likely the nation's top state in diversity of refugees, Minnesota has once again become an early-warning system for crimes against humanity being perpetrated in a faraway country – this time in eastern Ethiopia.
Minnesota’s Ethiopian immigrant community is estimated between 13,000 and 20,000, the lower number being the latest U.S. Census figure, and the higher a number given by local Ethiopian immigrant groups.
Ethnic Somalis
About a fourth of the state’s Ethiopian immigrants are from Ogaden, whose natives, in contrast to Ethiopia’s Amharic-speaking Christians, are Somali-speaking Muslims. And therein lies the problem.
For decades, ordinary Ogadeni herders and farmers have lived on a literal battlefield over which Ethiopia and Somalia, acting as proxies for global powers, have waged an epic-length conflict.
A conventional war was fought in 1977-78. More often, counter-insurgency attacks by the Ethiopian government against supposed Ogaden separatists -- or now, "terrorists" -- have targeted civilians and entire villages, creating vast refugee flows.
The Ogaden landscape today is littered with the hulks of tanks and rusting weapons used in battles since 1948. That was the year that Britain, then the region’s dominant global power, ceded Ogaden to Ethiopia, even though nearly all of its five million inhabitants are ethnically and culturally Somali.
During the Cold War period, the region’s global powers were the Soviet Union and the United States.
Minnesota's Challenge
Today, the great global struggle being waged locally is the “War on Terror.”
Official U.S. foreign policy holds that the Horn of Africa is one of the world’s top breeding grounds for radical Islamist terrorists.
An Islamist governnment in Sudan, plus a powerful Islamist faction in Somalia with the likely support of nearby Eritrea, have led to the U.S. embrace of Ethiopia as a close ally in the War on Terror – it being “the only democratic nation in the Horn of Africa.”
But Minnesota’s large Ethiopian population challenges that formulation.
If Ethiopia is a democracy how come thousands of its citizens are fleeing as refugees and asylees to our state, insisting Ethiopia is a tyranny?
A report published last month by Human Rights Watch lends credence to horrific stories told by the four Ogadeni men at the Minneapolis coffee shop.
87 Villages
The report’s title, “Collective Punishment,” refers to the practice of wiping out villages based on rumors that insurgents live there. The report’s subtitle is “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in the Ogaden.”
Despite Ethiopia’s attempts to block information about human rights crimes from escaping the Ogaden, Human Rights Watch said it had received reports of “at least 87 burnings and forced displacements of villages, many of which involved extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape across numerous areas of the Somali Region,” meaning the Ogaden.
Since the late 1970s, when Ethiopia and Somalia waged a conventional war over the Ogaden, between two and three million refugees have poured out of region into neighboring Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti – and then onwards to a global diaspora including Minnesota.
In the most recent violence, tens of thousands of Ogadenis have already been displaced, and an Ethiopian economic and aid blockade threatens to escalate the humanitarian catastrophe by orders of magnitude as a result of drought and famine, Human Rights Watch said.
“The situation is critical,” the report says.
Moral Hazard
As for the question of funding, the U.S. is the largest single source of foreign military aid to Ethiopia. Moreover, total U.S. military aid to the country increased seventeen-fold after 9/11, when Ethiopia became a close ally of the U.S. in the “war on terror.”
According to the Center for Public Integrity, the U.S. provided $16.8 million in military aid to Ethiopia in the three years following 9/11, compared to $928,000 in the three years before 9/11. That is a small percentage of Ethiopia’s annual $300 million defense budget, but critics say that unofficially, U.S. support of Ethiopia and its military is far higher.
Overall U.S. assistance to Ethiopia totaled $474 million in 2007 alone, according to the U.S. Department of State. Including other major sources of foreign aid, especially the UK and the European Union, Ethiopia receives almost $2 billion in aid annually.
“Americans are also a victim in the Ogaden,” one of the men in the coffee shop said. “Do they know their tax dollars are supporting a tyranny like this? If they knew, wouldn’t they want it to stop?”
CORRECTION: In this story's original version I bluntly characterized the government of Eritrea as Islamist, which was incorrect and misleading. The Eritrean government is composed of members of the country’s sole legal political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, which formally follows no ideology. Yet in 2007, the U.S. and the U.N. both accused Eritrea of providing weapons and support for prominent Islamist factions in neighboring Somalia, as part of Eritrea's long-running conflict with its neighbor, Ethiopia. Strong evidence has been offered to back this claim. Nevertheless, as I said, the PFDJ is not formally aligned. And it remains even more emphatically true that average Eritreans, who have their own problems with their government, grievously suffer for having the “Islamist” label tagged onto their entire nation by a U.S. government following its own “War on Terror” propaganda campaign. I'm sorry that my original wording sounded like that tag.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink
http://www.mcgillreport.org/ogaden.htm
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June 25, 2008
Ethiopian Official Defects
to U.S., Decries Anuak Genocide
ROCHESTER, MN -- An Ethiopian government official seeking to distance himself from what he says is a continuing attempt by Ethiopia to eradicate an African tribe, has defected to the United States.
Obang Oman, who only three weeks ago visited Minneapolis
as part of an official Ethiopian delegation, was scheduled to return to Ethiopia on Sunday,
June 8.
Instead, the night before, he fled his Washington, D.C. hotel, spent the entire evening in a 24-hour restaurant, and flew out early the next morning for Denver, Colorado. He has not announced his defection until today.
“I know what is waiting for me if I return,” Oman said. “They would try to arrest me or kill me. I fear for myself, my wife and my children. So what is the better thing to do? I decided to keep my remaining life.”
Anuak Genocide
Oman’s defection is the latest twist in the long-running saga of the Anuak tribe of Ethiopia, more than a thousand of whom live as refugees in Minnesota. According to Human Rights Watch and other international groups, the Anuak tribe has been the target of crimes against humanity and a campaign of genocide conducted by the Ethiopian government.
Minnesota has the largest Anuak refugee population in the world.
Ironically, Oman came to the U.S. last month as part of an Ethiopian government delegation whose official purpose was to persuade Minnesota’s Anuak population that conditions are now safe enough for the Anuak to return to Ethiopia to invest, to start businesses and to raise their families.
As the Deputy Director for Agricultural Research in Gambella, the western state of Ethiopia where most Anuak live, Oman sat on a dais with five other high-level Ethiopian officials at a May 31 meeting in Minneapolis. With the other officials, he promised more than a hundred Minnesota Anuak refugees in the audience that conditions in Ethiopia are now safe and secure.
Remarks Recanted
Today, Oman recants those remarks. He says that the governor of Gambella, Omot Olom, who is named as a key planner of the genocide in several human rights reports, had personally threatened his life in the past and would likely have jailed him or worse if he had not lied at the Minneapolis meeting.
“He expected me to lie,” he said, referring to Governor Olom, who was the highest-ranking member of the visiting delegation. “I don’t like to lie, but if I had refused he would have taken action.”
Oman said that his wife was evicted from their government housing in Ethiopia two days after his defection, and that he fears for her life and those of his three children.
Feisel Abrahim, an Ethiopian government spokesman based in Washington, D.C. who was part of the visiting delegation to Minneapolis, denied that Oman’s wife had been kicked out of her apartment, that she or Oman’s children are in any danger, or that the Ethiopian government has any grievance whatsoever against Oman.
“This individual is looking for a better life rather than serving his people,” Abrahim said. “There is no way the government is after him. Most people when they come to the United States try to present themselves as political, that they will be tortured or imprisoned. But in actual terms it’s not true.”
Routine Torture
Michele McKenzie, an immigration lawyer for the Minneapolis-based The Advocates for Human Rights, says that Ethiopian refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. have been one of the biggest portions of their clientele since at least 1991, when the present Ethiopian regime took power.
“It’s because of political repression,” McKenzie said. “It informs a level of fear that I would say is unique in the clients we deal with. The government routinely uses torture as a means of curtailing dissidents, and they don’t soft-pedal their tactics. It’s working for the Ethiopian government to target people ethnically and it seems they are picking off the groups one by one.”
Oman, the official who defected, is an Anuak and is not named as being involved in the Anuak genocide in any human rights report. He also was not employed by the government on December 13, 2003, the day on which some 425 Anuak men in Gambella were reportedly killed by uniformed Ethiopian soldiers, in one of the worst massacres ever suffered by the Anuak.
Oman says his decision to defect was largely based on having grown sick of lying to distort and cover up the Ethiopian government's persecution of the Anuak tribe.
"Essentially," he said, the Ethiopian government "is trying to eradicate the Anuak. I don't want to lie. I decided I wanted to try to save the life of my community. I love them, I am from them, and I want to help save them."
Last Warning
Oman says his relationship with Olom, the Gambella governor, turned sour in March, 2006 after he questioned the apparently arbitrary killing of two young Anuak men in Gambella by Ethiopian soldiers. The regional military commander complained about him to Olom, Oman says, which prompted Governor Olom to personally threaten his life.
“They discussed it and he gave me a last warning,” Oman says. “He said ‘If you do that again you will be killed or arrested.’” Following that incident, Oman says he was demoted several times. He says he was ordered to join the visiting delegation primarily because the government needed to have an Anuak testify to the Minnesota Anuak that conditions are safe to return.
Several Minnesota Anuak, reached by telephone, said that Oman’s defection testified to the actual truth of conditions in Gambella today, as opposed to the optimistic line offered by the official delegation at the May meeting.
Causing Chaos
“His defection automatically contradicts that message,” said Apee Jobi, an Anuak who lives in Brooklyn Park. “It says that that Gambella is not really stable and that things are still really bad.”
Habtamu Dugo, an Ethiopian journalist seeking asylum in the U.S. after suffering several jailings and torture for publishing articles critical of the Ethiopian regime, says that many Ethiopian government officials have defected to the U.S. in recent years.
“While they are in the regime, they do what they don’t believe in, and that haunts them,” Dugo said. “They get tired of seeing crimes committed against their own people, whom they say they represent. The time finally comes when they realize they are causing a lot of chaos. They feel guilty and they don’t want to be a part of the system, so they defect.”
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/defection.htm
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June 11, 2008
In Darfur, Minnesota,
Another Kind of Siege
DARFUR, Minnesota – Every once in a while, someone in this tiny speck of a prairie town catches sight of a “Save Darfur!” poster in a magazine or a newspaper, or on the flickering TV at the Darfur Lounge on main street.
What follows is a shake of the head and a stoical smile.
Folks here are well aware of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the blood-drenched patch of northern Africa that -- by pure historical accident -- is this Minnesota town’s namesake.
But the citizens of Darfur, Minnesota have had their own bitter survival struggle in recent years. The clash of modern life versus traditional agricultural life here hasn’t been as tragically bloody as the siege in Sudan, but it still has profoundly diminished this place that 137 Minnesotans call home.
Railway Town
And today, powerful new global economic forces -- the rising price of gasoline, farm fertilizers, food commodities and globalization itself -- are beginning to batter and further isolate Minnesota's Darfur. It’s an ironic counterpoint to the supposedly increasingly interconnected, digitally “networked” world.
“We used to have two of everything here,” said Katherine Penner, a Darfur native who has worked at the local post office for 20 years. “Two grocery stores, two gas stations, two of everything. But now,’’ she says, her voice trailing off wistfully.
Like hundreds of Minnesota’s agricultural communities, Darfur began as a surging railway town that boasted a cathedral-like grain elevator at its commercial and spiritual heart. The town grew by mid-century to include its own stockyard, a lumber yard, a hatchery, a hardware store, downtown coffee shops, a barber shop, a beauty shop, a brass band and a public school.
Two Name-Tales
Today, the town's wide empty main street is flanked by shuttered old buildings. The elegant old public school, once the pride of Darfur, sits empty with blank windows at the center of town. The four viable businesses -- the bar, the bank, the coop and the elevator -- huddle against the vastness of the prairie.
Folks in town tell two stories about the origin of the town’s name, which is pronounced "DAR-fer" as opposed to Sudan's "dar-FOOR."
Bruce Englin, the co-manager of the Darfur elevator, says the story goes that a Norwegian immigrant railroad worker asked another worker, back in 1899 when the town was first surveyed, “Why did you put that stake dar fur?”
Katherine Heppner recalls a different version. She says her father told her as a child that trappers in the area used to seek dark-pelted local otters whose “dark fur,” once rendered in immigrant brogue, became dar fur.
The city’s official history, buried in dusty files at the Watonwan County Historical Society in nearby Madelia, describes the dynamic Darfur-of-long-ago days in this scene of the Darfur General Store in 1900: “Sausage came in very long, dry sticks; cheese came in large round cakes which was sold to customers in pie-shaped wedges; candy came in pails; dry goods consisted of yard goods, lace, buttons, hats, shoes, and long black stocking; there were lanterns, pails, washtubs and washboards all suspended from the ceiling.”
$4 Gas, $6.30 Corn
It’s all gone now, and it all left long ago. The rise of mega-farms, the globalization of agricultural markets and the flight of young people to the big cities – the classic Midwest American story -- left Darfur struggling.
Now, newer global forces threaten to dissolve what little cohesion the town of Darfur has managed to retain.
At the Darfur bank, vice-president Michael Stoesz hands out a flyer showing that although food commodity prices have risen this year, most other “input costs” for farmers are rising much quicker – propane by 54%, farm diesel fuel by 68%, fertilizer by 99%, and potash a whopping 125%.
“Corn at $6.30 a bushel sounds great on the outside,” Stoesz says. “But with all these other prices going up, in reality it’s not so great.”
A framed satellite photograph on Stoesz’ wall shows Darfur in a single snapshot – 58 homes filling city blocks laid out in a perfect triangle, with the grain elevator at the middle of the base and the town’s cemetery at the triangle's peak.
Sudan News
Over at the Cenex agriculture coop, the talk is about what happens if the price of corn and beans goes down but the price of fertilizer, chemicals and fuels stay where they are or spike higher. That could spell Darfur's final doom.
Sofie Evers, who has run the one-room Darfur library for two afternoons a week for the past 29 years, says she has many friends in Darfur who already are suffering from close-to-$4-a-gallon gasoline.
“We have no grocery story here, so we have to drive to get food,” she says.
That trend is increasing Darfur’s sense of isolation from the rest of Minnesota and the world, Evers said.
Every once in a while, news of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan makes its way to Darfur, Minnesota in an odd and fleeting way.
Sermon Theme
Rick Nelson, a bartender at the Darfur Lounge, sometimes clips article headlines out of the newspaper – “U.N. to Send 26,000 Troops to Darfur,” “Bush Determined to End Bloodshed in Darfur” – and posts them on the bar’s bulletin board, next to the notices about farm auctions and bake sales.
Lisa Schumann, the Darfur city clerk, remembers how a bunch of college kids wearing “Save Darfur” t-shirts showed up once out of nowhere to have their pictures taken next to the green-and-white "Darfur, Pop. 137" road sign on County Road 30 just outside of town.
Lots of folks in Darfur remember how Pastor Bob Olson of the Lutheran church here, before he passed away, started making sermons about the Darfur genocide, and passing the plate from time to time.
Mostly, people here say that not much unites the two Darfurs except for the name. But sometimes on reflection they change their mind.
“We’re polar opposites,” Mike Stoesz started to say. “We are just a small little town in the middle of nowhere, with very few of all the modern things like computers, compared to …” And then he paused for a moment.
“Come to think of it,” Stoesz amended himself, "maybe we aren't that different after all."
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/darfurmn.htm
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June 4, 2008
An Ethiopian Strongman Meets The Minnnesota Anuak
By Douglas McGill
MINNEAPOLIS , MN -- The burning question in the days before the tense meeting held here last Saturday was: How would the traumatized survivors of an accused mass killer greet the very person who had planned their doom?
Omot Obang Olom has been named by human rights groups as a key architect of a genocide against the African Anuak tribe of western Ethiopia.
Last Saturday, that same man met face-to-face with more than a hundred Anuak survivors of the genocide who now live in Minnesota, which is home to the largest Anuak diaspora population in the world.
The Minnesota Anuak and Olom confronted each other in an otherwise plain conference room at a Minneapolis Sheraton. The Anuak sat in rows before a dais where Olom perched watchfully if impassively for a full six hours, flanked by two stony-faced Ethiopian officials on his either side.
Reluctant Speakers
The dais was draped with the red, green and yellow flag of Ethiopia, with bunches of white cut flowers and brightly painted Anuak gourd bowls.
Olom today is the governor of the Ethiopian state of Gambella, the ancestral homeland of the Anuak tribe and ground zero of the genocide. The declared purpose of his visit was to assure the Anuak of Minnesota, who fled here to escape likely death in Ethiopia, that their homeland is now peaceful enough that they may return to raise their families, to do business, and to invest.
A microphone stood in the center aisle of the audience for anyone brave enough to address Olom publicly. An Anuak moderator however began the session by declaring that if anyone was too afraid to speak – many Anuak had said they feared for the lives of families members still in Ethiopia -- they could write down their questions instead on a piece of paper.
In Jesus' Name
The Anuak of Minnesota who attended the Saturday meeting were dressed as if for church, and sat respectfully as if in pews.
The Anuak men were immaculately groomed, wearing handsome suits and patent leather shoes, sometimes with subtle silver ear studs and stylish eyeglasses. The women likewise were tastefully turned out in flowing long colorful dresses, bright gold- and silver-bangled jewelry and sweeping headscarves covering long braided hair.
The meeting began with a vigorous prayer from Omot Aganya, a Minnesota Anuak pastor.
“We must be sure that there are absolutely no hard words, no fighting today!” Aganya thundered, jabbing the air with his fist. “We thank God for this opportunity to meet together and to talk. We REBUKE ALL EVIL SPIRITS that might enter this room. We CAST THEM AWAY so this meeting will have a positive outcome, IN JESUS’ NAME!”
Intense Stares
Olom, the reputed killer, was a baby-faced man only in his mid-30s. He wore a powder blue suit and wire-rim glasses, and spoke in the flat tones of a technocrat, not the impassioned tones of an ideologue.
“It’s been too long since we have talked,” he told the crowd in his opening statement. “We need to all be in conversation today because Gambella needs you. You all need to become a part of a new democratic Gambella. We are peaceful today and there are chances for development. If the Anuak of America don’t become a part of that, we won’t make any progress.”
When he was finished, about half the audience applauded weakly.
Then, during the Q&A, the positive-to-negative comment ratio veered sharply negative. All but a handful of the audience questions were sharply critical of Olom.
Sorrow and Fury
The most poignant comments came from Anuak women who fixed Olom with intense glares and lashed him with words mixing sorrow and fury.
One woman began by sternly uttering a single word, “Okichi.” It was Olom’s childhood nickname which was known to everyone, and when she said the word a ripple of nervous laughter spread throughout the room.
Another woman leaned into the microphone and said to Olom: “Thank you for being here, for not running away from us. We want to tell you what we have in our hearts. We will say good things and bad things. But the first thing is, you should have started your speech with an apology. We want to hear your apology. Yet you still have not yet apologized. Will you now apologize?”
The apology the Anuak woman sought was for the gruesome events of December 13, 2003 and for the years that have followed – the period of time that a major 2005 Human Rights Watch report says that Olom was involved in “crimes against humanity” against the Anuak.
"Exceptionally Hard-Line"
On December 13, according to those reports and to a journalistic account, more than 100 soldiers entered the Anuak town of Gambella, where they led a rampage that ended in the deaths of 425 Anuak men, the destruction of hundreds of Anuak homes, and the rape of Anuak women and girls.
Two reports by the human rights group Genocide Watch cite witnesses saying that Olom, who was Gambella's security chief during the massacre, gave lists of educated Anuak men to the Ethiopian army to be targeted for execution.
In the years following 2003, Olom “has taken an exceptionally hard-line approach to stamping out the threat to regional security,” the 2005 Human Rights Watch report said. “Unarmed young men have been frequently shot at and in many cases killed while traveling between villages. Many [Army] patrols seem to view any Anuak civilian who runs away from them a legitimate target.”
The Living Dead
In the six-hour Saturday meeting, Olom never apologized. To the contrary, he flatly denied having passed a death list of Anuak names to the Ethiopian army, and he blamed the massacre of December 13 on his predecessor as governor of Gambella, whom he called weak and cowardly.
“It is wrong that people point to me as the bad guy,” Olom said, even though he was Gambella’s security chief during the 2003 massacre. “I was only trying to calm the situation.”
During the Saturday meeting, members of Olom’s delegation said that lists of the Anuak dead that are published on the Internet are inflated and inaccurate.
“I have seen people on that list walking around in Gambella,” the official said. Some names on the list also were double-counted, he said.
Blaming Victims
In many cases it was Anuak troublemakers who caused the killing on December 13, one Ethiopian official told the crowd. Olom said that dozens of Anuak men in prison today in Ethiopia are still suspects in the killings.
My translator, an Anuak named Magn Nyang, offered a bitter comment after translating those words.
"Is he saying that we killed ourselves on December 13?” Magn asked.
“He is blaming the victim,” Magn said. “Omot Olom is not answering the most important question, which is who has been found guilty of the crimes? We want that question answered and we want those who are guilty to be arrested.”
Legal Hearings
Many Anuak refused to attend yesterday’s meeting on ethical grounds. Some of them contacted the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, to try to deny Olom a visa or even to have him arrested.
One of the boycotters was Obang Metho, a prominent Anuak activist and writer who lives in Saskatchewan and travels frequently to Minnesota.
Last Wednesday, Metho, the director of the Anuak Justice Council, published an article explaining why he would boycott Saturday’s meeting: “It should take place under some other venue -- a legal hearing in a court, a truth-and-reconciliation hearing, or at least an Anuak traditional approach where there is accountability for what one has done and the truth is held in high regard,” Metho wrote.
The traditional Anuak approach mentioned by Metho is a prominent feature of Anuak culture called “gurtong,” in which aggrieved parties meet, the facts of a case are painstakingly determined, accountability is established, and a mutual settlement is reached.
Blunt Spears
Literally translated “to blunt a spear,” gurtong has been studied by anthropologists and proposed by some human rights groups as a model peacemaking process.
Another boycotter of Saturday’s meeting was Obang Kono Cham, an Anuak from Rochester who sends money regularly to a brother who has lived in a refugee camp in Kenya since he fled the massacre of December 13, 2003.
“I’m still suffering because of my brother, and every Anuak does the same thing because of Omot Olom and his crimes,” Cham said. “I didn’t want to go to the meeting and see him deny all of that in front of me.”
Yet, Cham added, “Olom also has suffered from the violence. He’s been forced by the Ethiopan government to kill his own people. When you look into his eyes, you see there is nothing there. He also is a victim.”
Douglas McGill can be reached at doug@mcgillreport.org
See an earlier story, A Genocide Planner to Meet His Minnesota Survivors
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http:www.mcgillreport.org/olomvisit.htm
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May 29, 2008
A Genocide Planner to Meet
His Minnesota Survivors
By Douglas McGill
ROCHESTER, MN -- An Ethiopian government official named as a primary architect of a genocide in western Ethiopia will visit Minneapolis this Saturday, to directly confront members of the African tribe his government has targeted for destruction.
The official’s impending visit has thrown the Minnesota community of Anuak into a state of alarm and intense internal argument.
The Anuak, an African tribe based in western Ethiopia and southern Sudan, have been immigrating to Minnesota and elsewhere outside of Africa since the Ethiopian Army began ethnically cleansing them in the mid-1990s.
Some Minnesota Anuak believe the official’s visit on Saturday should be boycotted while others want the chance to meet him face-to-face. Still others, saying the official has perpetrated genocide, are working through the U.S. State Department to block the official’s entry into the country.
The official, Omot Obang Olom, is the governor of the western Ethiopian state of Gambella, which embraces much of the Anuak homeland. Olom was the chief of security in Gambella in December 2003, when over a three-day period some 425 Anuak men were killed by the Ethiopian Army.
"Lots of Smoke"
A Human Rights Watch report in 2005, "Targeting the Anuak," and earlier reports by human rights groups including Genocide Watch, have detailed Mr. Olom’s role in the massacre of December 13, 2003, and in a subsequent bloody crackdown lasting months against Anuak insurgents and civilians. The Human Rights Watch report called these events a "crime against humanity."
“This man is a killer,” said one Anuak Minnesotan, who asked not to be named because he said relatives in Ethiopia would be endangered if he were. The Anuak plans to meet the official on Saturday “so that I can ask him: ‘The victims of the genocide are gone but what about the people who are still alive in Sudan and Kenya and Minnesota? Will you tell the truth about what happened?’”
A U.S. State Department official said that Minnesota Anuak community members had called him about the official’s visit. “I’ve looked into this and he sounds like a really bad guy,” the official said. "There is a lot of smoke but we don't have the evidence to deny him a visa.”
Civilian Targets
The State Department has walked a tightrope on the Anuak case since it exploded with the massacre of December 13, 2003.
Privately, officials in Washington and Addis Ababa concede that the Ethiopian government is culpable in the killings, and a 2005 U.S. Embassy press release said as much. But official U.S. policy is that Ethiopia is an ally in the “war on terror,” which limits the ability of U.S. officials to criticize the Ethiopian government, much less to deny diplomatic visas.
Mr. Olom “has taken an exceptionally hard-line approach to stamping out the threat to regional security posed by Anuak shifta,” the Human Rights Watch report stated. "Shifta" is an Ethiopian word for “bandits” but in reality it very often includes ordinary Anuak civilians killed by soldiers, the report said.
“Unarmed young men have been frequently shot at and in many cases killed while traveling between villages, and many [Army] patrols seem to view any Anuak civilian who runs away from them a legitimate target,” the Human Rights Watch report said.
Arrest for Crimes
The purpose of Mr. Olom’s visit to Minneapolis is among the points vigorously debated by Minnesota Anuak, who form the largest Anuak diaspora community outside of Ethiopia.
The Anuak Community Association of North America (ACANA), based in Minneapolis, says that it invited Mr. Olom to visit Minnesota so that Anuak community members could directly ask him to give his account of December 13, 2003 and the aftermath.
“We wanted the Gambella leadership to come so that people could ask questions,” said Akway Cham, the president of ACANA. “A lot of Anuak are going through life as refugees. People are still suffering and they want to ask ‘What are you guys up to and how will you prevent a future incident like 2003?'”
But many Anuak angrily reject ACANA's rationale, saying that attempting to arrest Olom for crimes against humanity -- not giving him a platform for reconciliation -- is the more appropriate course.
Frustrating Q&A
Olom's visit, they say, is part of a deliberate Ethiopian propaganda campaign to divide the Anuak diaspora and to convince the world that far from committing genocide in Gambella, Ethiopia warmly welcomes the Anuak.
Indeed, last April 26, two high-ranking Ethiopian officials met in Minneapolis with Anuak community members to spread just that message. They told an audience of about one hundred Minnesota Anuak that the Ethiopian government is prepared to invest substantially in economic development in Gambella, and they wanted members of the Anuak diaspora to return.
But for much of the meeting the officials spoke in Amharic, the Ethiopian language, and not in Anuak, so many in the audience didn’t fully understand what was said. Even more frustrating, people who attended the meeting said, the officials stonewalled during the question-and-answer period when Anuak audience members demanded to know if the Ethiopian government planned to offer reparations for the 2003 massacre.
No Answer on Graves
More specifically, many Anuak asked the officials where the 425 people who were killed in the December 13 massacre are buried, so that they may be exhumed and given a proper burial. But the Ethiopian government insists the massacre never occurred, and no answer was given.
“It was just propaganda,” said Apee Jobi, an Anuak who lives in Brooklyn Park and is editor of Gambella Today, an Anuak web site. “The real purpose was to divide the Minnesota Anuak community so that we fight among ourselves and don’t fight the Ethiopian government. Some side with them and some don’t; some say forget December 13, and some say we can’t forget. They are very good at playing that.”
“They are trying to say that nothing ever happened, it is okay now to come back," said Okuch Kwot, an Anuak living in Columbia Heights. Kwot's older brother has lived in a Sudan refugee camp since the 2003 massacre, while his older brother’s wife and children are living in a camp in Kenya. "But if you try to invest and you are an Anuak you cannot get a bank loan, you cannot buy a truck. They will label you as a rebel and everything will be taken away.”
Tragic Journey
Obang Metho, an Anuak activist from Canada who travels frequently to Minnesota, says that the April meeting marked the first time that the Ethiopian government began plying Anuak immigrants with “gifts and favors,” as it has been doing with other Ethiopian diaspora populations for several years.
“The government-sponsored delegates thought they could buy, flatter and persuade the Anuak in the diaspora into forgetting about the Anuak massacre of 2003,” Metho recently wrote. “These ‘ambassadors bearing gifts’ from the regime have been trying to silence their critics for the last year by offering invitations, opportunities and investments in the country.”
Omot’s visit to Minneapolis marks a new chapter in a tragic journey for the Anuak of Minnesota, whose ancestral territory in Africa lies directly between civil-war ravaged southern Sudan and famine-stricken Ethiopia.
Oil and Gold
The Anuak territory in Gambella is fed by several rivers and has both oil and gold deposits, which makes their land coveted by the Ethiopian government.
Racial tensions between the dark-skinned Anuak and lighter-skinned “highlander” Ethiopians, as well as rights claim battles over Gambella’s oil deposits, are at the root of conflicts dating back several decades.
In the 2003 massacre, Ethiopian soldiers rampaged through the Anuak town of Gambella, burning down over a thousand homes, gang-raping women and girls and slaughtering all but a handful of the Anuak men who comprised the educated leadership of the small tribe of only 100,000 members.
Around 12,000 Anuak refugees fled the massacre on foot through the African bush to seek safety in refugee camps in southern Sudan, and in vast refugee slum cities near Nairobi, Kenya.
Four years later, most of those refugees are still struggling to survive in the desert or in those slums, their educations and careers permanently disrupted. Many refugees say they fear returning to Gambella because Mr. Olom, a widely feared figure before and during the 2003 massacre, now serves as the governor of the state.
Cell Phone "Earwitnesses"
This reporter interviewed dozens of Anuak Minnesotans in the days following December 13, 2003. Many of them had heard the sounds of gunshots, screaming and crying over cell phones with friends and family members who were caught in the midst of the slaughter.
In April 2004, I also traveled to the Pochalla refugee camp in southern Sudan where some 10,000 Anuak had fled following the killings, and to the refugee slum of Ruiru, Kenya, where more than a thousand Anuak had fled.
In those interviews, and in several human rights reports published in 2004 and 2005, Omot Obang Olom was frequently named as a government official who prior to the 2003 massacre had ordered arbitrary arrests of Anuak.
A second report on the massacre published by Genocide Watch, based on interviews with eyewitnesses, reports accusations that Mr. Olom provided the Ethiopian army with a list of Anuak leaders to be targeted for killing.
An Execution List
The Anuak governor of Gambella at the time of the massacre, Okello Akway, fled for his life to Norway after the December 2003 massacre.
In a telephone conversation this week, Akway confirmed that he had seen Mr. Olom pass a list of educated Anuak men to the Ethiopian army.
Akway says he met with Omot Obang Olom and Tsegaye Beyene, then Ethiopia’s military commander in Gambella, on the morning of December 13, 2003.
“Omot had a paper in his hand,” Akway said. “That paper was for selecting the people to be killed.” After the killing began, Akway said that he begged Omot and Beyene to stop the massacre, and was threatened by Omot.
“Omot said ‘If you are talking like this, you will be killed like Agwa.” Agwa Alemo was an Anuak leader and resistance fighter who was assassinated in 1992 and is considered a hero by many Anuak.
Typical and Intentional
Rosa Garcia-Peltoniemi, a clinician with the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, says that the arguments now dividing the Minnesota Anuak are typical of what happens to diaspora populations when the political figures responsible for their exile suddenly reappear in their midst in Minnesota.
“It’s typical and it’s intentional,” she said. “Governments that engage in ethnic cleansing do this deliberately. They want to create dissension and conflict and distrust between people. It’s divide and conquer.”
“These conflicts more and more are quite global,” she added. “The exile communities become very important because they have economic power. They send money back home and people also travel back. Even after they leave their countries for the U.S., it isn't a complete cut-off.”
Olom will meet with Minnesota Anuak on Saturday at noon at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in Minneapolis at 1330 Industrial Boulevard.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/olom.htm
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March 11, 2008
Sometimes, Journalism
Stops Free Speech
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin – The central theme of this talk has been how journalism's weak ethics tradition hampers its ability to adapt and evolve in today's globally interdependent world.
Journalists define ethics almost exclusively in First Amendment terms, and self-defensively shut down conversations that range any further, especially into public speech ethics and morals.
That rigid "First Amendment-only" response is deeply problematic in a society where millions of ordinary citizens are exploring how to become journalists on the Internet, and in a larger world where billions of people have different values and ideas about free speech.
Free speech is a transcendent principle. But if like any moral principle it's accorded monopoly status, how can constructive conversation occur?
There are also ancient teachings about moral or "right speech," and new scientific insights into how language works in the brain to shape belief and action, that only a relaxed, humble, and non-defensive journalism can absorb with benefit.
Global Trends
Moreover, and most practically, journalism's ethical dilemma has down-to-earth implications for the survival of journalism in purely economic terms.
I'd like to end my talk today with a few observations about the interrelation of ethics and economics in the global media, through a brief look at U.S. newspapers.
From their crumbling cost structures, shifting readerships and demographics to the changing news-reading habits of their customers, American newspapers increasingly are at the mercy of global trends.
Yet virtually none of the obituaries-cum-analyses of the ailing U.S. newspaper industry today account for the global components of the U.S. newspaper industry's problems.
Survival Plans
To take one example, competition for today’s major metropolitan daily newspapers comes not just from the other newspapers in a given market, from TV shows or from video games that young people play instead of reading the news.
Today, major U.S. newspapers also compete with the daily newspapers of foreign countries, which are read on the Internet every morning by the immigrant populations living in American cities.
So why aren’t more major daily newspapers courting immigrants as a major plank of their survival plans?
Over the past several years, I've asked many newspaper editors and publishers, including the then-publisher of the embattled Chicago Sun-Times, just this question.
Their answers always boil down to this: "Immigrants don't want us and they don't need us. They don't share our readers' interests, they don't live in the same neighborhoods, and they don’t even speak the same language as our readers."
Instead of answering a global phenomenon with a global solution, or even a globally-themed discussion, this defensive, head-in-the-sand posture is struck.
Reality Check
The critical question to ask here is an ethical one: "If the journalism of a major metropolitan daily newspaper isn’t for all the citizens who live in that city, who is its journalism for? More to the point, who is journalism for?"
But journalism has a hard time discussing, much less answering that question.
More precisely, journalists typically answer the question too quickly, without checking the answer against reality, before defensively ending the conversation.
The quick answer, of course, is "journalism is for all citizens."
That's the automatic response provided by First Amendment-only journalism ethics, which defines the purpose of journalism as providing the citizens of democracy with the information they need to be free and self-governing.
Favored Demographics
But the actual reality is, for the past half century journalism has not been for everyone in society but rather for people who can afford it -- for the people who live in the prime zip codes, who can buy the stuff in the ads, who make up the "favorable demographics," and who speak fluent English.
That last one might sound like a stretch. Obviously, English-language papers are for people who read English, right? But in fact, publishers like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst once built fortunes selling newspapers to immigrants who spoke little or no English, but wanted desperately to learn.
Immigrants once bought daily newspapers for their English language columns, their advice for assimilating immigrants, and for immigrant and mainstream news.
By contrast, in recent decades journalism has sliced up our communities into favored and disfavored demographics, catering to the former and shunning the latter.
Information Redlining
In journalism, we've rationalized this shift away from the notion that journalism is for all citizens with a raft of euphemisms. We’ve called it "smart marketing," "writing for our demographics," and most of all, "knowing our audience."
When in fact, we've practiced the journalistic equivalent of bank red-lining. We’ve funneled the precious information lifeblood of democracy to certain favored groups and neighborhoods, just as redlining banks do with loans.
A recent study by media researchers in the U.S., England, Denmark and Finland shows how the news in America has become a commodity of the upper-class.
Using a standard news-knowledge test given in all four countries, the study showed an enormous difference separating well-to-do, educated Americans versus lesser-educated citizens, as compared to the three European countries.
Seeing Whole
In the U.S., the difference between the two groups was 40 percentage points compared to 14, 13, and zero points difference in Britain, Finland and Denmark, respectively.
How can journalism describe the world accurately, as an interrelated whole, if we define our own communities as demographic slivers? By describing them as slivered, we help make them so.
Of all our national institutions, journalism is surely among the best suited – by virtue of its proud history, its skills of realistic social observation and description, by its favored place in the U.S. constitution, and by its key role in democracy – to begin to see the world clearly and whole again, by seeing and serving all citizens.
By describing our communities as interrelated wholes, we would help keep its parts working together, as opposed to flying apart.
We need a full, relaxed and open ethical discussion to reach agreement on this or any other goal.
Will journalists -- citizens and professionals -- lead this global ethical conversation?
When will we do this, and how?
Thank you.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/freespeech.htm
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February 19, 2008
The Buddha, the Dharma
and the Media
By Douglas McGill
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin – There is an old interviewing trick journalists use to get people to say things far more intimate than they planned to reveal.
The trick works when the journalist, instead of asking a follow-up question during the silence that follows an answer, instead stays silent. The compulsion to fill conversational vacuums is so powerful that people often blab intimacies they didn't mean to share.
That interviewing ploy is one of many ethical shortcuts I used as a reporter and editor in the mainstream press for more than twenty years, first as a reporter for The New York Times, and then later as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong.
As the years passed, I cut more and more ethical corners as a journalist to get exclusive stories, to elicit juicy anecdotes and quotes, and to get my stories the best possible play on the newswire or in the newspaper – preferably on page one.
Verbal Steroids
I became a serial exaggerator of social trends. Increasingly, I started defining every trend as “new and important,” “widespread,” or “emblematic.”
My writing vocabulary was getting showy and meretricious (and a Happy New Year!), and I began avoiding humble but specific, useful words.
I got hooked on such verbal journalistic steroids as “unprecedented,” “in a dramatic new development,” “revolutionary,” and “raises new and troubling questions.” I felt sheepish, hangdog and worse. But I kept using.
Sometime I'd get to the part of the story where I needed to type in these phrases, and I'd literally feel sick.
Was I really going to do this again, I'd ask myself?
Usually, I would. Because when I injected these particular words my stories and -- most important -- my byline shot straight onto the front page.
And that felt oh, so good. But where was the end to these addictions?
Extreme Reality
Of course, deeper ethical issues face the modern global journalist, language-wise.
The world is filled with violent words and actions that journalists must sometimes, of necessity, report. Sugar-coating reality would be an ethical lapse equal or even greater than occasionally exaggerating social trends.
The world is filled with realities so extreme they are literally beyond the reach of language, used at its most extreme, to accurately describe. But even straight and well-intentioned reporting of such violence, incendiary language, and extreme reality can kick the cycle of violence to even more violent rounds.
What morals should guide a journalist's professional purpose, reporting methods, and use of language in such a world?
In recent years, Buddhism’s doctrines on life’s purpose, human suffering, and ethical speech have seemed to me to suggest – as no other moral system I have yet found -- practical answers to such questions facing a global media.
Practical Morals
There is a spiritual side to Buddhism, it’s true. But its most appealing trait to me from the beginning has been its straightforward and empirically-based morals. It asks not a speck of faith from anyone. Yet it offers a comprehensive and practical human morals of which speech is an integral part.
In this way, Buddhism seems tailor-made for journalism’s ethical, and increasingly global and multicultural, needs.
Indeed, in its relentless quest to observe without filter or distortion the nature of daily human existence -- the fact and flavor of the simple ordinary present, the living now -- Buddhism seems, in a certain way, quintessentially journalistic.
In my early years as a journalist, I was happy to discover the world through journalism. My youthful curiosity and optimism carried me through those years.
My drive to explore the world more widely (if not more deeply) trumped the ethical questions that always tagged behind.
Ethics Codes
It’s only natural, I suppose, that with age the question of one’s purpose looms larger. You’ve only got so many days in life, and so many chances to direct one’s attention with positive intention and purpose.
For a few years, I searched for an ethical system within the profession, or even from another profession, that addressed these concerns. Basically, I got nowhere. I found out that journalists don’t like to talk about the moral basis of what they do, which is to use language. They are practically allergic to such a thing. That's got to change if journalism is going to evolve ethically and globally.
Journalism's moral obtuseness is enshrined in its ethics codes.
The specific injunctions of these guides to newsroom practice – not to plagiarize, not to lie get a story, not to cause anyone harm, etc. – are nowhere connected to any fundamental vision of human existence or morals.
That may sound like too grand a hope for journalism, but medical and legal ethics are grounded in this way. Why not journalism and the media?
Kant and Mill
By now, surely, the enormous impact of the media on global affairs is obvious enough to warrant thinking more seriously about media morals, beginning with the morals of journalism, which is the public service branch of the media.
Journalists wishing to go deeper ethically than their profession allows, as I did on my quest, traditionally look to Enlightenment philosophers for enlightenment.
In particular, ethics courses at communication schools teach the “utilitarian” ethics of John Stuart Mill, and the “duty-based” ethics of Immanuel Kant.
Mill's utilitarian ethic calls for examining each case to determine if the greatest good is achieved for the greatest number. The Kantian ethic, by contrast, asks people to question if a given action would help or harm society if it was repeated by everyone. Could it be “universalized” to society’s benefit?
These approaches have great appeal because they define communication ethics as a matter of general human morals, and not of daily expedience.
Buddhist Media
And yet, how impractical Mill and Kant are!
Enlightenment philosophers, I discovered, ascribe superhuman powers to ordinary people. Can any single person reasonably guess, with any degree of accuracy, whether a given act of speech will result in “the greatest good for the greatest number”? Or whether it could be “universalized without harm?”
Since when could any being but a God do such a thing? Neither the morals of Mill nor of Kant are easily translated, in practical terms, to individuals facing daily life situations, much less to hyperactive, competitive newsrooms.
It was in Buddhism that I finally found an explicit and practical morals of human communication. Since I discovered its doctrines a few years ago, my ethics thinking has centered around the question whether it might be possible to develop a new journalism based on such universal yet practical principles.
A journalism grounded in Buddhist morals would display two salient traits derived from its moral purpose and methods. Such a journalism would be:
A journalism of healing. Buddhism is often not classified as a religion because it teaches no theology, declares no divinity, and requires no faith. Instead, its doctrines revolve entirely around the achievement of a practical goal: “the end of suffering.” Nor is the definition of suffering complex or esoteric. It is ordinary everyday suffering, aches and pains, mental moods and afflictions, sickness and death. On a social level, suffering in Buddhism is defined as any harshness, violence, and division of the community. A Buddhist journalism would therefore be aimed at helping individuals overcome their personal sufferings, and helping society heal the wounds caused by injustice, hatred, ostracism, and physical violence. Such a defined professional purpose would give the Buddhist journalist a measuring stick for each word and story produced: does it help overcome individual and social suffering?
A journalism of timely, truthful, helpful speech. A Buddhist journalism would need tools and materials adequate to its healing purpose. The Buddhist “Right Speech” doctrine provides many of them. Right Speech sits midway along the “Noble Eightfold Path,” the Buddha’s prescribed method to reach the end of suffering. The midway place of Right Speech along the Noble Eightfold Path is interesting, because speech is the first action to follow the gaining of wisdom and positive intention, as developed in meditation. By this view, speech is a person's very first chance to act morally in the world. It is followed then in the Noble Eightfold Path by “Right Action” and “Right Livelihood.” Also, very helpfully for journalists, the identifying traits of Right Speech are specifically defined as “timely, truthful, helpful, and spoken with a mind of good will.” Likewise, the five main types of speech to avoid are lies, divisive speech, harsh and abusive speech, and idle and distracting speech.
Can a new global journalism of healing be practiced that embraces timely, truthful and helpful speech, and avoids the five destructive modes?
It would be important and interesting to find out.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permanlink www.mcgillreport.org/buddhamedia.htm
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February 14, 2008
My Language Crimes
at The New York Times
By Douglas McGill
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- Journalism has much to be humble about, but one special area where journalists need to tread with special diffidence and without mindless stomping is language.
Generally, journalists believe themselves to be experts at language. So did I, at one point. But now I believe that I was wearing enormous blinders during the ten years I worked as a
staff reporter at The New York Times, and then later worked as
a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong.
Today, I think that I was basically sleepwalking, language-wise, during those years as a mainstream news reporter and editor.
On a daily basis, I believe that I unconsciously but serially committed two capital language crimes as a journalist (two at least).
My first language crime was that by the rules of objectivity, I believed that my language was basically neutral. I believed that I was passing along to readers the key facts of any given story, while leaving it to the readers to sort and prioritize those facts to use as they wished.
Nuts and Bolts
I believed likewise that my own beliefs and prejudices were, thanks to objectivity, mostly absent from my stories, and that the prerogatives of assessment, judgment and opinion lay almost entirely with readers.
Then, in recent years, I read Plato’s Phaedrus, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Roland Barthes, who wrote the deathless line that “language is never innocent.” I took a new look at newspapers to verify that line for myself and became convinced along with Plato, Aristotle and Barthes that all language is fundamentally persuasive.
Every writer is basically trying to persuade the reader of certain things, especially of the writer’s own authority and worldview.
The means of persuasion are standard usage, narrative structure, vocabulary (especially metaphor), syntax and grammar – the given, assumed, overlooked nuts and bolts of language.
While visibly holding language together at its joints and seams, these mechanical devices also are carrying out a covert operation on the meaning of language, which in its influence outweighs by far what is actually said.
This stealth-layer of language endorses the writer’s worldview via an encoded set of ideals, values, and ironclad social ranking and status norms. Readers unconsciously decode these meanings as effortlessly as the writer encodes them, so quickly and easily that the process goes unnoticed.
To write unconsciously of this whole process is therefore to unconsciously endorse the status quo. By brute repetition and other means, ordinary language thus congeals the harmful views, hurtful categories and gross injustices of rank and process that are embedded in daily life.
Human Boundaries
My second language crime was to fetishize a plain-English writing style as a cure-all against government propaganda, corporate corruption, and all other forms of evil in the world.
In my college and early professional years, I read my copy of George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” to little bits. Absorbing Orwell completely, I believed with passion that bold clear sentences map a simple reality that can be shared across all human boundaries.
But then in recent years I read George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and their book Metaphors We Live By. And I discovered the work of many other scientists, linguists, and political scientists who are making important empirical discoveries today in the field of language and morals, such as Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Pinker, and Drew Westen.
As Plato and Aristotle did with rhetoric, showing how persuasive intent underlies all language, so these scholars have now done with metaphor, laying bare its fundamental role in language and morals. But they've exceeded the ancients by using science to demonstrate how language works at the level of brain structures and body chemistry, to underlie virtually all human action and language -- including the kind we inordinately prize as "rational."
These scientists have peeled back the surface of language to show the hidden engines underneath. They’ve linked brain structure to morality and language.
"Girly Man"
Specifically, their research has shown that powerful brain structures – the specific neuronal linkages responsible for creating metaphors -- drive our reasoning process at an emotional level far beneath conscious reasoning.
The metaphors or “frames” generated by these neuronal linkages activate huge webs of meaning across the physical brain, which instantly align a human being with an entire worldview including passionate likes and dislikes, altruism and prejudice, blithe airs of apathy and do-or-die zeals.
To connect this to the newsroom, a reporter might, for example, insert the phrase “girly man” into a story, repeating what he heard a politician say in a big speech at a convention.
As he does so the journalist might say to himself, “Say what you will but Arnold Schwarzenegger sure makes a great story. I’ve got a spot of color now in my piece, and they’ll be talking tomorrow at the water cooler!”
And yet, with that one not-innocent sprinkling of pixels into his story, the reporter surrenders his moral autonomy to political speechwriters who know that just the right metaphor, uttered at just the right time, sways millions of voters in their direction. A strong metaphor – miracle of miracles! – even makes people vote against their own personal interests, time after time.
New Knowledge
If journalists aren’t humbled by the knowledge that despite their best intentions they are used like this by their sources and spinners 24/7/365, I don’t know if they ever could be humbled, or whether they even care.
The world today is bursting with new knowledge -- much of it the result of hard scientific research -- about the moral basis and uses of language.
When is journalism going to sit down and absorb this new knowledge and integrate it into the ethics and practices of the craft?
For Part 1 of the lecture, click here.
To comment or discuss, click here.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/languagecrimes.htm
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Dear TMR Readers,
Last Wednesday, I had planned to give the annual Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Instead, on the day of the lecture, Milwaukee got 20 inches of snow, the university shut down and I spent the day in my hotel coffee shop. With the blessings of my hosts, I am publishing my talk here serially, in four short sections over two weeks.
If you would like to comment on the article, please visit the Local Man journalism discussion blog.
Peace,
Doug
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The True Promise of
Citizen Journalism
THE BURLEIGH LECTURE ON MEDIA ETHICS
Marquette University
February 6, 2008
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- It was never easy being a journalist, but it’s especially tough these days.
A journalist today not only must get the color of the man’s hat right, then make an editor happy enough to publish a story, and then not get sued once it is.
Now a journalist must worry whether she will have a job next week, because the newspaper or magazine that employs her may be sold.
If you are a journalist in television news, chances are your company long ago was sold to a giant corporation that wants you to stop doing immigration pieces and do more instead about Britney’s tragic breakdown, steamy trysts on luxury cruises, and exposes about ballerinas-turned-hookers.
It’s a scary scenario, in journalism I mean.
At newspapers, especially, dramatically declining advertising and circulation revenues have caused the combined market value of U.S. newspapers to drop 42 percent since 2005. To prop up profit margins, newspaper owners across the country have laid off thousands of veteran reporters and editors.
It's a time to renegotiate the
journalist-citizen relationship.
But something interesting and hopeful is happening as mainstream journalists find themselves suddenly outside of newsrooms. Along with millions of other ordinary citizens, they find themselves reading and writing blogs, making podcasts, and experimenting in video and other online media.
These newly-solo journalists, of whom I’m one, are for the first time meeting lots of fellow citizens who are doing journalism on the Internet.
Also for the first time, lots of journalists are relating to people not as sources for their stories, but as fellow citizens with whom they can create journalism together. It’s a time to renegotiate the relationship between journalist and citizen, and for both sides to learn a lot from each other.
Citizen journalism workshops so far have stressed the skills that journalists can teach ordinary citizens, such as reporting and writing techniques.
But citizens have much to teach professional journalists too, especially about ethics. Citizens are surprised at this, in my experience, but they shouldn’t be.
Citizens can teach journalists
about ethics.
Journalism in recent decades has suffered a severe crisis of professional ethics, that citizens can help to heal. In the big picture, in fact, the guidance that citizens can offer to journalism in this way far exceeds in importance all the skills and techniques that journalists could offer to citizens.
That’s because journalistic skills amount to methods of verifying facts, plus a certain facility at writing in plain vernacular English. Neither of these skills lies far beyond the reach of anyone with a good high school education.
Whereas ethics is about the moral sense – knowing right from wrong, wholesome from unwholesome, what’s vital from what’s distracting, and the ability to listen and to care about people different from ourselves.
For nearly a century, thanks to the ideal of “objectivity,” journalists have steadfastly refused to talk about ethics – these real ethics – in newsrooms.
Of course, journalism has ethics codes aplenty. But they nearly always cover merely procedural, ethically superficial topics like conflicts of interest, plagiarism, handling complaints, and who picks up the check at lunch.
Ethical schizophrenia gives journalists soul-sickness.
The ban on authentic moral talk in newsrooms has created a difficult, even painfully schizophrenic situation in newsrooms.
Because on the one hand, journalists are among the most civic-minded, and in that sense ethical, people one could imagine. Why else would someone choose a profession with such long hours and poor pay, if not for the chance to improve the world a little bit?
Yet thanks to “objectivity,” those same journalists are unable to openly discuss morals in the workplace. They are forced to conduct themselves at work in a manner similar to, say, environmentalists who work for lumber companies.
I have witnessed the destructive impact of this throughout my working life at The New York Times, Bloomberg News, and in other newsrooms. Over a period of decades, I have personally witnessed young journalists start their careers filled with idealism and within years hurt so badly in their souls that they suffer anxiety, depression, nausea and panic attacks every day at work.
If you don't think straight about morals, how is it possible to act in a morally positive and consistent manner?
They usually blame the hours, the pressure, and the competition.
I believe the suffering is caused mainly by the virus of objectivity, which instructs journalists to create positive moral outcomes by acting in a morally neutral manner. It’s crazy, the conscience knows it and rebels.
My colleagues at The New York Times, Bloomberg and other newsrooms and I were liberals and conservatives, straight and gay, Catholics and Mormons and Buddhists and Unitarians. But the moment we entered the newsrooms, a curtain of neutrality descended around each of us. With the force of a strict gag order, we were never able to speak with each other about the moral and civic passions that truly inspired and guided our lives.
We could never bring moral thinking directly to bear on our stories.
The ethical scandals that have plagued journalism in recent decades is traceable to this schizophrenic situation. How could it be otherwise? If you can’t speak at all about authentic morals -- much less speak straight about them -- how could you possibly act in a morally consistent manner?
Objectivity has caused even deeper long-term harm to the profession by attracting people motivated not by a civic sense but rather by commercial and personal ambition, mini-Murdochs and mini-Machiavellis of the news.
Citizens can help journalism restore
an explicit, realistic, and positive
ethic of public service.
Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the idealistic wellsprings of the craft.
Because when we work simply as citizens, doing journalism as we would vote, or serve on a jury, power games diminish and the will to serve others arises.
That's why I’m excited about citizen journalism. The energy of wholesome moral intention has been lost for years in journalism. Citizens who never bought into “objectivity” in the first place can help us all to restore it.
My enthusiasm for citizen journalism sometimes earns me the contempt of fellow journalists. At one journalism conference recently, for example, I sat on the dais next to the managing editor of a major metropolitan newspaper.
After listening to me describe teaching journalism to ordinary citizens in Minneapolis, she opened her own remarks by icily saying: “I represent the institutions of journalism that Doug McGill is trying to destroy.”
That remark encapsulates the conversation-stopping defensiveness, the out-of-touchness, and the morally superior attitude that infects much of today’s journalism and is in large part responsible for its present woes.
Citizen journalists have ethical
pitfalls to avoid, too.
Since when was journalism anything more than an act of citizenship?
Since when did individual journalists exercise skills more advanced than the use of native language, plus a basic moral sense, to share stories of the public world?
How could ordinary citizens who are trying to learn journalism’s practices and ethics, in order to consume journalism more profitably and to use new communication technologies more responsibly, possibly represent an invading horde of destroyers?
If this is how institutional journalism thinks of its readers and viewers, no wonder it is losing its customers by the millions.
Not that citizen journalism is a panacea, far from it. Already, some worrying trends are obvious. The biggest one perhaps is the tendency to gloss over ethical discussions, just as mainstream journalism traditionally has done.
Seduced by the newest technological sublime, citizen journalists just like professional journalists often forego ethical talk. Classes in blogging, online editing, online marketing, reporting and writing are offered, but no one sets aside time to wrestle with the underlying problems and theory of the craft.
The very understandable urge to quickly prove oneself, plus of course to solve the world’s problems as soon as possible, trumps ethics talk.
Are citizen journalists just learning
how to be better special interest advocates?
There is a very real danger that if citizen journalists start their careers without sorting out the problem of objectivity, citizen journalism will end up precisely where mainstream journalism has done, in a deep ethics hole.
In addition, citizen journalism is showing a tendency to become a journalism of special interests, instead of a journalism of a raucous but peacefully conversing unified society. Most of the students in my student journalism classes in Minneapolis come to learn journalistic skills that will make them more effective advocates of a special interest, not more rounded as citizens.
Their causes are worthy – protecting the rights of children, immigrants, the handicapped, and the elderly; AIDS awareness; global warming; election finance reform; peace and justice; and so on. But if they leave my classes only to write better press releases for their special interests, seeing their new skills as weapons rather than as conversation tools, little progress will be made.
Still, I’m hopeful. When I read web sites like The Twin Cities Daily Planet, The UpTake, Freshare, Global Voices, Ovi Magazine, and growing numbers of similar projects every month, I see plenty of citizens who aren’t in the least confused by objectivity’s contradictory dictates and claims.
Citizens can help restore the voice of
the conscience in journalism.
These citizen journalists are Somali teenagers describing their journeys to America; and elderly people devoting their retirements to caring for the environment; and Burmese monks resisting violent government oppression.
At their best, these citizens write an ideal journalism, one that is rational yet moral, fair yet crusading.
They revive the public voice of the human conscience, which the gag order of objectivity long ago tried to still.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/truepromise.htm
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January 15, 2008
The Bright Side of
Britney's Breakdown
ROCHESTER, MN -- When I turned on the CBS Early Show this morning, oh, what a sight! Britney Spears was being hounded by paparazzi!
When that poor young woman got out of her car she was swarmed by dozens – dozens! -- of sickening media parasites, all pushing and shoving and trampling over each other, crowding in and pointing their big black cameras directly at her, screaming “Britney, Britney, over here!”
The heartless bloodsuckers all wanted a close-up image of Britney’s shattered, sleepless, tear-stained and frightened face. Because that picture would sell to magazines, newspapers and TV shows for megabucks.
The situation was so serious that the Early Show’s Julie Chen, a sweet lady who obviously has Britney’s very best interests at heart, got the CEO of a paparazzi company, Hollywood.TV, on the program for an earnest chat.
It was such a relief when Julie and her guest, Sheeraz Hasan, didn’t wallow in the horrible spectacle of Britney’s internationally-televised breakdown.
Glamour Capitals
Instead, with utmost decorum they solemnly discussed the burning social question “Is paparazzi coverage a modern version of medieval stoning?”
The New York Times had a very helpful piece on Britney the other day, too.
The article reported on a memo written by the assistant bureau chief of the Associated Press’ Los Angeles bureau, telling the bureau staff that “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.”
The AP’s managing editor for entertainment, Lou Ferrara, backed up his local editor 100 percent on that, adding the wire service “wants to know everything about that story.”
In fact, the Associated Press is so committed to “breaking entertainment news,” Ferrara said, it plans to add 22 more entertainment reporters in New York, Los Angeles, and London this year.
As a person who lives in the Midwest, I was delighted to hear that the AP understands that folks in the heartland care about celebrities who live in the world’s glamour capitals, especially about all the suffering they go through.
Larger Issues
As for the New York Times article on the AP memo, I was relieved to see that it was a very dignified piece that wasn’t actually about Britney herself. Instead, it was strictly about the memo and, most important, what the memo signified for changing standards in the mainstream media.
In this very classy way, the Times was able to avoid dragging Britney’s name through the mud once again.
Similarly, when the Times ran a photograph the other day of Britney strapped to a hospital gurney, looking dazed and frightened like a trapped animal, the reporter carefully included several sentences to show readers how sordid the whole scene was, and how larger social issues were at stake.
For example, the Times article made the insightful, troubling point that “Ms. Spears’ personal life has doubtless made more money for the celebrity tabloids, news shows and Web sites than she ever made as a singer.” (And thanks too, to the Times, for giving her the dignity of the honorific ‘Ms.’)
The Times, after all, is a serious newspaper.
We need the Times, just as we need all of our best TV morning news shows, news agencies and individual journalists to devote their best efforts to covering the serious problems we face today – not only mental health issues in Hollywood, but equally important challenges such as the War in Iraq, illegal immigration, poverty, and global warming.
Lion Food
So it is such a relief to see that CBS, the AP, the New York Times, and so many other paragons of journalism are thinking not only about Britney’s best interests and the needs of their readers and viewers, but also about the long-term interests of American society, and also the world at large.
If our best institutions of journalism started to cynically sell human suffering as entertainment, because people proved with their pocketbooks that's what they wanted, what a fix we’d be in!
It would be like in ancient Rome when people enjoyed seeing social outcasts – and the occasional fallen celebrity – thrown to the lions.
If that were the case, what a sad point we’d all have come to!
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/britney.htm
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January 11, 2008
Why Can't Journalism Talk
About Its Own Morals?
ROCHESTER, MN -- As the New Year rolls in like an inexorable tide, I have watched the elections, done some reading and made a resolution as a journalist, as a citizen, and as a guy.
It's a resolution about, um, morality.
It's about how to determine what's right from what's wrong, wholesome from unwholesome, especially in the making and consuming of the media.
My resolution is about how to notice, nurture, and then to use inherent human capacities to tell the difference between good and evil in the media. In some ways, that's even more difficult than telling good from bad in real life, because the media flattens all the bumpy richness of life into a single, thin, fluorescent or inky dimension.
I'm excited but nervous to be writing this.
Because on the one hand, I'm energized to be talking about morality in journalism, or the lack of it. That breaks an old taboo within my profession, which is always a fun day's work.
On the other hand, there are dangers in asking whether there really are any morals in journalism, the high-walled and sometimes vengeful kingdom of neutral "objectivity."
Robertson or Chopra?
It's easy for people to spot that single word "morality," and immediately decide one has intellectually succumbed to rightwing scolds like Pat Robertson, or to New Age fuzzyheads like Deepak Chopra. (The latter being much the greater likelihood for me.)
But this kneejerk pigeonholing fuels my drive to find the roots of the problem.
If we don't have a language to talk with each other about what's right and wrong in the mass media, about what's healthy and what's unhealthy media to consume, what kind of a media and journalism are we going to have?
At the very least, by simple logic, we will have a confused mass media and journalism. And at worst we'll have a wicked one, since chaos always is exploited by the intelligent but depraved.
Simple Question
At the library I found three trusted guides through these tricky waters -- two communitarian philosophers and one mass media historian who explains why open discussion about morals, character and virtue is disesteemed in modern society. Not just in journalism and the media, but everywhere.
My guides are Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote “Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy;” Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of “Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief but inspiring essay called “Spiritual Thinking.”
All three of these writers ask simple questions to kick-start moral thinking. One question they all ask in one form or another is:
How come Lady Justice wears a blindfold?
And hey, is that really such a good idea?
The Blindfold Theory
Is it smart to block from our consciousness all those telling little winks and tics that we constantly receive from life around us and by which, in reality, we navigate our daily rounds?
Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary last week based on a microsecond of tearing up, plus a tiny subtle hitch in her voice that apparently persuaded a few thousand women to switch their votes to her at the last minute.
Lady Justice would have missed it all.
The blindfold theory holds that on the societal scale, the rational process of balancing costs and benefits works better than seeking wisdom from within one’s supposedly subjective conscience and soul.
Does that reasoning pass the common sense test?
I’ve got a big pile of poker chips placed on this question, because as a journalist I’ve worn a mighty moral blindfold for 30 years. It goes by the name of “objectivity,” the idea that journalists serve the public best by writing about issues as neutral bystanders, rigorously detached from what they observe.
Selfish Liberalism
Without taking sides, we journalists are supposed to gather facts and deliver them to the public to “let the readers decide.”
I’ve wrestled with journalism’s objectivity problem before. After a fair amount of soul-searching, a few years ago I finally was able to describe (as many others have before me) the ethical shortcuts and rationalizations that journalists make in objectivity’s name.
But until I read my three philosopher-guides, I’d never before seen the roots of the problem.
For all three writers, the name of the blindfold is liberal political theory, which is not just a theory but the bedrock faith of modern western society. These authors especially deplore the strain of liberalism that has dominated in the past half-century, and which they say has removed individuals as moral decision-makers from public affairs.
Depressed Newsrooms
“According to this liberalism,” Sandel writes, “government should be neutral as to conceptions of the good life. Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within which people can choose their own values and ends.”
By defining individual moral action in society as a choice between ready-made options, which Sandel calls the “procedural republic,” instead of developing the character of individuals to make subtle, case-by-case decisions, Sandel says society loses in the end.
"A political agenda lacking substantive moral discourse is one symptom of the public philosophy of the procedural republic,” he writes. It has also “coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives.”
That sounds like the depressed atmosphere of mainstream newsrooms today.
Disempowerment in newsrooms today takes many forms, all the way from mass layoffs at newspapers that are downsizing, to the frustration of reporters who are assigned to cover celebrity scandals while skipping important civic issues.
Meanwhile, there is neither any substantive moral discourse in newsrooms about these trends, nor any suitable framework to have one. (Only fired and refugee mainstream journalists on the Internet can try that!)
"Satanic" Arguments
John Durham Peters’ critique of liberalism is more radical than Sandel’s, especially on the right to free speech and the lengths to which he believes the media exploit it.
“There is something satanic about many liberal arguments in favor of free expression,” Peters writes. “Defenders of free speech often like to plumb the depths of the underworld. They tread where angels do not dare and reemerge escorting scruffy, marginal, or outlaw figures, many of whom spend their time planting slaps in the face of the public.”
In a talk at McGill University last year, Peters placed a red laser dot on liberalism in plainer English: “Liberalism undermines itself by pretending to be above the battle, by pretending to be neutral. Lots of liberals say it’s only a set of procedures and rules. But I would suggest that liberalism is one of the players. It’s not a referee. And that liberalism needs to recognize that it too has a vision. And that even in claiming neutrality it thereby forfeits a kind of neutrality, because by always trying to seek the higher ground it ends up pushing people out of an ethical position.”
Looking back, I have rarely seen more moral hypocrisy than in mainstream newsrooms, such as at The New York Times where I worked as a reporter from 1979 to 1989, and as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in its Tokyo, London and Hong Kong newsrooms in the 1990s. Of course, I count myself as one of the hypocrites.
Absolutism Corrupts Absolutely?
On the one hand, reporters and editors in all these newsrooms were deeply committed to ferreting out the truth, and sometimes showed great courage in doing so. This behavior alone demonstrates journalists' deeply personal and moral involvement in society.
Yet at the same time, whenever moral questions arose upon the publication of our hard-won factual narratives, our first impulse was always to exempt ourselves from any further dialog by citing “objectivity.”
Our job was simply to gather and put out the information we dug up, we told our miffed complainants, and refused all further involvement.
The accuracy of the facts that we published, and not any discussion about the moral shadings raised by the timing or manner of their publication, was the highest moral principle we felt beholden too. “If you have a problem with what we published, talk to our lawyers,” we’d say to anyone who raised questions.
Free speech absolutism was the alpha and the omega of our moral thinking.
That was expedient, but was it right?
Reflecting on my newsroom experience in the light of Sandel and Peters, I think that by insisting on such moral disengagement, we journalists hurt society in several ways.
Three Problems
First, we abdicate our leadership role in society as clear, honest, reliable communicators. We limit the valuable contributions that we could make to society as exemplary communicators, by clinging to a hypocrisy that is visible for all to see.
Second, we contribute to journalism’s decline by degrading the public trust that is journalism’s principal foundation.
Third, and worst of all, by our moral obtuseness we fail to facilitate a robust and open discussion about what constitutes the good life – the best forms of government, the best values and models of human behavior.
A multicultural and global society especially needs such a free and open forum to progress peacefully. If journalism doesn’t create one, what social institution will?
These questions apply to citizen journalists -- the millions of bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and other ordinary folks who are reporting the world around them on the Internet -- as much and even more so than to trained journalists.
Because like it or not the institutions of journalism, and with them the traditional journalistic values they once protected, are crumbling. That turns the ethical imperative for creating useful journalism over to the people who account for the vast majority of hours that actually are spent today in society looking around, and then recording and commenting on what’s seen, which is the essential journalistic enterprise.
So what’s the answer?
Neighbors and Strangers
My philosopher-guides guides offer three variations on a civic-minded theme.
Michael Sandel counsels a revival of republican public philosophy that stresses the formation of individual moral character, much along the lines that Thomas Jefferson endorsed in his agrarian vision of democracy.
John Durham Peters advocates drawing on religious traditions that are in sync with each other and with secular solidarity. “One of the central principles of the law in Judaism is kindness to the stranger, and one of the central principles of Christianity is love of the neighbor,” he says. “In some way, [those] are more powerful foundations for thinking about society than liberalism if you want a society with both solidarity and freedom in it.”
Charles Taylor, in his brief but enlightening essay, advocates a communitarian project similar to Sandel’s and Peters’. Yet he cautions that any future peaceful world will require a burdensome body of laws and rules to maintain order.
“We will in many ways be living lives under even greater discipline than today,” Taylor says. “More than ever we are going to need trail-blazers who will open or retrieve forgotten modes of prayer, meditation, friendship, solidarity and compassionate action.”
My Resolution
Personally, I doubt that any such trail-blazers will be wearing blindfolds.
My New Year’s resolution is to work as a journalist, to act as a citizen, and to live as a human being without a blindfold.
Instead, I'll try to simply use my God-given head and heart and eyes.
Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink: http:www.mcgillreport.org/truemedia.htm
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November 2, 2007
What I've Learned
Teaching Citizen Journalists
ROCHESTER, MN – Three years ago, I started teaching basic journalism skills to citizens in community education classes in Minneapolis.
Since then I’ve taught about a hundred ordinary folks – school teachers, government workers, not-for-profit types, retired people, students and many others – the basics of journalistic story structure, ethics and practices.
I taught at the Resource Center of the Americas, a Latino cultural center in Minneapolis, until it closed last August, and now am teaching for the Minneapolis Public Schools Community Education department.
My students take the class for many reasons. Some want to do journalism on the Internet to cover a favorite issue such as health care, human rights, or immigration reform.
Some want to learn skills to use writing not-for-profit newsletters, corporate reports or press releases. And some are simply curious to discover how journalism works, because they’ve been consuming the news media for years without understanding it.
New Views
The class meets once a week for three hours over six-weeks, writing and rewriting articles between classes, reading and commenting on each other’s work during class. I invite working mainstream reporters and editors to many classes, to describe to citizens their daily jobs, their attitudes towards their work, and to answer whatever questions the students have.
The class has changed my view of my role as a journalist, of journalism’s role in a democracy, and of the promises and pitfalls of the many forms of citizen journalism that are a part of the news media today.
Here are the seven main lessons I’ve learned from my students, so far:
1. Citizens are an untapped source of expertise and positive civic energy that journalists can help unlock. Every one of my citizen journalism students has had years of personal experience in some important civic issue. They are aching to share that knowledge but have been hampered by A) Their cynicism about journalists and journalism, B) A lack of reporting and writing skills, and C) An incipient sense, like a vague but possibly potent memory, of journalism’s role as a foundation stone of democracy. The best possible teachers of these skills and attitudes of democracy are journalists. But journalists and their employers need to rethink their purpose and role in society for that to happen. We need to start thinking about journalists taking weeks, months and even years away from their newsroom jobs, to go into classrooms and auditoriums and public meeting halls to teach and to remind citizens – and to remind themselves – about how to read and write journalism critically and intelligently, and about journalism’s critical role in a democracy. Projects involving journalists fanning out into society in teaching roles would renew trust between journalists and citizens, and show the way towards new business models for journalism, too.
2. There is no substitute for a strong, independent, institutional journalism. My students are experts in many fields – mental health, immigration, aging, urban planning, human rights, animal rights, sports, local culture, recycling, water and air pollution, organic food, the legal system on Indian reservations, alternative medicine, and the Minnesota electoral system, to name just a few. But even under the rosiest scenario -- with citizens becoming skilled online journalists in all of these areas -- the result would be a journalism of special interests, and not of inclusive public interest. Most importantly, such a journalism would not constitute the strong counterweight to government and corporate power that only an organized and healthy professional journalism can provide.
3. Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the wellsprings of their craft. It happened to me. Like many journalists these days, I’m a refugee from mainstream newsrooms, where I worked hard and happily for many years. Until, one day, the relationship just didn’t work any more. Something about too many assignments that served corporate and not civic interests. I haven’t made much money teaching citizen journalism, but I’ve found citizens who care about journalism like they care about clean air and water. It’s energizing.
4. Journalists need to learn citizenship skills, as much as citizens need to learn journalism. Time and again, I have been shocked in my class to witness the gap that’s grown up between ordinary citizens and journalists. Even highly-educated citizens tend to be ignorant of the simplest facts about how journalism is created. Many students are surprised to learn, for example, that every word in a newspaper is not fact-checked before it’s published. On the other hand, journalists who visit my class, and I myself, sometimes display an apparently ingrained, patronizing aloofness to the students, especially when we’re called on our aloofness. We journalists tend to be super-sensitive when we’re the ones being asked questions. Ordinary citizens know that at least some doctors are relaxed, approachable people. But based on my experience these past three years, few citizens have learned that lesson about journalists.
5. A good citizen journalism class, like a great newspaper, allows for all types of expression – artistic, poetic, literary, photographic, musical, comical and fun. Because it’s created by human beings, journalism is a diverse and highly personal form of expression. Only by fully embracing that does journalism offer the complete picture of society that it should. I don’t tell students what stories to write, and they repay me by singing their hearts out in every possible way. One of my favorite stories in class was by a Guatemalan immigrant who described buying bottles of “crema” – a fermented sweet-and-sour concoction that tastes wonderful on strawberries – whenever she needed to connect with home. (She brought actual crema and strawberries to class after we read her story and begged for a sample.) Another student wrote about a scrawny feline named Buffer, the pet cat in a home of human castaways, in a way that put the problem of homelessness in a tragicomic new light.
6. Citizens create vital community consciousness through the discipline of writing journalistically. A magical thing happens in the class, every time. Over six weeks, students in the class write one story (or rewrite one) between classes, then share it with the entire class for feedback. This creates a bond of solidarity among the students. A sense of gratitude builds towards each person in class who shares their personal insights and experiences, often at some risk to personal pride. The insistence on telling the absolute truth that journalism requires, often forces students to reveal personal knowledge beyond what they had ever dared to publicly share. One of my students, a retired business consultant, wrote an article decribing his inner struggle at becoming a peace activist while his son was serving in the Army in Iraq. His story created a sense of solidarity in the room that was mystically strong. This is perhaps a microcosm of how journalism could ideally work in society, creating community day by day. “My view of journalism has changed,” one student emailed me after the course. “At its best, it serves like an amazing expansion of our personal experience, bringing truth into our consciousness.” Bingo.
7. I’m the one who needs to change. I began as a journalist in the heyday of Woodward-and-Bernstein in newspapers, and of John McPhee in magazines. So I often get nostalgic for spacious, context-rich narratives when I read the new citizen journalism appearing on the Net. “Giant Puffball Found in Clifton,” read a recent headline from the hyperlocal website, Baristanet. Where is the “Why should I care?” paragraph in the puffball story? Not to mention readers' often calorie-free comments like one after the mushroom story: “Shrooms rule.” When I settle down, though, I realize the error of my conservative reactions. Change is welcome, adapting smartly is the challenge, and Baristanet itself is a fantastic model. For mixed among its whimsical squibs on cute witches and record-shattering dosas are items reporting on urban trends, crimes, and public protests. Baristanet is doing just what journalism should do. It reports on its community with ethical attention, it has fun, and it follows in word and spirit democracy’s ultimate dictum: Citizens rule.
Copyright @ 2007 The McGill Report
Permalink:http://www.mcgillreport.org/sevenlessons.htm
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October 25, 2007
Mindfulness, Blended Orgasms and the News
ROCHESTER, MN – In the grocery checkout line the other day, holding my milk and eggs in hand, I scanned the magazine rack headlines:
• The Blended Orgasm – A More Intense Climax
• Bite Me! Woman’s Bizarre Relationship With Mosquitoes
• Bomb Blast Near Bhutto Kills 126 in Pakistan
• “Queen of Mean” Leaves $12 Million to
Pet Pooch
• Viking Fans Feel the Pain, Again and Again and ...
Has anyone out there noticed how a calm mind evaporates like the dew when exposed to newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and Sunday morning talk TV?
Even the serious Pakistan headline above, mixed into this gruel, is transformed into a jitter-making diversion, a passing frisson of gloom.
Yet there is a sense too in which the Pakistan headline fits right along with the others – that is, in the human insanity being described. The tabloids all-too-accurately report on our obsessive attachments and delusions, on the human condition, just as our newspapers factually report the news.
All of it dispels calm:
The strange human urge to be bitten! Maybe I’ll experiment!
The urgency of news from Pakistan! I must respond to it!
Blended orgasms – wow! How can I get one or give one?
I point to how the mass media transforms calm to agitation, because according to the Buddhist tradition, developing inner calm is the royal road to wisdom, which is the royal road to peace.
Obsessions & Fetters
Therefore, if the mass media -- and journalism as the conscience of the mass media -- is going to contribute to world peace, it will have to help develop calm states of mind among its consumers worldwide.
The Buddhist term for calm is “samatha,” or tranquility.
“Monks!” the Buddha once addressed his orange-robed followers. “There is the case where a monk has developed insight preceded by tranquility. As he develops insight preceded by tranquility, the path is born. He follows that path, develops it and pursues it. As he follows the path, his fetters are abandoned, his obsessions destroyed.”
Those would be the fetters of ignorance and mental restlessness, and the obsession with forming opinions, theories, identities and careers.
Developing calm mind states, the Buddha said, begins the path to peace.
Is the mass media following this path? A rhetorical question, I know.
Is the mass media’s role as a major influence on mind-states even explicitly addressed in the codified ethics of any branch of the mass media? If not, why not?
Visiting Forces
When you think of it, is there any resource on the planet more precious than a calm mind? The human race needs calm minds like it needs oxygen. When calm minds disappear, anxiety appears, and violence lurks close by.
Without a calm collective mind the human species surely will perish as quickly as if the ozone layer disappeared, or the polar ice caps melted tomorrow. And the mass media – when consumed or produced in huge amounts by anxious and scattered minds – is surely one of the greatest manmade threats to the vital planetary resource of calm minds.
Buddhist psychology precisely names the three basic toxins – the Buddha called them “visiting forces” – that attack the naturally calm human mind.
They are the “kilesas,” or defilements, and they come in three main varieties: greed, which is wanting to grasp what is pleasant; aversion, which is wanting to avoid or annihilate what is unpleasant; and delusion, which is ignorance of reality and an infatuation with unreal things.
Giddy Blisses
Mixing these three ingredients in different proportions yields the full menu of poisons that human beings fall heir to – anger, jealousy, lust, fear, anxious planning, tearful reminiscing, giddy blisses, judging, perfectionism, hypochondria, self-pity, martyrdom, horror, depression, and on and on.
As a journalist, my concern is that I know very little about the role that words and images play as a host or vector of the kilesas; or how language might be used to host, transmit, or support calm and wise states of mind.
The idea that as a journalist, not to mention as a person, I unconsciously host or transmit language toxins – kilesas, if you will, destroyers of the precious natural resource of calm – is slightly haunting. So is the idea that my culture offers no training in the public use of language in wholesome, ethical ways.
Don’t get me wrong.
I am 100% in favor of blended orgasms, whatever they are.
I just want to be able to get one, to give one, and as a journalist to tell the world about them – along with the distracting yet important daily news -- while also staying wise, caring and calm.
Copyright @ 2007 The McGill Report
Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/kilesas
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Talking to Strangers:
Journalism’s Role in a Global World
ROCHESTER, MN -- Journalists talk to strangers. It’s what we do.
Anyone can talk with strangers, of course. But in this globalized age, the border-crossing, stranger-engaging professionals called journalists perform an increasingly critical role.
A global journalist is an international information bee, cross-pollinating news, language, beliefs and customs in ways that fertilize and strengthen societies on all sides of the exchange.
When American journalists talk about global journalism, the ideal they most frequently cite is the export of free speech journalism to countries that lack a free society and freedom of the press. The assumption is that a healthy journalism is a prerequisite of a healthy democracy, so in this way American journalists can help spread freedom and democracy worldwide.
There is no doubt that spreading free speech journalism does great good in the world. The abuse of power is a constant in the affairs of man, so an institutional check on power remains indispensable. Yet the globalized "flat" world is so different, in so many ways, from previous periods that journalists need to review and possibly revise the highest ideals of their profession, in order to find relevance in this new world.
Journalism in Crisis
American journalists need to start seeing themselves as cross-cultural fertilizers as much as free speech crusaders; as linguistic translators who inevitably introduce biases and flaws into their works, as much as “clear conduits” of the truth; as cosmopolitans as much as patriots; and as engaged global citizens as much as morally neutral recorders of domestic events.
How the American press sees its role in the globalized 21st century is an obviously critical question, yet still is grossly under-discussed. The most obvious reason for this is that American journalism is in a severe state of crisis, facing multiple threats to its very existence. The Internet is stealing readers from newspapers and news magazines and TV news programs, causing widespread layoffs and buy-outs of senior journalists in all these places. Other times, to maintain a strong economic model, newspapers and TV news programs change their strategy from straight news gathering to offering partisan, sensationalizing TV performers and newspaper columnists.
Also, more and more news outlets are owned by a smaller and smaller number of corporate owners, which itself raises questions about freedom of the press. And continuing a trend of several decades, young Americans show less and less interest in following the news as a habit of citizenship.
Amidst such fear and disarray, it is understandably very difficult for U.S. journalistic organizations to re-define their role in American society, much less within the complex pattern of societies across the whole world.
Flat-World Journalism
And yet, logically, American journalism can’t solve its domestic problems until it defines its role in the globalized 21st-century world. Because this ultimately is the world in which American journalism operates – not the American economy but a global one, not an American society but a global one.
The Internet, for example, is the single greatest factor forcing American journalism to dramatically redefine itself or die. It is quintessentially a global phenomenon and not an American one. Numerous other examples -- immigration, global warming, terrorism, outsourcing, WalMart, world music, world sports, world food, global financial contagions and SARS to name a few -- similarly show that American society is profoundly interdependent with the other societies, cultures, environments and economies of the world.
I propose a new Flat-World Journalism model that sees the press as a global buffer institution, an independent linguistic and cultural translation engine that enables information to flow freely between societies of different types. In this new journalism, nonpartisan objectivity would be taken to a higher power, that of cosmopolitan neutrality. A new global press corps would consist of multilingual journalists operating with minimum bias and maximum openness as honest information brokers between nations and peoples, just as they have done for many decades between political parties and partisans.
At the heart of the new Flat-World Journalism -- to guide new newsroom practices as well as Web development and marketing strategies to nurture new generations of news consumers -- would be the ancient ethical practice of “xenia,” the love of strangers.
Xenia Ethics
Xenia was an exalted virtue of ancient Greece, prized for both its civic and spiritual benefits. Socrates was a devoted practitioner, always seeking out strangers for conversation because they challenged his thinking, suggested new ideas for daily life, and brought useful political, military, and cultural news from neighboring city states. Seeing strangers as Gods bearing wisdom and gifts was a part of xenia, as it has been in many ancient hospitality traditions around the world, and remains in many modern ones.
In India, for example, millions of followers of the mystic saint Kabir hold that the highest human ethical practice is to receive guests with utmost reverence. (This explains why so many Kabir-worshipping immigrants to the U.S. work as hoteliers and moteliers).
The practice of xenia is also at the heart of the Judeo Christian tradition, described in many Biblical passages in ways rich with journalistic potential.
The most famous xenia story, in Genesis, begins with Abraham in the midst of an ecstatic conversation with God. Suddenly, Abraham is interrupted by three strangers who approach his tent. He immediately drops his prayer to take care of the strangers -- to wash their feet, give them food and chat a while. The spiritual benefits of Abraham's xenia become evident soon enough -- the visitors turn out to be manifestations of God, who is pleased because Abraham stopped his spiritual practice to attend to strangers.
Off-Rolodex Sources
For Abraham as for Socrates, talking with strangers brought many distinctly practical, as well as spiritual, benefits. Strangers brought news of neighboring tribes, shared their best ideas about farming and herding techniques, told of daughters and sons in nearby villages who'd reached marriageable age, and opened new channels for trade.
The story’s lessons for journalism? Each person may draw his own, but one of mine is that every interview with an absolute stranger (not anyone listed in your Rolodex!) holds a potential mother lode of hard, useful, breaking news.
As journalists we all basically know this, but perhaps we need a reminder when we arrive at mid-career, with more power in the newsroom than in our cub days but not feeling quite as peppy, talking to the same sources every day, story after story after story. It’s tough to find new sources, especially once we’ve got a groove down with a favored set. But the Abraham tale says that changing our routine to help strangers – even forswearing interviews with very high-level sources indeed -- ultimately pays off.
I would go further in interpreting the Abraham story. I would say it suggests that across all barriers of race, age, nationality, color, rank or class, it's the journalist's job to ask questions of people who live across those barriers from each other, to discover their news, to learn about their beliefs and conditions of life. The story suggests that talking with strangers can benefit both the individual journalist, and heal the larger realms in which he lives – his family, his neighborhood, his newsroom, his community, his nation.
Surely, this incredible claim is something to pause over, to reflect on, and to test.
Local Areas
Modern scientific studies, not just ancient moral traditions, are also beginning to suggest that complex social systems need a cohort of ethically skilled information transmission agents – such as journalists – to ensure clear, open, continuous communication.
Neuroscientists, physicians, and researchers such as Francisco Varela and Jon Kabat-Zinn have suggested that journalism acts as the natural immune system of society, because journalists can share useful information throughout complex social systems, and can focus the whole system’s resources to heal damaged local areas during emergencies.
One trait of the globalized world dramatically highlights American journalism’s need to embrace a xenia ethic in the 21st century. That of course is the world’s “flatness,” a term popularized by the journalist Thomas Friedman. It refers to how global political and economic power is vastly decentralized as a result of the technologies such as the Internet, global media, global travel, and satellites.
The world remains far from entirely flat, of course. Huge income disparities continue, and a U.S. president and a tiny group of his associates can still singlehandedly steer a nation (several nations in fact) into a disastrous war. Yet a counter-trend is at least equally prevalent in the world, with power devolving from capital cities and corporate headquarters down through state, city and village groups, and often to individual people using the Internet to create voting blocs, “smart mobs,” “intelligent networks,” and bustling new commercial markets.
Cultural vs. Political
To understand the connection to journalism and xenia, recall that in recent decades a debate in journalism has pitted those who see the primary purpose of a free press as enabling democratic community through open public discourse, against those who stress journalism’s role as check against government power. The former takes mainly a cultural view of the press as the central civic conversation in a democracy, while the latter takes a political view, seeing the press as a key social institution influencing the election of public officials and the making of public policies. On the whole, the political view has been far more influential in the 20th century than the cultural one, in terms of shaping newsroom practices, beliefs and ethics.
The advent of a world of communications that consists of millions of simultaneous one-on-one conversations, in which decisions affecting masses of people are constantly arising out of the aggregate of these conversations, urgently suggests the time has come to integrate the cultural and political views of the press. Because as earlier noted, since the abuse of power is ever with us, the press as a political force will always be needed in a democracy. Yet at the same time, when hundreds of millions of people converse together constantly, and behave in roughly consistent patterns without direction by a central authority, this is a purely cultural phenomenon.
Notwithstanding that the political view of the press has dominated the profession for a century or so, the cultural view of jouranlism is therefore today in many ways more suited to help journalism survive in the flat 21st-century world.
All-American
This is why xenia makes good flat-world sense. It is quintessentially a cultural and not a political practice; it works mainly at an individual not institutional level; it negotiates differences between individuals as much as interests between groups; and it works by literary and metaphoric means, more than literal and legalistic ones. Most of all, it works from the bottom up, on the premise that high-level politics and policies arise from a synthesis of countless one-on-one conversations held at a local level.
In other words, xenia is humanistic, pragmatic, and democratic -- All American!
Putting xenia ethics at the core of a new global journalism would powerfully transform the craft. It would, as mentioned, redirect journalistic business strategies towards international as well as domestic markets. Expanding coverage of domestic immigrant and ethnic communities, not only for journalistic purposes but also as good business, would be a part of that shift. The role of minority journalists in newsrooms would likewise come in for a sea change, once the default management view was set towards engaging all the strangers in our midst – including the tired, the hungry, and the poor.
Because the Internet is so powerful a means to engage strangers, a xenia perspective would also suggest innovative new Web-based journalistic and business strategies.
Needless to say, adopting xenia news ethics would fundamentally change journalism’s prevailing newsroom ethics practices, too. It would raise ethics from its frequent newsroom role as an after-the-fact justification of aggressive newsgathering techniques (“post-hoc morality” as some say), to a central practice that deeply informs every decision in the journalistic process. New faces and new ideas would appear more frequently in our journalism, as would new story angles from our regular sources. Over time, our increasing knowledge of the interrelation of global reality to our local lives would give us greater insight into the workings of our globalized planet, allowing us to more skillfully navigate and thrive in our world.
These ideas about journalism’s role in a global society would, I believe, helpfully complement our profession’s indispensable commitment to free speech. They do not replace that ideal at all, but rather offer a powerful new metaphor that could suggest fresh global applications of free speech journalism that we may never before have considered.
Copyright @ 2007 Douglas McGill
Permalink: http://www.mcgillreport.org/xenia.htm
A Syllabus for a Moral Journalism
Healing the World with Words
The Re-Presentation of Suffering
Straight Scoop, Strange World
Why Journalism is Shallow
The Conscience of the Reporter
The Aleph and the Media's Soul
Journalists as Teachers
Language as Spiritual Food
Why Journalists Should Meditate
Sharon Salzberg Explains it All
The ABC's of Ethical Speech
More Columns
Are Journalists Curious, Really?
What is Journalism?
Is Jon Stewart a Journalist?
Can Reporters Have Ideas?
Is 'Citizen Journalism' Reliable?
The Heroism of Hospitality
A New Story for a New World
Who Are We Today?
A Global Citizen's Double Life
Unlearning Our Ignorance
Learning from Strangers
No Country is an Island
Americans Abroad
Conversation Across Distances
TMR Archives
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