Summer 2012 • Volume 42 Number 327 • $7.00
S t. Lo u i s J o u r n a l i s m R ev i ew P re s e n t s :
Covering political conventions by John S. Jackson • Page 14
Mark Vittert: media mystery man by Roy Malone • Page 10
Summer Book Reviews Pages 18-27
Buffet $mells money by John Jarvis • Page 6 gatewayjr.org
Summer 2012 • Vol. 42 No. 327 • $7.00
G ateway J ournalism R eview i s l o o k i ng for p eople to a n a l y ze their lo c al media .
Covering Elections
William A. Babcock Editor Charles Klotzer Founder Mallory MacDermott Creative Director
Do you teach mass media in a journalism school in the Midwest? Do the media do their job? Are you a media professional with thoughts about how the local media perform? Tell us about it. We need media critics in our 16-state readership area. Notice how we’re avoiding the traditional terms for this position. We don’t really want ombudsmen because that doesn’t really define what we need. The same can be said of news councils. Truth vigilantes don’t fill our needs either. Media critic works best. We need people to critically analyze how media in their area do their jobs. We not only need to know what they’re writing about, but what they aren’t writing about and why. We’re interested in those who cover how the media in their area report on stories being covered by national media, or how media respond to the needs of their local audience. Too, we are interested in all the mass media: print, online and broadcast journalism; photojournalism; advertising; public relations; integrated marketing communications and entertainment media. The Gateway Journalism Review starts from the proposition that media in our
basic 16-state coverage region may operate from a different viewpoint than many media outlets operating on both coasts. Considering that we live in a region described by those who live on the coasts as “fly over country”, we would like to know how media work while the rest of the world flies over. That doesn’t mean we don’t cover issues outside our target area, both nationally and internationally, but it does mean our primary focus is on America’s midsection. Every state in our coverage area has its own issues. The entire expanded Midwest is not a conservative bastion, nor is it a leftist haven. Our goal is to find people who live and work in our region to report on the subtleties of their state’s media that would not be visible by just examining a few newspaper or website articles or television reports. We want critics who can point out differences in how local or state media cover a story and how national media may portray the same story. We want
to take some of the “accepted” stereotypes assigned to many who live in our region and pick at them. At the same time, we’re interested in how media cover the situations that arise that reinforce those stereotypes. We think GJR is providing a service to an area that is underserviced, and we need your help. Won’t you get in touch with us?
Scott Lambert, Managing Editor
Wenjing Xie Marketing Director Aaron Veenstra Web Master
William Freivogel Publisher Scott Lambert Managing Editor Jennifer Butcher Production Editor Sam Robinson Operations Director Steve Edwards Cover Artist
Board of Advisers: Roy Malone, Jim Kirchherr, Lisa Bedian, Ed Bishop, Tammy Merrett, Don Corrigan, Michael Murray, Rita Csapo-Sweet, Steve Perron, Eileen Duggan, Michael D. Sorkin, David P. Garino, Rick Stoff, Ted Gest, Fred Sweet, William Greenblatt, Lynn Venhaus, Daniel Hellinger, Robert A. Cohn, Michael E. Kahn, John P. Dubinsky, Gerald Early, Paul Schoomer, Moisy Shopper, Ray Hartmann, Ken Solomon, Avis Meyer, Tom Engelhardt Published by School of Journalism College of Mass Communication and Media Arts Interim Dean: Dafna Lemish School of Journalism Director: William H. Freivogel Gateway Journalism Review Communications Building - Mail Code 6601 Southern Illinois University Carbondale 1100 Lincoln Drive Carbondale, IL 62901
To Subscribe: 618-453-0122 gatewayjr.org/subscribe
Subscription rates: $25 (4 issues). Foreign subscriptions higher depending upon country.
The Gateway Journalism Review GJR (USPS 738-450 ISSN: 0036-2972) is published quarterly, by Southern Illinois University Carbondale, School of Journalism, College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, a non-profit entity. The office of publication is SIUC School of Journalism, 1100 Lincoln Drive, Mail Code 6601, Carbondale, IL 62901 Periodical postage paid at Carbondale, IL and additional mailing offices. Please enclose stamped, selfaddressed envelope with manuscript.
If you are interested, please e-mail us at gatewayjr@siu.edu.
Copyright © 2012 by the Gateway Journalism Review. Indexed in the Alternative Press Index. Allow one month for address changes.
POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to: Gateway Journalism Review William Freivogel School of Journalism 1100 Lincoln Drive, Mail Code 6601 Carbondale, IL 62901.
14 • C overing political conventions John S. Jackson 15 • A s good as it gets? Kurt Shillinger 16 • E lections provide test for unique media collaboration John Jarvis
Book Reviews 18 • T he unloved American media Review by William A. Babcock 19 • G reat — and not so great — expectations Review by Jennifer Butcher 20 • R upert Murdoch: both sides now Review by Ben Conrady 21 • M inority voice in U.S. media Review by Austin Flynn 22 • W ikiLeaks pushes sourcing envelope Review by Christopher Karadjov 23 • A nd that’s the way it is —or isn’t Review by Scott Lambert 24 • A uthor examines investigative journalism 40 years after Watergate scandal Review by Michael D. Murray 25 • I t doesn’t look good Review by Kurt Shillinger 26 • I s Christian Science Monitor still viable as a news source? Review by Paul Van Slambrouck 27 • F ormer ABC chief Westin recalls forest, trees in “Exit Interview” Review by Scott Lambert 29 • A nd now, for something completely different: Times-Picayune forges transition path Pat Louise
Newspapers 6 • N ewspapers have the $mell of money for Buffett John Jarvis 8 • F our newspapers sold Scott Lambert 9 • S ix more gone from the Post-Dispatch newsroom Roy Malone 10 • M edia mogul Mark Vittert shuns the media Roy Malone
Point/Counterpoint
12 • W ar coverage: media toe presidents’ lines Steve Hallock 13 • W ar coverage: media challenge presidents’ lines William H. Freivogel
Opinion 4 • T he omnipresent sound of Music William A. Babcock 5 • N ews literacy John McCarron 30 • A bit of media history Chares L. Klotzer
Feature
28 • I llinois eavesdropping law controversial — and unresolved William H. Freivogel
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 3
Editor’s Note
Opinion In addition to having our regular mix of media and journalism offerings, the Gateway Journalism Review you are holding in your hands is our late summer edition and/or back-to-school publication. As many people rev up to read one last book before Labor Day or, if academics, consider adding one or two more works to a reading list, we hope this GJR might be of help. We have in the GJR gathered a variety of books we think will be of interest to our varied readers – media professionals, academics, media consumers, students and the like. We’d like to hear what you think of this books edition, what you think of our choices, what books you think we missed - and what books you would like to review for us in the future. So happy reading, and enjoy what’s left of your summer.
William A. Babcock, Editor
The omnipresent sound of music W i l l i am A. B a bcock There are two recent trends in journalism that I find increasingly annoying. I dislike most first-person reporting. Sure, when a journalist has a connection to his or her story there is a legitimate reason for an occasional “I,” “we” or “us,” but for the vast majority of cases, I’m interested in what journalists have to report, rather than learning about their connection to or interest in the topic. (And I say this with the full knowledge that I have started my own book review in this issue with a first-person example! Sigh…)
I also like public radio news, whether from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or NPR. Together with a blend of institutional print publications and broadcast outlets, and a variety of blogs, public radio adds a timely, knowledgeable news mix to my daily news and information mix.
The second trend that irks me is that of National Public Radio, which since early this century has been increasingly fixated on music. “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” now report on musicians, play music, talk about music, end news segments with overly lengthy musical interludes, feature new music, discuss new musical groups and play more and more and more music.
I would love to get my hands on the proprietary research NPR surely commissioned early on this century recommending the network use music to lure a new, younger, hipper age demographic. That would be the results of survey research urging NPR to fluff up its content, save money by having less hard news, conduct cheap interviews with musicians, dumb down its news and blatantly pander to older teens and 20-somethings with trendy music. But alas, I’ve tried for the past few months to unearth this information or to encourage NPR employees to talk about the musicization of their news programs. There have been no takers.
Now as this is a first-person commentary, let me issue a disclaimer: I like music. I studied classical piano for about a dozen years, dreaming of becoming the next Rudolph Serkin before the reality kicked in that I simply was not that good. I’ve sung in madrigal and a cappella groups, I used to play trumpet, my daughter plays classical and jazz violin. I have a sizable collection of rock and popular music. Mine is a musical family. I listen to music CDs and to classical musical radio stations. I attend live jazz and classical music performances.
But just as I like my music to be free of journalistic commentary, I want my news to be sound free. And it isn’t.
Thus my reportorial failure has driven me to use a firstperson piece to comment on music infesting my favorite news programs - two trends, as I said earlier, that I don’t like. None of this has been music to my ears.
Write Gateway a letter!
Submission Guidelines Letters must be submitted with the author’s contact information. This information is required to verify authorship, but will not be published. Include also your professional or preferred title and/or hometown and state.
Page 4 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Send letters to gatewayjr@siu.edu, or: Gateway Journalism Review Mail Code 6601 : D e a r E d it or 1100 Lincoln Drive Communications Building Carbondale, IL 62901
News literacy
News Literacy Project helps young readers to evaluate media credibility
J o h n M c C a r ro n If you find it’s getting harder to separate fact from fiction online, or straight news from bald-faced opinion, imagine what it’s like to be a kid. Oh sure, youngsters are natives of the digital jungle. They can whip around music files and Tweet their Facebook friends faster than you or I can hit control-alt-delete. But can they anticipate the left-right bias of an article depending on whether it’s found on the website of The Nation or the National Review? Or find authoritative economic reporting amid the partisan rants that pop up when one Googles a keyword such as “unemployment” or “stimulus?” It is a jungle out there and research shows most teenagers
and pre-teens are babes in the woods when it comes to evaluating media credibility or bias. Of course they are. A friend can show them how to stream movies from Hulu.com, but who’s going to show them how to regard an Internet rumor like “Obama is a Moslem” or “Romney is a bigamist?” Who, indeed, at a time when schools everywhere are cutting back on social studies and current events so they can go hard on reading and math before students take the all-important standardized tests? In Chicago some 60 journalists are helping close the gap by volunteering for an innovative and growing national program called the News Literacy Project. The idea is to provide middle- and high-school teachers with lesson plans Continued on Page 30
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 5
Newspapers
Newspapers
Sury was referring to Buffet’s statement May 17 that “in towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper.” Buffett made the comment after announcing that Berkshire Hathaway was buying 63 newspapers from Media General Inc. for $142 million. The “Oracle of Omaha” began his association with the newspaper business in high school, making money by delivering papers. But Buffett’s recent kind words for an industry long ignored by other investors belie his shrewdness for a good business deal. In a story written May 17 for Bloomberg Businessweek, Devin Leonard noted that “it’s also important to look at the price Berkshire is paying for the Media General papers.” Leonard wrote that “as recently as six years ago, newspaper companies sold for more than nine times EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization),” and he added that “Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Stephen Weiss writes today that Buffett’s company paid around four times EBITDA for the Media General assets.” “At that low price,” according to Leonard, “Berkshire Hathaway could make a nice return on its money . . . Buffett may have a soft spot for newspapers. But when it comes to investing, he’s no sentimentalist.”
Newspapers have the $mell of money for Buffett J o hn J a r v is It seems Warren Buffett likes what he sees in the newspaper industry. With the announcement June 22 of the acquisition of the Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald by Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, the 81-year-old billionaire now owns, or has agreed to acquire, at least 89 weekly and daily newspapers in eight states: Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. He also has 3 percent stock in Lee Enterprises, a newspaper chain that owns papers in much of the Midwest, including St. Louis. The Tribune-Herald’s sale came on the heels of the company’s June 12 purchase of The Eagle of Bryan-College Station, Texas. The Eagle was acquired from the Evening Post Publishing Co. for an undisclosed sum, according to the World-Herald. The Eagle has a circulation of 20,000, while the Tribune-Herald has a circulation of 34,000 daily and
Page 6 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
39,000 on Sundays. News of the sale of the Tribune-Herald took the newsroom by surprise, according to longtime staff member Ken Sury. “Our newsroom didn’t have a sense that anything was happening until the entire building received an invitation — sent out to our company emails at 10:30 p.m. (June 21) — to attend a meeting about the future of the Trib at 10 a.m. (June 22),” said Sury, the editor of Waco Today magazine, a monthly publication of the Herald-Tribune. “Once we got that, speculation ran rampant about the who, and we wondered before the meeting if indeed it would be Berkshire Hathaway because of the recent purchases – and especially the Eagle, which is only 90 minutes away.” “Overall, I’d say it’s a positive feeling among the staff here,” added Sury, who’s been with the publication 14 years and also has served as an assistant city editor during his tenure there. “The comments made by Buffett after the Media General purchase about the future of newspapers,
In a New York Times op-ed from Oct. 16, 2008, titled “Buy American. I am,” Buffett wrote that “a simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records five, 10 and 20 years from now.” Buffet’s politics have not appeared to play a factor in his newspaper acquisitions. On that point, the Eagle’s executive sports editor, Robert Cessna, who has worked at the newspaper for 37 years, doesn’t foresee any changes to
its coverage as a result of Buffett’s acquisition. “We live in a Bible Belt area,” Cessna said. “The politics of Warren Buffett won’t play in to anything as far as I can see.”
“This is still a paper that will tend to be conservative to reflect the community it serves, and the views expressed by the paper have always reflected that,” Cessna said. “Never in 37 years have I been told what to write or not write. That’s been about 13 publishers and 13 managing editors — half Democrats, half Republicans.”
“
There’s always some trepidation when there’s a change in ownership, but there’s more of a feeling of upside with this news — said Ken Sury, editor of Waco Today magazine, a monthly publication of the Herald-Tribune.
“
and comments made to Trib employees by BH Media Group President Terry Kroeger, give us good reason to feel their focus is on the future of our business. There’s always some trepidation when there’s a change in ownership, but there’s more of a feeling of upside with this news.”
He added: “I just think it’s a good investment. He seems to be buying papers in towns where there’s no competition. It’s hard to beat ‘refrigerator journalism.’ Towns like BryanCollege Station and smaller are always going to have some sort of paper and cater to the locals, which is what the advertisers like. The Eagle was sold again because it is making money, not because it is losing money. The days of buying a paper, cutting the staff, knocking down the size of the daily product — say, 16 pages daily instead of 20 – doing away with syndicated stuff, et cetera, are over,— because you can’t run a paper in the ground for four to five years and then try to sell it for a profit. It won’t happen.” Added Sury: “Kroeger said they don’t micromanage, but leave the business to the people at the local newspapers because we know our communities best. I don’t think there’s much concern that Buffett’s politics will have an effect on the Tribune-Herald. Maybe there will be an initial uptick in interest when BH Media Group takes over, but beyond that I can’t foresee much. We just have to continue doing what we do well; that has to be our recipe for success.” John Jarvis has worked as a writer, copy editor and editor for newspapers in Texas, Indiana and Arizona. He is now a M.S. student at Southern Illinois University.
G TEWAY J O U RN A LISM R E VI E W
Read more online! gatewayjr.org Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 7
Newspapers
Newspapers
Four newspapers sold S co tt L a mber t Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway have been on a newspaper buying spree in the Midwest. Freedom Newspapers has been selling. On June 12, Freedom announced that seven newspapers, including the Orange County Register, the Gazette in Colorado Springs and five other newspapers were being sold to 2100 Trust LLC. This comes less than two weeks after the announcement that four dailies in Gateway Journalism Review’s coverage area were being sold to various affiliates of Versa Capital Management. The Alton (Ill.) Telegraph, the Jacksonville (Ill.) Journal-Courier, the Sedalia (Mo.) Democrat and the Lima News in Ohio. The news was expected by all four newspapers. Only one, the Sedalia Democrat, had any immediate major changes in personnel, changing publishers. Lynn Kidd, formerly of the West Frankfort (Ill.) Daily American, is the new publisher at the Sedalia Democrat. When asked how he is adjusting to the new surroundings, he played the change down. “I wasn’t one of the people involved before the change,” Kidd said. “I don’t have any extra adjustments to make.” Instead, Kidd is making an adjustment from southern Illinois
to western Missouri, two regions similar in many ways. “There are a lot of similarities between here and southern Illinois,” Kidd said. “We have great people. The transition has been fairly easy.” The other newspapers seem to be making the adjustment to the change as well. The four papers were sold to a newspaper affiliate of Versa Capital Management. Owned by Gregory Segall, Versa has more than $1 billion in capital investments. The company is expanding into newspapers, with dailies dotted throughout Ohio and a new newspaper in Pennsylvania. “We are very pleased to have reached an agreement to acquire the assets of Freedom’s Central Division to add to our growing platform of community newspaper assets, including Ohio Community Media,” said Gregory L. Segall, CEO of Versa Capital Management in a press release sent to multiple papers about the sale. At Lima, editor Jim Krumel wrote about Freedom Newspapers and its demise, but mostly it has been business as usual at the other newspapers. Scott Lambert is managing editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.
“Thanks for your service!”
Six more gone from the Post-Dispatch newsroom R oy M al o n e The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has fired six more newsroom employees in its continuing drive to cut costs amid falling advertising revenue and circulation figures. Among those the Post-Dispatch described as being “laid off” was Jim Woodworth, a sports copy editor who is disabled and came to work on crutches. He started at the Post-Dispatch in 1998 and was the primary wire editor in the sports department. No employees volunteered to retire in the affected job classifications, so May 22 was the last day for the six let go. The others were:
SUBSCRIBE TODAY
SAVE 30% Page 8 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
• Ted Rogers, the last person on what used to be the wire desk. He started in 1999 and had also worked on the sports and news copy desks. • Jackie Hutcherson who worked at the paper nearly 15 years and was the health section editor. Before that she handled the former travel section. • Emily Rasinski who worked as a staff photographer for more than four years.
• Colleen Schrappen who started at the Post-Dispatch in 2005 and was a part-time copy editor on the news desk. • Amy Verkamp McCarthy who started in 1999 and worked on the business copy desk.
Roy Malone is a former reporter for the Post-Dispatch and former editor of the St. Louis Journalism Review.
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 9
Newspapers
Newspapers socks. He was quoted in Time Magazine as saying: “I wanted to be the youngest person in American history to have founded a company and sold it for more than a million dollars.” He appeared on “What’s My Line.” He liked the attention. To back up a bit, when he was 12 his dad, the late businessman Alvin Vittert, urged him to research firms that were successful and had potential, even driving Mark to interview their officials. As a teen he spent a summer going door-to-door offering to stencil the addresses of homes on curbstones for a dollar. In a Globe-Democrat feature, he told writer Rich Koster, “At the beginning of the summer, I succeeded in about one of five houses; at the end, it was about three of five. It was tremendous for my confidence.” That story by the late Koster, in 1977, described Vittert as a “a student of people and sales,” who knew he was good at persuading people. He enjoyed the game of selling his ideas more than of making a lot of money, which happened anyway. He enjoyed the process more than the payoff, Koster wrote. He developed a line of racquetballs that Brown Shoe Co. took over, revived the old I.B.C. Root Beer business and upgraded a dairy he bought. “I try to be real quiet” in going after business opportunities, Vittert told Koster. “Some things materialize, some don’t.” The Globe had reported that Vittert was considering a run for Congress in 1976 as a Republican, but that never happened. He continued pursuing business possibilities but didn’t need an office, just a legal pad that he used to list what he needed to do each day. He even approached Charles Klotzer about buying his St. Louis Journalism Review. No sale.
Media mogul Mark Vittert shuns the media R oy M a lone Mark Vittert, who may be the richest, most influential journalist in St. Louis, won’t answer journalists’ questions.
And now he doesn’t want to talk to the media? Should he?
As a result, he is St. Louis’ mystery media mogul.
Ray Hartmann who partnered with Vittert at the Riverfront Times and now St. Louis Magazine, said, “He’s a big name in the media but a very private guy . . . I don’t give out his phone number. You can be on TV and still be a private person.”
Vittert, now 64, was part owner of the Riverfront Times. He helped start the St. Louis Business Journal and similar publications in other cities. Vittert still owns part of the Business Journal and writes columns for it, he was an original panelist on the Donnybrook television show on Channel 9, and is on the board of directors of Lee Enterprises, owner of dozens of newspapers including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Suburban Journals. In years past, Vittert was a sought-after speaker at local events. Martin Duggan, formerly with the Globe-Democrat and longtime moderator of the Donnybrook show, called Vittert, “The most knowledgeable person I know in the newspaper business.”
Some of what the public knows about Vittert goes back to 1971 when he was written up as a 22-year old in a piece titled “A Self-Made Millionaire.” After graduating from DePauw University, he sold a marketing firm he helped create to Playboy Magazine for $1.5 million. It listed students at hundreds of universities so that businesses could connect with them to sell their goods and services. Vittert became a national personality as the news media jumped on the story, even mentioning that he wore no
He married Carol Holt and they had two children: a son, Leland, who is called “Lucky”, and a daughter, Liberty. Carol became active in community projects, including one to aid victims of crime. He had attended John Burroughs High School and she went to Principia. He liked sports and even boxed as a youngster. In recent years the Vitterts moved permanently to the northern Michigan town of Leland, where they had vacationed and where Carol’s parents had property.
set “a standard of integrity and decency that’s an example for us all.” That same year Vittert was emcee at a memorial for the respected Elliot Stein, local investment guru. Also that year, Post-Dispatch columnist Jerry Berger wrote that Vittert and Andrew E. Newman were among the wealthiest St. Louisans, each worth more than $10 million. In 1980 Newman, and Vittert started the St. Louis Business Journal and then similar weeklies in several other cities. This business was sold to the fast-growing American City Business Journals in 1986. Vittert’s former editor of the St. Louis Business Journal, Donald Keough, had gone to Kansas City to help start a business journal there that became part of American City Business Journals. About that time, Vittert joined the board of directors of Lee Enterprises, a chain of smaller newspapers. Newman, an executive at Edison Brothers Stores, joined the Lee board later. In 2005 Lee bought Pulitzer Publishing Inc., including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for $1.46 billion. Lee’s shares have lost value in recent years because of the poor economy and loss of newspaper advertising revenue. The firm refinanced its huge debt through a brief bankruptcy filing several months ago. At the Post-Dispatch, Lee has reduced the news staff by half. Even the compensation for Lee directors, which for Vittert had been about $100,000 a year, has been reduced over the last few years. Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan is a close friend of Vittert and the two take boat trips each year. When McClellan mentions Vittert in a column, he never names him, to protect his privacy. McClellan declined to discuss Vittert, saying conversations they have are private. Ellen Sherberg, editor of the St. Louis Business Journal, would only say Vittert is an astute businessman who “can see around corners.” She did agree to give him my telephone number with a message that I was going to write about him. And Lo, Vittert called. He said he wasn’t agreeing to an interview, he just wanted to be respectful in returning a phone call. In a brief chat, he explained with a chuckle that he wore no socks after college because he had no laundry service at an apartment as he did in college. He said his son Leland is called “Lucky” because nurses at the hospital where he was born called him that when he survived possibly being strangled by the umbilical cord. Lucky, at age 11, flew a plane from the U.S. to Paris, accompanied by an adult pilot. Now he is a correspondent for Fox News, stationed in Jerusalem.
In 1977 Vittert became a partner with Hartmann in launching the Riverfront Times, an alternative weekly newspaper. Their 60-40 partnership (Vittert with 40 percent) lasted 21 years until the RFT was sold in 1998 for several million; the actual figure was never disclosed. They then became partners in St. Louis Magazine, which had been a moneyloser but has now prospered as a glitzy publication aimed at an upscale audience. In 1994 Vittert pushed a campaign to have his friend Jackie Smith, tight end for the former St. Louis Cardinals, be inducted in the Pro-Football Hall of Fame. He said Smith
Mark Vittert
Vittert said I should write anything I wanted, but he would not cooperate and Continued on Page 30
Page 10 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 11
Point
War coverage: media toe presidents’ lines S teve H a llock The joke’s on us might be the plaint of those who voted for Barack Obama believing they were electing the anti-Bush, a long-awaited liberal peace monger who would restore the nation’s standing in the world as a paragon of rational diplomacy — who would eschew the might-makes-right unilateralism of the Bush administration. This is no joke, though; it’s deadly serious. To the dismay of many on the left, the foreign policy of the Obama administration has been — as pointed out by New America Foundation Director Peter L. Bergen in a recent New York Times Sunday op-ed piece — more big-stick Teddy Rooseveltian than finger-wagging Jimmy Carterian. The “sizable” military accomplishments of Obama — whom the Republicans ironically try to cast as soft on defense — include, according to Bergen, not only the decimation of AlQaida’s leadership. “He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al-Qaida, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.” A couple of interesting ironies, at least, are present in the discussion of Obama as what The Times labeled in the headline over Bergen’s piece, “Warrior in Chief.” One is the glaringly small-picture view that compares Obama to his predecessor. Fact is, Obama simply is fitting neatly into a presidential foreign policy paradigm constructed during a nearly 60-year period, beginning with the post-World War II Truman Doctrine establishing U.S. aid for foreign nations (Turkey and Greece in this specific instance) feeling the threat of communist insurgency. The other irony in this war-president discussion is that the venue for the criticism of Obama’s foreign policy bravado — the editorial pages of The Times and other elite newspapers — is the same forum that over the years has helped every president since Harry Truman wage war abroad. My research of a dozen of the nation’s major newspaper editorial pages — forums in which the framers of the day’s current events set their agendas and sway public mood and policy — during the last six decades has found avid support by the nation’s press for each presidential argument for foreign military intervention. Conservative and liberal, West Coast and East Coast, North, South and Heartland, these newspapers have lined up in support of the military action that followed each
pronouncement of doctrine. An expanding thread of justification and argument for financial and military involvement abroad has ensued, along with an ever-enlarging presidential authority to take the nation to war — all abetted by a press in editorial commentary ranging from hedging acceptance and complicity to outright cheerleading. A brief history of U.S. war diplomacy: After Truman sent troops to Korea following the North’s invasion of the South, his successor pronounced the Dwight Eisenhower Doctrine of lending military assistance to those nations who fear communist insurgency or threat and who request help. Eisenhower invoked this doctrine to justify sending troops to Lebanon. And Eisenhower’s Domino Theory - which argued that if one Southeast Asia nation fell to communism, others would follow - justified the Vietnam War. President John Kennedy cemented this foreign policy archetype by expanding the Vietnam War and with the failed Bay of Pigs humiliation. Even as the Vietnam War effort was failing, Lyndon Johnson exclaimed his own doctrine, sending troops to the Dominican Republic in the cause of social justice and nation building. The doctrines kept coming and so did the list of reasons. Jimmy Carter drew an oil and human-rights line in the Middle East. Ronald Reagan sent troops to Beirut, and invaded Grenada to battle terrorism and communism. George H.W. Bush went to war for oil and human rights in the Middle East and Somalia, Bill Clinton for human rights in Bosnia. George W. Bush declared the right to wage pre-emptive war to protect national interests and security, and now Obama lends U.S. support on behalf of humanitarianism. These proclamations justified military involvement abroad on behalf of containing communism, promoting democracy, and humanitarianism — all without benefit of the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war but with the implicit backing of Congress, through resolution and funding, and a compliant press that saved the hard questions for later. With talk of war with Iran in the air, we — and Congress, apparently — can do little more than worry about what will be the next presidential war. Indeed, drone strikes in Pakistan during the first two years of the Obama presidency occurred at the rate of every four days, compared to every 43 days under Bush, and “two years into his presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president was engaged in conflicts in six countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya,” wrote Bergen. Both congressional liberals and conservatives criticized the Continued on Page 31
Page 12 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Counterpoint
War coverage: media challenge presidents’ lines W i l l i am H. F re i vo g e l One of the most repeated pieces of conventional wisdom about the lead up to the war in Iraq is that the press served as a cheerleader for the invasion, buying into the Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction and connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. This view is embraced so fervently in academia that it seldom is questioned. Like a lot of conventional wisdom there is quite a bit of truth to it. The reporting of Judith Miller in The New York Times, and front-page stories about the prospect of a mushroom cloud over a U.S. city, fanned the flames of war. The Pentagon’s brilliant strategy of embedding journalists with troops resulted in front-page stories about the local boys and girls preparing for war. And some media outlets, such as Fox News, built ratings on war news. But there also is a bit of hyperbole in the claim that the U.S. media served as lapdogs before the Iraq invasion and other American wars— a claim that my friend and former SIU colleague, Steve Hallock, makes in an interesting piece in this issue. Hallock maintains that the editorial pages of the Times and other elite papers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, have “helped every president since Harry Truman wage war abroad.” Over the past six decades, he writes, there has been “avid support by the nation’s press for each presidential argument for foreign military intervention . . . skeptical journalism came late — after the wars had begun, the troops had landed, the bombs had fallen, the missiles had fired, the troops and innocent civilians had been slaughtered.” In the run up to the 2003 war in Iraq, he writes, none of the elite newspapers “ardently disagreed with or challenged the larger, dominant frame for war that the Bush presidency built carefully over a period of months: that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to his neighbors and to the United States; that he was aligned with the terrorists who attacked the United States on SEPT. 11, 2001; that he was an evil despot, part of an Axis of Evil, who needed to be plucked like a toxic weed from Middle East.” I must disagree with my friend based on my experience as the former deputy editorial editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I don’t believe that Post-Dispatch editorials over the past 60 years provided uncritical support of U.S. war policies. Irving Dilliard, the brilliant, liberal editorial editor of the Post-Dispatch, wrote as early as 1954, that the United States should stay out of Vietnam. His successor, Robert Lasch, won a Pulitzer prize for his Jan. 17, 1965 editorial, “The Containment of Ideas,” calling for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam long before the war was controversial. As the war in Iraq approached, I reread Lasch and Dilliard. Our editorials challenged President Bush’s premises for the war beginning in the summer of 2002, before the nation had focused on the invasion.
In an Aug. 4, 2002, editorial we wrote: “The legal and moral justifications for war are debatable. This would be a pre-emptive strike against a nation that has not threatened us in a decade. A nation is justified in acting in its self-defense if another nation is threatening an imminent attack . . . But the best intelligence estimates are that Saddam won’t have a nuclear bomb until 2005. Are we justified in striking the first blow now?” On Sept. 22, 2002, in an editorial “American Empire,” we questioned the connection of Saddam Hussein to alQaida, stating, “It never was clear why the war against terrorism morphed into the war against Iraq. There is no proof that Saddam had a link to al-Qaida. Saddam hasn’t been connected to a terrorist act against the United States in a decade. And al-Qaida terrorists hiding in Iraq are not under Saddam’s protection.” Although most editorials are written in a day, I spent two months preparing our major statement on the war, the Jan. 26, 2003, editorial, “Persian Gulf II: A war too soon.” Here are excerpts: “Mr. Bush is too eager to wage war, too bellicose in his expression of a dangerously inconsistent foreign policy, too arrogant in his projection of U.S. power, too certain of the omnipotence of military might. His crusade’s links to Sept. 11 are tenuous, and its potential for generating war after war is great. “In his State of the Union address one year ago, Mr. Bush transformed the war against terrorism into a war against an ‘Axis of Evil’ — rogue states with weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorists. That is a far different proposition than a war on stateless terrorists. His crusade’s links to Sept. 11 are tenuous, and its potential for generating war after war is great.
Continued on Page 31
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 13
Covering Elections
Covering Elections
As good as it gets? K u r t S h i l l i n ge r Federal spending is out of control under the Obama administration. The health care individual mandate is socialist. President George W. Bush presided over the slowest job growth in half a century. None of these statements — by Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, conservative pundits, and President Barack Obama respectively — stands up to scrutiny. Spending has grown more slowly under Obama than it did under each of his modern Republican predecessors, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The individual mandate emerged two decades ago from the conservative Heritage Foundation and was broadly favored by Republicans until Obama adopted it. Depending on the terms of reference, more jobs were lost month by month during the past three years than in the preceding eight. But even when exposed, such falsities persist.
Covering political conventions J o hn S. J ackson America’s national political conventions are actually two big productions presented simultaneously for two quite different but interrelated audiences the convention-goers and the mass audience reached through the media. First, there are thousands of convention delegates, alternates, media people and camp followers inside whatever big arena the national parties have chosen to host their conventions. It is critically important to keep all parties occupied, entertained and happily participating in the proceedings of the convention as they are the most immediate object of the events on the platform and they provide the backdrop for whatever drama may be playing out behind the scenes. The much larger audience is the one provided by the electronic and print media.
The parties and the candidates know that they are putting on a show for the approval of the mass audience. The conventions are carefully crafted and choreographed to send positive messages to this larger audience. The convention hall is looked on as just one big sound stage where the production can be mounted and where the delegates are bit part players as the story unfolds. This “bifurcated” nature of national conventions is documented by Byron E. Shafer in his book Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the Natioinal Party Convention. Those who plan and execute conventions know their history well. The debacle of the 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago is imprinted in their collective memory, and they know that such an angry and disruptive spectacle must be avoided at all costs. The professionals know that the Continued on Page 34
Page 14 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Election cycles have probably always induced political sophistry — selective interpretations, mischaracterizations and outright lies — but in the rapidly evolving digital age, they now also provide a biannual or quadrennial measure of how changes in information vetting and news consumption affect political accountability. The New York Times began a recent editorial observing that “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites” spoken “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” It is probably more complicated than that. The public square is more noisy and diverse by the day. Eight years ago newspapers and broadcast news held the public trust. Four years ago blogging was relatively new, but now it is essential link bait for news websites. No one tweeted then. Now everyone does. The growing partisan media have broken down the traditional barrier between news and opinion, fragmented audiences and created echo chambers for party-line narratives. On one hand, the pace and mechanics of the new media environment provide cover from the fact checkers. “Part of the mission is to try to cut through the unremitting flood of what the new media call facts,” says Bill Lambrecht, Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It becomes difficult to think and write stories and go talk to people on the Hill if you’re sitting there totally fragmented by tweets and emails.” On the other hand, the increase in information available
through the new media may be offsetting the declining range of the traditional media. “I don’t think this is such an easy question,” says Markus Prior, associate professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, in an email. “There are also reasons why new media might strengthen accountability.” Political accountability, Prior notes, is a function of the level of political knowledge within the general populace. Political knowledge, in turn, depends on the availability of information about government and elected officials. Until relatively recently, newspapers, broadcast news and radio newscasts were the primary independent informers. Two of those sources, newspapers and the network broadcasters, have diminished substantially in the last decade. Earlier this year the White House Council of Economic Advisers ranked newspapers as the fastest-shrinking industry in the United States, having contracted 28.4 percent in the last five years alone. That altered print landscape has dramatically reshaped political coverage. Two presidential elections ago, most middle-sized metropolitan dailies had well-staffed Washington bureaus. Today most of those offices have closed, and the few that remain — such as the PostDispatch’s — are one-person operations. Broad, thematic pieces have replaced the old daily “boys on the bus” political coverage. At the same time, another concern is a growing potential for mismatch between congressional districts and newspaper markets. As David Stromberg and James Snyder pointed out in a paper two years ago for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the shrinking number of local newspapers combined with redistricting result in less evenly spread local coverage. “[A] good fit . . . between newspaper markets and congressional districts leads to more press coverage of the local congressmen,” they wrote. Here, the same thing that took the bottom out of newspaper ad revenue may provide a civil silver lining: The Internet, they noted, provides at least the means for regenerating local coverage. Prior is similarly cautiously optimistic. While the proliferation of entertainment media has diverted a large segment the public’s attention, news consumption is growing among a small, demographically representative segment of the population. Given the explosion in digitally accessible political information, Prior doubts that total news consumption has decreased substantially. Rather, it is Continued on Page 36
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 15
Covering Elections
Covering Elections philanthropy that supports majority rule of society within the context of basic constitutional rights. Weiss emphasized two facets of the collaboration: civic engagement and social networking. “We aim to get the community involved and engaged with the election and the issues,” he said. “More than anyone, we are prepared to do that. Nine Network and the St. Louis Beacon long ago became part of the Public Insight Network, which reaches out to members of the community asking for their input and sharing their expertise. We have thousands already participating and expect that our coverage will draw in many more. Already, the PIN members have helped us draft questions for our Voter’s Guide, which should be available in the first half of July and will be the handiest, most useful guide ever published in this region.” Weiss said, “Our coverage is regional – though, of course, when you are on the Internet, your reach is worldwide. Generally, our coverage will extend as far west as Jefferson City (Mo.) and as far east as Springfield, Ill., as far south as Carbondale (Ill.) and Cape Girardeau (Mo.), and as far north as Quincy (Ill.) and Hannibal (Mo.).”
Elections provide test for unique media collaboration J o hn J a r v is In the first collaboration of its type in the nation, media members in the St. Louis area are banding together to map out the political landscapes in Illinois and Missouri. If successful, the Internet collaboration could serve as a blueprint for combined coverage in other communityfocused endeavors across the region. Dick Weiss, a contributing editor at the online-only news site St. Louis Beacon (www.stlbeacon.org), said the name for the collaboration is Beyond November. Its website, beyondnovember.org, was expected to be up and running in early July. Weiss said the website “will aggregate the work from each of the entities – Nine Network of Public Media (ninenet. org), St. Louis Public Radio (www.stlpublicradio.org) and the St. Louis Beacon – and also provide some content unique to the site.”
Page 16 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
“We will be developing a Twitter handle and hashtags, and a Facebook site as well,” Weiss added. “My goal is to have something popping politically through our collaborative just about every hour of the day, and often more than that.” Margaret Wolf Freivogel, editor of the St. Louis Beacon, provided some background on how the collaboration took root. “The three organizations share a common mission of helping St. Louisans come to grips with significant issues,” she said. “We realized our election coverage together could be much more than the sum of the separate parts. And we’re eager to figure out how such an extensive collaboration can work. We’re grateful to the Deer Creek Foundation for funding to get this off the ground.”
“State and local races are the main focus,” he added. “The presidential race is less so, though of course it will play a role as it relates to red-state Missouri and blue-state Illinois, and the way in which state and local candidates are using (presumptive GOP nominee Mitt) Romney and (President Barack) Obama in supporting roles or as whipping boys. “I should add that our coverage isn’t just about races, as in the horse race, but about the issues, the role of money in politics, fact-checking candidate claims and so forth. So what we are doing is beyond what many news outlets are now doing, and it will go beyond November in that we aim to hold elected officials accountable after the election for what they promised to deliver.” The collaboration has some of St. Louis’ best political journalists working for it, including Jo Mannies, the dean of St. Louis political reporters. Also working as political
reporters will be Rob Koenig, one of two remaining St. Louis reporters working in Washington D.C. and Jason Rosenbaum, a Missouri political reporter. All three work for the Beacon. For Weiss, the measurements to determine if the collaboration is successful are straightforward. “We have an expert in Charles Gasper, director of evaluation at Nine Network, who will be helping us to establish benchmarks,” he said. “They have not yet been set, but from my point of view I think we will be successful if an increasing number of residents find us and engage with the information we provide; consider us credible, serious and worth visiting more than once; learn something they didn’t already know and consider us insightful; believe we are the best source of accurate, unbiased information; and believe we are worth supporting by recommending us to their acquaintances – and maybe even becoming members of one or more of our organizations.” Weiss envisions the collaboration continuing well past this year’s election season. “In terms of politics, we aim to keep this going beyond November as a means of holding officeholders accountable, and as a means also to keep residents engaged and involved in civic life,” he said. “In terms of our organizations, I consider this a demonstration project to show how we can work together effectively and use our resources to their best advantage. In terms of doing great journalism, these are challenging times. If we can do this well together, we can also cover health care and education probably equally as well . . . and if we can get that far, we can become a model for others around the country.” Note: William H. Freivogel, publisher of GJR, was the founding board chair of the Beacon. His wife, Margaret Wolf Freivogel, is editor. John Jarvis has worked as a writer, copy editor and editor for newspapers in Texas, Indiana and Arizona. He is now a M.S. student at Southern Illinois University.
G TEWAY J OURNALI S M R E V I E W
Subscribe now. Be informed. gatewayjr.org
The St. Louis-based Deer Creek Foundation is a private
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 17
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
The unloved American media
Great — and not so great — expectations R e v i ew by J e n n i fe r B utch e r
R e v i ew by W i l l i am A. B a bcock What is special about being a person?
“ Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters” Author: Jonathan M. Ladd Publisher: Princeton University Press Paperback: $26.95, 282 pages
Some 30 years ago, I received a phone call late one evening from one of my intern students, an intelligent and talented young woman who went on to have a successful career in both print and radio news journalism. I still remember her suggestion word for word. “Professor, there’s something you didn’t tell me that you need to tell your students. You need to tell them that people hate journalists.” I took her suggestion to heart and have made it a part of talks I’ve given ever since then to dozens of college classes and many professional gatherings in the United States, Europe and Asia. And I was reminded of her admonition while reading Jonathan M. Ladd’s book, “Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters.” Ladd, an assistant professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University, reasons that America’s institutional news media of the mid/late 20th century was uncharacteristically respected due to economic and political factors that no longer exist, and that were not present before the 1950s. He concludes “Why Americans Hate the Media” by saying, “…we should idealize neither the highly institutionalized news media environment of mid-twentieth-century America nor the other extreme of a very fragmented, unprofessional news environment toward which the United States has moved recently.” Ladd musters considerable data to bolster his contention that economic and political competition present incentives for the public to see the media as more credible. Too, he has framed his arguments and thesis by repeatedly referencing a few journalism historians and citing the findings of numerous surveys and social science research. Except for relying on occasional data he apparently gathered himself from surveys of students, most of the data from which he
draws his conclusions appear solid. But his citations — and references — have occasional holes. He might have mentioned Grover Cleveland when making the point that the media have not always been kind to U.S. presidents, and he could have dealt with the press backlash (especially by the Christian Science Monitor) against the “yellow journalism” at the beginning of the 20th century. In particular, Ladd might have discussed the finding of both the Commission on Freedom of the Press (Hutchins’ Commission) and the “social responsibility theory” from the book Four Theories of the Press, as they established the cornerstones of the more professionalized media of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. For the most part, though, Ladd’s usually exhaustive research is his book’s strong point as major, multiple sources and studies usually are cited. Thus, “Why Americans Hate the Media” would be an excellent addition for senior- and graduate-level college courses dealing with media, public policy and politics. Had the author spent more time offering suggestions of how all of journalism and the mass media might be seen as more credible and thus garner more respect from the public — and less time referencing social science research on the subject — “Why Americans Hate the Media” might attract more members of the both the media and the public. Or perhaps that might be the title of Ladd’s next book, How to Get Americans to Love – or at Least Not Hate – the Media. Now that would be a book that could attract both a university and a lay readership. William A. Babcock is editor of Gateway Journalism Review.
This is one of the questions posed to Sherry Turkle, author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” in the ‘80s when she was conducting one of her many ethnographic studies in technology and personal identity, and now many years later inspired this book. The book is divided into two parts: “In Solitude, New Intimacies;” and “In Intimacy, New Solitudes.” These sections together illustrate not only the “networked life” of individuals and how technology is used as a tool to guide relationships as well as to create alternate, parallel identities, but also how these technologies have been introduced to children.
“Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other ” Author: Sherry Turkle Publisher: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group Hardcover: $28.95, 360 pages
This is something on which Turkle focuses heavily, calling the current generation of children ranging from age five to early 20s “digital natives.” These children have grown up with robotic toys that “made demands for attention and seemed to pay attention to them. Being one of these children, I can remember fondly some of these toys from my own childhood — Tamagotchis and Furbies among them. Turkle seems to point out what we all know but don’t talk about (outside academic settings): Technology is safe because one can predict the “reaction,” or elicit the desired “reaction” from technology that cannot be achieved through another human being.
Turkle’s research on “things” is balanced by discussions on how people use technology to experience their own identities. Chapter one introduces ELIZA, a computer program from the 1970s that operated in the form of a psychotherapist. The program did not “understand” what people said to it, but recycled the same words people used when talking to it, phrasing them as statements or questions the same way a therapist would. This sense of false empathy made “people want to say something true.” She discusses other forms of technology that allow people to experience identity, such as Second Life. When faced with an opportunity to live out a virtual life, Turkle finds people erase their imperfections, or use it as a “do-over” for the real lives they are currently living. The same could be said of Facebook and MySpace profiles, as well as online dating profiles — all of which occupy more and
more of people’s time, removing them further from the “physical” reality. And these are identities that are created through technology, and can be taken with us. Smart phones allow people to constantly live their virtual reality simultaneously with their physical reality. More and more teenagers, Turkle finds, have anxiety about talking on the telephone. Not being able to pre-prepare dialogue and predict a response is disturbing. And this anxiety only further perpetuates a dependency on the virtual experience. So what does Turkle’s book mean? Do we really expect more from technology, and more from technology than we do from people? Turkle says Yes. People spend hundreds of hours on Facebook, send thousands of text messages and play out their lives on blogs, in games and on multiple profiles. Technologies also allow for controlled, organized interaction between people. Individuals can communicate with others through Facebook, but even if they don’t like their response, it can be deleted or the person can be blocked. In this way, Facebook operates as a type of roboticism. Technology has no impulses, no morals or emotion. Yet they elicit these reactions from us. Continued on Page 36
Page 18 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 19
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Rupert Murdoch: both sides now
Minority voice in U.S. media
R e v i ew by B e n C onra d y “Rupert Murdoch: The Politico Media Complex Mogul,” by Heinz Duthel, is a comprehensive biography of the life of a man whom many admire and about whom many others wonder. The name “Rupert Murdoch” is familiar to most everyone, primarily for his association with News Corporation, the world’s second-largest media conglomerate of which he is founder and CEO. While not the most gripping piece of literature, Duthel’s work is clear and thorough, while remaining informative. Duthel, who has a graduate degree in philosophy, shuns bias, allowing for the reader to reach his or her own conclusions. He begins his book with a list of claims that can be made of Murdoch, including war monger, oil imperialist, intimidator and mixer of business and politics. Following that, he begins the story of Murdoch’s life, leaving little for the reader to assume, as the coverage is very complete. To finish the book, Duthel lists some positives of Murdoch, including being named one of Time magazine’s 100 People of the Century. While Duthel delivers a product that is well researched, his over arching points may be difficult for the casual reader to understand. Duthel implies that the reader should make up his or her own mind, and provides numerous facts about Murdoch from his early childhood in Australia, to world-wide notoriety.
“Rupert Murdoch: The Politico Media Complex Mogul” Author: Heinz Duthel Publisher: CreateSpace Paperback: $34.50, 572 pages
Unfortunately, Duthel’s book does not flow. Paragraphs are short and concise. There is little storytelling as Duthel strives to keep anything but the facts from his writing. Lists abound throughout the text, backing Duthel’s claims and observations, but causing a distraction. The look inside the mind and life of a man with extreme power in a news-driven world could be a fascinating one, yet the author makes it seem like a classroom lecture slideshow: loads of information, yet choppy and slow-moving. Duthel shows his ability to research and gather information in Rupert Murdoch: The Politico Media Complex Mogul. The book probes the life of an intriguing man, yet where Duthel fails is his delivery. The book stumbles along chronologically without any sense of a purpose. Certainly back-lying messages abound, but Duthel is supreme in his ability to hide his own point of view and allow for the reader to develop his own. While Duthel does not deliver a product for a monthly book club, he does come through with an intelligent piece of reflection of Rupert Murdoch, a true Politico Media Complex Mogul.
Ben Conrady is a student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
R e v i ew by A u s t i n F l y n n Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres, both Spanish-American journalists, combine their knowledge of the history of minorities in mass media to create “News for All the People,” a book that focuses on the struggles and successes of minority groups in the ever-growing American mass media. While the book is an ambitious read that covers nearly 400 years of American history, it is also insightful and provides readers information on a subject the authors assert is rarely spoken about in the context of our past. With this in mind, “News for All the People” is great for readers either interested in American history of mass media or how minority groups influenced the growth of the industry. The book covers a subject the authors say needs more coverage and exposes the history of it for all that it is, not only on a purely factual scale, but on an analytical one calling out the failures of the past. For example, the authors explain in depth how American Indians and African-Americans were harshly portrayed by the white media, but also show how that affected media for years to follow. “News for All the People” is a great learning device for amateur journalists and seasoned veterans because it not only shows great successes in mass media, but it dares us to never make the same mistakes we did when first building the news. Overall, this book is successful in exposing struggles of minorities throughout the history of the news. The story starts with the first newspaper in the New World, Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurrences. Gonzalez and Torres waste no time showing how biased this first paper truly was, writing tales of the “barbarous Indians” or “miserable savages” despite the creator’s goal of wanting the paper to “counter the Spirit of Lying which prevails among us.” The introduction does a good job of setting a strong tone for the rest of the book, one that it follows to the final page, telling accounts of newspapers refusing to hire AfricanAmericans, or even report on the tragedies that befell AfricanAmericans during the times of slavery. Gonzalez and Torres also discuss the hardships that the Chinese faced when they first immigrated here, as well as Latinos who struggled and eventually succeeded in creating their own newspapers that were printed in Spanish. All races are covered extensively in the book throughout many different time periods, creating a well-rounded history of minorities in the news. The second section titled “Rebel Voices” did a great job of explaining the point of view of the minority groups. This section was all about how, despite the world of mass media trying to keep these minority groups out of the press, they rose up and found places for themselves within the business. One chapter discusses how even though few American Indians
“News for All the People” Authors: Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres Publisher: Verso Hardcover: $30, 453 pages
became writers for white-run newspapers, they became editors, a step that allowed Indians to show white readers how their culture wanted to be viewed. Not only this, but some Indians went so far as to make their own newspapers. The Cherokee Phoenix, the world’s first Indian newspaper, made leaps and bounds in painting a truly vivid picture of their people that could not be found in white press. Gonzalez and Torres make this section much more meaningful by adding a brief history on the hardships Indians faced. For example, the section begins by explaining successes Indians faced in mass media, quickly followed by sections that talk about broken land treaty promises to the Indians and how the American press chose not to write about such broken promises. This places the reader in that time period and shows them a side of history they might not be aware of, adding context to the primary material. Continued on Page 37
Page 20 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 21
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
WikiLeaks pushes sourcing envelope
And that’s the way it is —or isn’t
R e v i ew by C hri s to p her K ara djov I will never forget the excitement in late 1989 when I laid my hands on reprints of an entire cache of telegrams exchanged in 1938-1939 between the German Embassy in Moscow and Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, in Berlin. The heretofore ultra-secret documents had been dug up and released by a publishing house in Vilnius, Lithuania, which while still formally a part of the Soviet Union was on the verge of seceding. In a sense, the publisher was ex-territorial and thus not subject to the strong censorship that had been the rule of the land in the Soviet Union for more than 70 years. The cables revealed nasty backroom diplomatic dealings between the Soviet and Nazi governments on the eve of the Second World War. They told the story of a fascinating back-and-forth, which culminated with the MolotovRibbentrop Pact of August 1939 and subsequent partition of Poland in September of the same year.
“ WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era”
Authors: Charlie Beckett and James Ball Publisher: Polity Hardcover: $19.95, 180 pages
I used these documents for an enthusiastic term paper in my modern history class and got an A on it — albeit with the warning from the professor. She wrote on the margins an advice not to forget to “look at the whole picture” and admonished me to use more diverse sources to build up a solid case, “because no source is an end in itself.” Historians work with source data all the time. Journalists often try to, but for a variety of reasons all too often end up using information regurgitated by others. And the general public, until very recently, has rarely been able — or curious and skilled enough — to peruse original sources. WikiLeaks has changed this pattern by creating an entirely new model of information dissemination. Or, rather, the WikiLeaks model has achieved a tipping point by merging older patterns (i.e., old-school leaks) with the opportunities for quick propagation via the Internet, combined with the easy possibility for numerous contributors on a global scale to feed in potentially interesting materials. As Charlie Beckett and James Ball write in their book “WikiLeaks,” one of the major draws of their subject lies in its ability to converse directly with anyone connected to the Internet without necessarily going through traditional media filters. These authors remind us that the first major scoop
achieved by Australian-born globetrotter Julian Assange and his collaborators was related to corruption among Kenya’s national elite. Some of its most prominent revelations embarrassed the United States, ostensibly the mightiest country on earth, and literally no geographical location has been left unmentioned or unaware of the WikiLeaks potential for revelations. The sheer amount of information released through WikiLeaks has been stupefying, making it more of a process than a number of one-time leaks, as Beckett and Ball aptly put it.
The Nightly News Nightmare: Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections Author: Stephen J. Farnsworth and Robert Lichter Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield Paperback: $24.95, 246 pages
Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show may actually be a more credible source for learning a presidential candidate’s positions on issues than are the nightly news programs at ABC, CBS or NBC. Shows like Stewart’s, late night talk shows and Saturday Night Live reach a younger audience, allow the candidates more time to express their views and in some cases provide viewers with information they didn’t previously know about the candidates. One might question what this says about the viewers who gain their information from these sources, but the authors of “The Nightly News Nightmare: Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1998-2008” shift their focus toward the traditional media covering these elections.
This phenomenon has upended many traditional understanding of the role journalists and media play in societies. It has posed ethical challenges, infuriated governments, often endangered — and maybe on occasions saved — lives, and even brought along a dose of tabloidquality entertainment, primarily through the personal shenanigans of Assange. WikiLeaks has revealed plenty of backroom diplomatic dealings as well.
The book examines the performance of the three major networks dating back to the 1988 presidential election. The results consistently show that major networks’ nightly news programs do not do a good job of covering presidential elections. Television news coverage from ABC, CBS and NBC concentrate on horse-race coverage, spend little time explaining the actual issues to viewers, concentrate on negative coverage and scandal and don’t do a good job of informing the public about the candidates before national elections.
It has also presented scholars with a classification puzzle as to what exactly is WikiLeaks: a new form of journalism, a global whistleblower, a grassroots NGO, an outlet for authority-subverting punks, or all of the above?
In this third edition of the book, which originally published after the 2000 presidential election debacle that saw national news networks call the election wrong twice, authors Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter
Continued on Page 37
Page 22 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
R e v i ew by S co t t L am ber t
present an image of network news that not only gets it wrong in critical times, but never really lets the viewer know what the candidates are saying. Using content analysis data from the Center for Media and Public Affairs, Farnsworth and Lichter examine presidential elections dating back to 1988 and measure the performance of the three major networks. The results, again, are dismal. The authors find the major networks continue to spend more time talking about their view of the candidates and less time covering them. The average sound bite per story actually rose in the 2008 election from 7.8 seconds per sound bite to 8.9 seconds per sound bite, still not nearly enough to understand the candidate’s message. The authors make a startling comparison about the 2000 presidential election, stating that if all of Al Gore’s comments from Labor Day until the night of the election were spliced together from the three network newscasts, the length of the story would last the amount of time it would take to watch an episode of CSI. George W. Bush’s coverage would not have equaled that. Back to late-night television, the authors note that a television viewer will hear more of a candidate’s words on a late-night television show than they would hear from broadcast news coverage. That’s just the start of the networks’ problems. The main narrative of the three major networks remains horse-race journalism. The horse race becomes more important than the candidates’ message, a problem because of a recurring bandwagon effect. The authors show a bias in the major networks’ coverage, centering Continued on Page 38
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 23
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Author examines investigative journalism 40 years after Watergate scandal
It doesn’t look good
R e v i ew by M i c hael D. M urray This book by a former Tampa Tribune and Chicago Daily Herald reporter turned university lecturer represents a significant addition to the literature on investigative reporting and its biggest political story. On the 40th anniversary of Watergate, it arrives at a propitious time, fitting with other recent works, such as Mark Feldstein’s “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.” Part of the “Visions of the American Press” series, edited by David Abrahamson, it begins with a forward by Watergate’s Bob Woodward and provides an overview of many historic investigative stories. The book provides a tremendous service by offering insights into investigations by Elizabeth
“ Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse” Author: Jon Marshall Publisher: Northwestern University Press Paperback: $24.95, 336 pages
Cochrane, aka Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, aka Annie Laurie, as well as Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, all of which demonstrates to the reader that the prelude to Watergate will be well documented and very carefully presented. It is well researched and well written. The battles of Pulitzer and Hearst are here. Another asset is the review of regional work contributing to national stories: Edwin Markham’s “The Hoe Man in the Making” and “Following the Color Line,” by Ray Stannard Baker, preludes to coverage of child abuse and callous treatment of African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan is investigated. Mining disasters produce investigations. Walter Lippmann provided thoughtful consideration on the influence of such aggressive journalism. All in all, Marshall articulates how this period was not totally devoid of digging in critical areas: criminal activity, corporate corruption, exposés of crooked politicians and mob activity. These set the stage for investigations of bribery as in the Teapot Dome scandal, and exposure of the extensive illicit “investment pyramids,” aka Ponzi schemes. The cumulative effect of digging created phenomena such as the Washington Merry-Go-Round. Drew Pearson’s column in more than 600 papers, broadcast over ABC radio, set a standard for aggressiveness on government abuses, stoking the fire if going to extremes and raising expectations. While his work was often regarded as nasty and salacious, all the relentless digging and bragging caught the attention of the public. While labeled “teller of monstrous and diabolical falsehoods” by one politico, Pearson used manure in comparison to those who objected to him: “All Cow, No Bull — better Than the Column.” The author points out that while opportunities were there, some important stories: the stock market crash, The Holocaust and the rise of McCarthyism were not properly investigated, especially given their impact. Respected writer Anthony Lewis, while considering a journalism career, said reporting on government more likely resembled stenography, as opposed to challenging the government “line” on any subject. With issues of secrecy emerging from World War II, the reporter’s role conveying sensitive information forms the rest of this section. Oversights and challenges of the period included failure to hire African-Americans at mainstream outlets, explaining why crime stories: juvenile justice and mistreatment of black women were under-reported by the “establishment” press, left to African-American newspapers. Emerging voices were helpful in creating a culture: A.J. Liebling, George Seldes, and I. F. Stone — even appearing Continued on Page 38
Page 24 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
R e v i ew by K u r t S h i l l i n ge r In the early 1990s, a rising but still relatively unknown agitator in the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, began circulating memos among his Republican colleagues suggesting the use of specific unsavory words to portray Democrats and their policies. Conservative pollsters such as Frank Luntz picked up on the idea and perfected it through focus groups. Congress was portrayed as corrupt and broken. Moderates were hounded. The parliamentary norms of bipartisanship, consensus building and compromise were painted as rot. As spectacularly as that strategy worked — Republicans wrested control of the House for the first time in 40 years and left a battered Clinton administration pleading for relevance – there nonetheless was a tempering influence at work: the media. Americans received news and debated ideas through broadly shared lenses of newspapers and broadcast media that, by degrees and however imperfectly, hewed to a professional standard of objectivity. Only a few publications — the Washington Times and American Spectator on the right, for example, the Nation on the left — and the pioneering talk show gadfly Rush Limbaugh — were openly ideological. How innocent those times now seem. Liberal and conservative columnists still jockey for space on the op-ed pages and banter amicably on the News Hour, but the partisan Fox News has nearly run the networks and CNN out of business, newspapers are shriveling prunes, and the public square is a cacophony of blogs, tweets and Youtube clips. The result, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein argue in their new study, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, is a fragmenting of the narrative, erosion of accountability and deepening of partisan divides. “In the old days, the networks news shows viewed themselves (and viewers deemed them so) as a public trust . . . and provided, along with newspapers and newsreels, a common set of facts and core information that were widely shared,’ they write. ‘The new business models and audiences are challenging the old notion that Americans can share a common set of facts and then debate options.” Books from Washington’s K Street idea mills seldom resonate beyond the Beltway. Most are either too policy specific for the general reader or too politically narrow to survive an election cycle. This one is different. Mann and Ornstein have 80 years of experience between them observing Congress. In a city dense with egos, they share a rare reputation for dispassion, reason, fairness, objectivity and constructive
“It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Ex tremism” Authors: Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein Publisher: Basic Books Hardcover: $26, 226 pages
praise. Few working in Washington worry more intelligently about the welfare of the Republic. Their book is not in the main a media study. Nor is it the outcome of a specific research project. Rather, it is a statement of their collective wisdom offered as a kind of midstream course corrective during an election cycle in which the stakes are unusually high. The importance of the book lies in their willingness to spend all of the political capital earned over their long careers in one shot. Continued on Page 38
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 25
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Is Christian Science Monitor still viable as a news source?
Former ABC chief Westin recalls forest, trees in “Exit Interview” R e v i ew by S co t t L am ber t
R e v i ew by P a u l V an S l a mb rou ck
interviewing President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn.
“ The Christian Science Monitor, Its History, Mission, and People”
“Exit Interview”
Author: Keith S. Collins Publisher: Nebbadoon Press eBook: $9.95, 354 pages
Journalism is a peculiar occupation. A friend of mine calls it a kind of priesthood — a high calling eliciting qualities that others might consider unreasonable. Who else, besides a journalist or someone in the rescue professions, runs toward trouble rather than away from it? There have been many things unreasonable about the Christian Science Monitor since its founding more than a century ago. For instance, the demand that its first issue roll off the presses less than four months after the project’s inception was, by any industry standard of the time, unreasonable. Including “Christian Science” in the title while setting out to be a regular, secular newspaper was also not the most reasonable thing to do. And then there was the immoderate founding mission to “injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” No pressure there. Despite, or perhaps because of, such boldness, the Monitor has, in fact, carved itself a special place in the history of journalism. As former Monitor editor from 2001-2005, I am not dispassionate on the subject, but suggest any historian would agree that this newspaper has danced to a different drummer. “The Christian Science Monitor, Its History, Mission, and People,” by Keith Collins, helps us understand why and how. While Collins’ book offers a broad summary of the newspaper’s first 100 years, it also attempts to analyze when the paper has approached its founding purpose, and when it has not.
Fortunately, author Collins applies both a friendly and a critical eye to his subject. He describes the roots of its inspiring boldness, tracing the context of its founding in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, also founder of the Christian Science religion and church. Collins also offers a well-rounded and fair recounting of the newspaper’s near collapse in 1989 when its three top editors resigned in protest over the way the publisher, The First Church of Christ Scientist, Boston, was managing the enterprise. Through many editorships in between, Collins describes the Monitor’s quest for its own distinct voice, its reason for being in the crowded field of daily print journalism. It hasn’t always been pretty. As Collins writes, the paper struggled from the outset with a “tendency toward naïveté, pedantry, and predictability.” It has also won seven Pulitzers and at times has been on the short list of newspapers that went to the White House. It has been a must-read in foreign embassies, college campuses and among policy elites. It has had journalistic “heft” well beyond its always rather modest print circulation, which peaked at 234,000 in 1970. Collins is not part of the journalism priesthood. Though he worked for a brief stint at the Monitor as an editor, he built a career as a communications consultant to a variety of organizations and corporations. Not being a career journalist is a good thing and a bad thing. Collins’ Continued on Page 39
Page 26 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Author: David Westin Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover: $27, 256 pages
David Westin, former president of ABC’s news division, writes a book that gives the reader an inside view of the journalists working for ABC news and of the issues that reporters and executives face daily while putting out a quality news product. The book gives the reader a vivid snapshot of ABC news and provides enough insight into the decision process in major stories that readers will believe they are getting the inside scoop on many key decisions. From Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress to Peter Jennings’ belief that ABC should have been more skeptical of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Westin does not fail to give the reader his reactions to the events as they unfolded. Westin is unflinching in his reflections. He takes the reader through the events of the 2000 election fiasco and calmly lays out the mistakes that were made. He talks about his miscues, including a mix-up that led to Leonardo DiCaprio
For those reasons alone, this is a book worth reading. But for those who study journalism or who teach journalism, this is a book that should be read for other reasons. In each chapter, Westin provides a story that occurred during his career at ABC. And he also attacks a major issue that journalists and journalism educators face on a daily basis. He ties his decision to allow DiCaprio to interview President Clinton to a discussion about what makes a real journalist; he ties the Monica Lewinsky scandal coverage to a discussion about sourcing; he ties a decision to run fallen soldiers’ names on a “Nightline” special to a discussion about bias and perception of bias; and he ties the John Kerry swiftboat controversy with a discussion about balancing fact and fairness.
All of his examples start with Westin explaining his decisions on how ABC reacted to each of these stories, then evolves into an essay on the overall problem, problems that affect journalism at all levels. This allows readers to make a connection between the real-life problem that occurred and the conceptual situation so often discussed in journalism classes or newsrooms. Westin addresses all aspects of journalism, starting with a reflection on the problems of balancing journalism and ratings. He uses examples to explain when stories may need to be forced down the viewers’ throats (ongoing Iraq war coverage) and when the coverage of an event may have longer lasting effects than originally believed (coverage of Princess Diana’s death). He ends by discussing the problems of a shrinking newsroom and expanding coverage. Westin takes a refreshing look at journalists, portraying them as solid professionals who have a job to do and try their hardest to do that job well, although the result does Continued on Page 40
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 27
Feature
Opinion
Illinois eavesdropping law controversial — and unresolved W i l l i am H. F reivogel A series of court decisions in Illinois has left the state’s eavesdropping law, the toughest in the nation, in legal limbo. The law makes it a felony to audiotape a conversation without the permission of everyone involved, making it unlawful for citizens to tape encounters with police or other public officials. Even though three courts have said the law was unconstitutional as written, the Illinois General Assembly has failed to fix the problem, partly because the reform is opposed by police groups. A House bill to fix the law died in the Senate this spring. The issue is important to journalism and civil liberties organizations. The Illinois Bar Association, the Illinois Press Association, National Press Photographers Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have challenged the eavesdropping law. In these days of “citizen journalists” and many ordinary citizens carry cell phones with video and audio capability, Illinois’ half-century-old law can put people in legal jeopardy for seemingly innocuous actions, such as videotaping a child’s soccer game. That’s the way a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saw it when it ruled 2-1 in May that the Illinois law could not be enforced as written. The appeals court held that the current law likely violates the First Amendment because people probably have a First Amendment right to record the things public officials do in public. “The Illinois eavesdropping statue restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests,” wrote the majority. For that reason, it likely violates the First Amendment’s free speech and free press clauses, the court said. The decision was handed down just before the NATO meeting in Chicago, which attracted large protests and citizen-police confrontations. The 7th Circuit decision was in line with one last summer from the 1st Circuit in Boston. That court ruled that Boston police violated the constitutional rights of Simon Glick by arresting him for using his cell phone to film police making an arrest on the Boston Common. The court said that Glick was “exercising clearly established First Amendment rights in filming the officers in a public space.”
Within the past year, Illinois’ law has suffered other defeats in the courts. In March, a judge in Chicago threw out a prosecution against Chris Drew, a street artist. Drew intended to get arrested in an act of civil disobedience targeting a Chicago ordinance banning the sale of art on the street without a permit. That would have been a misdemeanor, but he ended up charged with a felony for arranging a recording of his arrest. Judge Stanley Sacks threw out the prosecution, ruling the eavesdropping law was too broad and potentially criminalized “wholly innocent conduct.” For example, Sacks said that the law would theoretically permit the prosecution of a parent who recorded her child’s soccer game and accidentally caught a conversation between bystanders. Drew, who died two months after the ruling, reportedly asked his lawyer to defend the court’s ruling on appeal. The third case in which the Illinois law was viewed by a court as unconstitutional was last year when a judge in Crawford County ruled it violated both the due process and First Amendment rights of Michael Allison. Allison had tried to tape his conversations with police and public officials after a dispute with police. Allison said in an interview last year that officers were seizing old cars he was fixing on his front lawn. The police said that violated an ordinance. When Allison went to court, he requested a court reporter but was denied. Allison then announced he would record court proceedings himself with his DS-30 digital device. He was charged with five counts of violating the state eavesdropping law for trying to record conversations with the city attorney, circuit clerk, police and the court. He faced up to 75 years in prison. But Judge David K. Frankland ruled the law violated due process because it did not have an adequate criminal intent element. Completely innocent actions by citizens seeking to record audio in public places could be prosecuted without any showing of criminal intent. Frankland wrote that the law had been passed to protect people’s privacy but was being enforced to ban recording of public actions of government officials. “A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen’s privacy Continued on Page 40
Page 28 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
A bit of media history C h ar l e s L. K l o t ze r Exactly 50 years ago the first issue of FOCUS/ Midwest was published. Roland Klose reminded me of that nostalgic date. After publishing 95 issues, F/M was merged into The St. Louis Journalism Review in 1983. Subsidizing two deficit producing publications was just too much. At the time, some of the readers of both journals felt that F/M should have been the survivor. After the first issue appeared it gained a strong editorial endorsement in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a fullpage feature, and in succeeding years not a month passed by without one of its stories being republished in the Post’s editorial page feature “Mirror of Public Opinion.” F/M covered social, political, racial and related issues throughout Missouri and Illinois, with particular emphasis on St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. Each issue had at least one page of poetry first edited by Webster Schott, and it included notables such as William Carlos Williams, Harry Mark Petrakis and James Farrell. Later the page was edited by Don Finkel and other poets. Its columnists, Hubert Humphrey, Irving Dilliard, Paul Simon, Harry Moore and many others, established its reputation. Hopes were high that ultimately coverage could be extended throughout the Midwest. It never happened. Resources were always too limited. Indeed, our ambitions for coverage were not unlike that of the Gateway Journalism Review. Happenings at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago made headlines throughout the country. F/M received the press coverage from major dailies published throughout the world, and we reproduced their stories. It became a striking tool to review how the rest of the world viewed the American political process. When the Chicago media called the disturbances and violence at the convention a student riot, its reporters, some of whom had also been beaten up by the police, knew it was a police riot organized by Mayor Daley. As a result, the Chicago Journalism Review was borne under the leadership of Ron Dorfman. That publication motivated a group of reporters from the Post-Dispatch and the Globe Democrat
to consider a review for the St. Louis region. We published the first issue of SJR in June 1962. That issue became one of the best we ever produced exposing the Post’s and Globe’s collusion under the Joint Operating Agreement and editorial decisions that induced one of its key investigative reporters, Albert Delugach, to leave the Post. Their coverage of St. Louis crime links was never published locally. Globe publisher Duncan Bauman also killed Dennis Walsh’s expose of crime in this area. (Commercial: The 95 issues of F/M and the 325 issues of SJR and recent issues of GJR are still available.) Roland was with us during the transition period (19821986), laboring then long days and frequently long nights when F/M was merged into SJR A few years back, he resurrected an online FOCUS/Midwest that is well crafted and displays the quality of its original. As far as we know, it is the only serious literary journal in this region. In F/M’s brief life of 21 years, it made singular contributions. When the African-American community tried to break open the white-only hiring practices of St. Louis Banks by boycotting the Jefferson Bank, the local media failed to cover the substance of the protest. An article by Virginia Brodine set the record straight. Police practices in many smaller communities in the two states did not receive much scrutiny. A special issue detailed their policies. Two issues dealing with poverty in Missouri and Illinois, with original covers drawn by LeRoy Neiman were produced in 1970. The headlines in these issues have a contemporary ring. The Missouri issue featured “The Promotion of Unemployment,” “The Connivance of Government,” “The Perversion of Public Aid,” and “The Neglect of Domestic Needs.” The Illinois issue dealt with “The Denial of Representation,” “The Fraud of Charity,” “The Lack of Adequate Nutrition,” “The Death of Rural America,” and “The Mismanagement of Health Service.” On a lighter side, of special interest were the doings and behavior of state legislators in both states both in the legislatures and outside. We also had fun. A bit of media history. Charles L. Klotzer is founder of the St. Louis Journalism Review.
G TEWAY J O UR N AL ISM R E V IE W
gatewayjr.org
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 29
Feature
Point/Counterpoint
News Literacy covering basics such as the various types of media, the First Amendment, the role and responsibilities of the press — then bring real journalists into the classroom to explain what they do - and, of course, take questions. “Many mistake us for a journalism program,” said Peter Adams, the Project’s Chicago manager. “but the core of our mission is teaching young people the important role that credible information plays in a healthy democracy … and giving them the tools to be discerning consumers and creators of information.” The Chicago effort has drawn volunteers from the Tribune, Sun-Times, WBEZ-FM, AP, NBC-TV, the Chicago Defender and others. Last year the project reached more than 1,200 students in seven schools and plans are in the works to expand to 12 schools in 2012. Nationally, the Maryland-based News Literacy Project reached double those numbers when counting its efforts in New York and Washington, D.C. It was founded in 2008 by Alan C. Miller, a former Pulitzerwinning investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He got the idea, he says, from the tremendous response he received after speaking to his daughter’s classmates at her Bethesda school. Miller began developing a curriculum and seeking help from foundations and media outlets concerned — for reasons both noble and economic — about the next generation of news consumers. In Chicago, the project’s main backers include the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). Both already were active sponsors of inschool enrichment activities. Several well-known journalists have been recruited, both as board members —
Continued from Page 5
such as Gwen Ifill of the PBS Newshour — and school visitors — such as Tribune columnist Clarance Page. But most classroom visitors are workaday news men and women who simply want to give back, or in some cases dispel TV dramatizations of what reporters do, which is to say accost people with microphones and ask overly aggressive personal questions. Me? I do it to “give back,” sure, but also to get inside Chicago’s much-maligned public schools — places few reporters actually go, except for those covering the ed beat — and see for myself what’s actually happening inside. What I’m learning is that teachers — and surely those involved with News Literacy — work very hard; and that the students — most but not all — pay attention and ask good, if sometimes unexpected, questions. Unexpected as in: “Who was the most famous person you ever interviewed?” and “How do you know if someone is telling the truth?” Truth be told, I generally follow the advice of one of my long-ago Tribune editors to “write about what you know.” That means I don’t try to tell these Net-hip kids about Facebook or Twitter. Someone else covers that. Instead I tape tear sheets on the blackboard of that day’s Tribune and Sun-Times front page, editorial page and op-ed page. Then I try to explain what the rules are for each section: how front-page stories generally stick to the “5W” facts but often provide some needed interpretation; how editorial positions are decided and written and how they represent the opinion of the publisher (who is too busy to write them himself); and how you, too, young lady, can write an op-ed or a letter to the editor. But just
Media mogul Mark Vittert shuns the media omplain. I still had questions so, I went to the Lee’s annual meeting in March in Davenport, Iowa. Afterward, I introduced myself and we chatted, though it was only about general topics. He called McClellan “the best” and said journalism was the best protection for democracy. He said
his family meant “everything” to him. He offered that as a youth he once visited an aunt who worked for a newspaper in Chicago and was blown away by the hubbub of the newsroom. He was sold on newspapering, though he never became a daily journalist.
because you have strong feelings doesn’t mean you can make up stuff. To drive home the latter point, I pass out letter-sized sheets inscribed with my favorite Mark Twain quotation, one all columnists should know by heart and one I keep above my writer’s desk: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort ‘em as much as you please.” If that doesn’t confuse the kids, I don’t know what will. But the main thing, I think, is to get them thinking about this stuff, It’s about who you can trust in print or online and why, about the difference between a real journalist — someone committed to the hard work of fact-checking and truth-telling — and the growing army of professional spin-meisters and amateur ax-grinders who’ve crowded into the digi sphere claiming they’ve seen the light and so should you. Lately, the project has been examining ways to expand its in-class lessons, via Skype and other interactive online tools, so that more schools in more cities can participate. Of course they’ll also need more journalists, and I’d recommend it. Like so many other ways to “give back,” Literacy Project volunteers come away with as much as the kids. Maybe even more … but that’s just my unsupported opinion. Find more information thenewsliteracyproject.org/
at
www.
John McCarron is a freelance urban affairs writer and adjunct lecturer at DePaul University’s School of Communication. Previously he worked 27 years for the Chicago Tribune as reporter, financial editor and member of the editorial board. Continued from Page 11
He is not gregarious but makes you feel he knows you and likes you. And it’s hard not to like him. He is warm, friendly and has an air of quiet confidence and honesty without being boastful. Though he’s made some bad investments along the way, there are some people who
want to chum him up in hopes some of his investment magic might rub off, or he might tell them about a good investment. After the meeting the board retired to approve a $500,000 bonus for Lee CEO Mary Junck and a $250,000 bonus for the chief financial officer, Carl Schmidt. They were rewarded for guiding Lee through
the bankruptcy. Union employees at the Post held a protest meeting outside the paper to criticize such bonuses at a time when Lee was laying off more employees.I wondered how Vittert would explain those bonuses? Another question: Was he instrumental in getting Lee to buy Pulitzer at top dollar when now it’s not even worth selling? And what does he
think the future is for newspapers? One can’t really blame him for not wanting to do interviews.
Roy Malone is a former reporter for the Post-Dispatch and former editor of the St. Louis Journalism Review.
War coverage: media challenge presidents’ lines “...Even though we don’t seek religious conversion, or land, we fight in the footsteps of the European crusaders. Even though we don’t seek empire, the Arab world sees us as neo-imperialists dictating the rules for the world — which don’t apply to us — by deploying our economic might and history’s most powerful fighting force. Even though we say we fight for democracy, our allies include the House of Saud and Pakistan’s military dictator. “...The United States does not have an inalienable right to swagger about the globe knocking down governments and setting up new ones — and then wondering why we are not universally loved, respected and admired. “...Nations must have compelling reasons to ask their sons and daughters to shed their blood. Sept. 11, 2001, was such a reason. So far, we haven’t seen one in Iraq.” Four days later, in “Separating Fact from Fiction,” we wrote: “Mr. Bush’s nightmare scenario depends, in part, on closing the link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. For months, the administration has tried fitfully to link al-Qaida and Saddam. But intelligence analysts say there is no evidence that Saddam either cooperated with al-Qaida on terrorist operations, or was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, Saddam’s secular party has traditionally been at odds with bin Laden...Mr. Bush also claimed Tuesday
Continued from Page 12
that Iraq had imported aluminum tubes ‘suitable for nuclear weapons production.’ But only the day before, United Nations weapons inspector Mohamed ElBaradei had said the tubing was for rockets, not uranium centrifuges.” Finally, a few days before the war, on March 9, we said: “Mr. ElBaradei followed Mr. Blix with a point-by-point rebuttal to U.S. claims that Saddam has a nuclear program. He said that documents from 1987 show that the specifications for stainless steel tubes had been set for building rockets, not a centrifuge for reprocessing uranium. And he said that documents purporting to show Iraqi uranium imports from Niger were ‘not authentic.’” The Post-Dispatch was not the only newspaper to question Bush’s major premises for war. Other papers also editorialized against the war. When I remind people that this includes Times, they often are surprised, given the conventional wisdom about the Times’ role in the lead up to the war.On Oct. 23, in the “Illusory Prague Connection,” the Times noted that two-thirds of Americans believed Saddam had a hand in Sept. 11 and added: “Trouble is, no hard evidence of such a link has been made public.” In a Feb. 14 editorial, the Times added, “there is little hard evidence” of a connection between Saddam and alQaida, and said, “the administration should stop peddling that line to the
War coverage: media toe presidents’ lines Libyan military intervention, which involved drone assaults but no ground troops, Bergen correctly pointed out. As for the press role in this foreign adventurism, it is useful to remember
American people.” Finally, in the March 9 editorial “Say No to War,” the Times wrote: “If it comes down to a question of yes or no to invasion without broad international support, our answer is no.” It added that, “despite endless efforts by the Bush administration to connect Iraq to Sept. 11, the evidence simply isn’t there.” Nor were editorial pages the only places where the administration was challenged. Knight Ridder Washington reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay provided terrific reporting on the weaknesses of the intelligence backing the move to war. At the Post-Dispatch, Washington Bureau Chief Jon Sawyer also wrote stories raising questions. But Sawyer’s stories did not get the frontpage play that stories from our embedded reporters at the front received. Yes, the press should have done a better job warning the nation about the weaknesses of the president’s argument to go to war. Perhaps even the editorials we wrote at the Post-Dispatch were not ardent enough in their opposition to war to please the Noam Chomsky’s of the left. But beware of the hyperbole that cloaks the conventional wisdom about the press’ failings in the run-up to the war in Iraq. William H. Freivogel is director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and contributes to the St. Louis Beacon. He is a member of the Missouri Bar. Continued from Page 13
here, as Walter Lippmann observed some time ago, that most citizens get their news of foreign events, including war, secondhand — through mediated channels that include newspapers. Newspapers, particularly during the period under
discussion here, have traditionally set the national reporting agenda; even when television news replaced newspapers as Americans’ primary source of information about the world, television news directors and managers took their journalistic cues Continued on next page
Page 30 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 31
Point/Counterpoint from the nation’s major and regionally dominant newspapers. When it comes to the crucial period leading up to war — the time frame when the case for war is argued, the pre-war phases when war can still be prevented — the nation’s press has habitually abandoned its ballyhooed watchdog role. Instead, these purveyors of public opinion took on a lap dog or guard dog role — as in guarding the interests and ideologies of the nation, the culture and the economy in which they thrive. And in the process, they constructed a reality of the world based largely — especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy and defense – on official government sources who had a strong interest and played an authoritative role in framing how the news of these policies was portrayed to the public. To be sure, these same newspapers — the Times of New York and of Los Angeles and Seattle, the Journal of Wall Street, the Tribune of Chicago and Post-Dispatch of St. Louis, the Post in Washington and Denver, USA Today, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Houston Chronicle in the South — donned their watchdog garb once the wars began, investigating atrocities, lies and misplaced alliances and causes. But this sort of skeptical journalism came late — after the wars had begun, the troops had landed, the bombs had fallen, the missiles had fired, the troops and innocent civilians had been slaughtered. It came after the United States was involve, and thus in a political and time frame making it more difficult to get out than it had been to get in. Certainly, these press agents asked some questions and expressed some uncertainty along the way; but these questions and doubts had primarily to do with war strategy rather than war doctrine. For example, while many of these newspapers demonstrated some skepticism regarding President George W. Bush’s arguments regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, beyond some initial questioning, none in the end ardently disagreed with or challenged the larger, dominant frame for war that the Bush presidency built carefully over a period of months: that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to his neighbors and to the United States; that he was aligned with the terrorists who attacked the United
States on Sept. 11, 2001; that he was an evil despot, part of an Axis of Evil, who needed to be plucked like a toxic weed from Middle East; that a regime change to a democratic form of government would best serve the region, the world, and U.S. interests. By the time of the invasion, all of these newspapers had bought into this larger argument. The primary question regarding war — especially after former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s damning presentation to the United Nations demonstrating the connivance and intentions of Hussein — became not whether to go to war with Iraq, but when and how to do so, whether unilaterally or with United Nations backing. The Bush case for war with Iraq followed the template established by his predecessors: arguments on behalf of national security, of resisting authoritarianism, of protecting U.S. and Western interests and values abroad (oil and democratic forms of government, for example), of protecting American citizens facing threat from despotic governments, and finally of rescuing citizens of other nations from the oppression of their leaders. The question here is not whether bad rulers and policies need to be resisted or whether U.S. security must be protected — as Obama eloquently argued in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, when he explained that he “cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.” Make no mistake, the president urged. “Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince alQaida’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.” Rather, the argument is that presidents have increasingly used this sort of rationale to take the nation to war in a process that expanded steadily since World War II without Congress raising much of a ruckus beyond the feckless War Powers Act that came out of the Vietnam War. And this presidential war power has flourished with the blessings of a press that has abdicated its Fourth Estate responsibilities of oversight. The process culminated, most recently, in the U.S. participation in
Page 32 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
Point/Counterpoint the liberation of Libya — a military drone exercise that drew some press criticism for ignoring constitutional war-making authority but that sparked press applause nonetheless. In a televised speech explaining his decision to undertake the Libyan military operation, President Obama included a justification that echoed explanations by former presidents, including Johnson’s Dominican Republic intervention, Reagan’s Grenada invasion, George H.W. Bush’s decision to send troops to Somalia, and Clinton’s explanation for ordering air strikes and deploying ground troops in the Bosnian conflict. “For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom,” the president said. “Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges. But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act.” He added, in reference to the uprisings in other Middle Eastern and North African nations of which the Libyan civil war was a part: “Born, as we are, out of a revolution by those who longed to be free, we welcome the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East and North Africa, and that young people are leading the way. Because wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States. Ultimately, it is that faith — those ideals — that are the true measure of American leadership.” These are the same ideals cited by presidents from Truman on in their defense of military engagement. They are the same values and arguments invoked by the press in its editorial chorus of celebration for the successful denouement of the Libyan operation — a war choir that resonated with pro-war editorials dating to Korea. Trumpeted the New York Times: “There is little doubt that the rebels would not have gotten this far without NATO’s air campaign and political support from President Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron. When critics in Washington and elsewhere declared Libya a quagmire, these leaders refused to
back away.” “Though you wouldn’t know it from the reaction at the Council on Foreign Relations or among some GOP presidential candidates, this is a victory for freedom and U.S. national interests,” claimed The Wall Street Journal. Chimed in USA Today: “The inter-vention was a high-stakes gamble about which we’ve been skeptical, but if ultimately successful, it can be an important step in what stands to be a long, difficult process of rebooting U.S. policy away from support for dictators and toward support for the people’s democratic aspirations.” The Washington Post praised the operation. “The imminent collapse after 42 years of Moammar Gaddafi’s brutal and capricious regime demonstrates that even a half-hearted U.S. effort can make a big difference. Mr. Obama insisted six months ago that U.S. participation would last only ‘days;’ he kept the connection between military means and political goals murky; he fudged rather than comply with the War Powers Resolution; he was slow to recognize the Libyan opposition. But as British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy led, Mr. Obama crucially maintained enough U.S. support to keep the NATO mission going. Libyans themselves provided the motivation and the man power, but they could not have succeeded without U.S. help. And Mr. Obama sustained the mission despite criticism from both Democrats and potential 2012 opponents.” And so on, citing from other newspapers included in my research (excepting the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which, its editorial page editor informed me, no longer editorializes on non-local topics): Detroit News: “Libya’s malevolent dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, is out of power. A six-month rebellion, backed by NATO air strikes, has ended his regime. That is a victory for the Libyan people and one that the West ought to celebrate. For 40 years, Gadhafi ruthlessly exploited Libya’s oil resources for his own gain and made the country a pariah in the West.” Chicago Tribune: “Then there is Libya’s mad despot, Moammar Gadhafi. After
months in which he and his security forces fought to put down a broad-based insurgency, the capital city of Tripoli was overrun by rebels Sunday, virtually sealing his doom. Here, the opposition has not only moral support but military help from abroad, in the form of an extended NATO air campaign.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “There is no doubt that without NATO’s intervention, this megalomaniac slowly would have rolled up the rebels, hunting them down — as he said — ‘like rats and cockroaches.’ Mr. Obama took heat from both the left and the right for sending U.S. air and naval forces into the fray. We are among those who believe he owed Congress more in the way of consultations under the War Powers Act of 1973. Still, while the economy may be a mess, the president can take some comfort in knowing that in the span of four months, he helped rid the world of Osama bin Laden and Moammar Gadhafi. Not a bad summer’s work.” Denver Post: “The Khadafy era in Libya — an improbable 42 years of brutality at home and bloody adventurism abroad — is seemingly finished. And that’s cause for celebration despite the uncertainty over what sort of government will eventually emerge. ... The brave rebels who bucked the odds and took on Khadafy’s troops deserve the major credit for victory, of course, but they could not have succeeded without the air support they received from Western powers. President Obama can justly claim a foreign policy triumph in the face of considerable skepticism from critics, which included this editorial page.” Seattle Times: “NATO airstrikes have provided key support while keeping foreign troops off the ground, allowing Libyans to liberate their country. Combat air patrols will continue until all proGadhafi forces surrender. The air coverage helps rebels and protects civilians. Initially, the U.S. provided much of the firepower. President Obama, responsive to a warweary American public, shifted to allow the international community to lead — a strategy that worked.” Los Angeles Times: “The use of force to address the internal abominations of other nations raises profoundly difficult
questions for American policymakers. Eager not to serve as the world’s police force and yet determined to support democratic values and human rights, the United States often finds itself facing limited, unpalatable options. It may stand aside and allow rulers to abuse their people, or it may intervene, risking American lives and reinforcing the international impression that this nation is entitled to govern others. In Libya, the Obama administration chose a middle course. The U.S. provided limited air and drone support to rebels who might well have been defeated without it. It declined to act unilaterally, but rather played a supporting role in an effort led by European nations that have a greater stake in Libya’s stability. And though there were signs of mission creep, of deepening embroilment in Libya’s civil war, the U.S. largely resisted those temptations. Not one American soldier set foot in Libya. Force is sometimes justified, but it should only be deployed when other methods have failed, when it can serve a vital end and when it can be effective in securing that result.” Of course, nothing works like success — a case that Obama is making in his campaign for re-election. It is a campaign that, when it comes to foreign policy, promises a replay of past presidential contests that have raised national security concerns. In the past, though, these worries have been used to target the Democrats, have accused Democratic presidential candidates as weak on defense and national security. This time, it is the Democratic candidate who will have the national security argument on his side — due, in large part, to a foreign policy of military adventurism that, make no mistake, is not any modern or new development. It is one steeped in more than 60 years of tradition, with a big boost from a Congress that has ceded its war-making authority and a press that has surrendered its watchdog responsibilities when it comes to the most crucial decision any president must make — to go to war. Editor’s Note: In this story, Moammar Gadhafi’s name has been spelled differently. It is used in quotes from differing publications and those publications spelled the name in differing ways. Steve Hallock is director of the School of Communication at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and author of “The Press March To War: Newspapers Set the Stage for Military Intervention in Post-World War II America.”
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 33
Covering Elections Covering political conventions fall campaign, while it may have started informally weeks or months earlier, only begins officially after the nomination roll call and one candidate has been officially designated to carry the party banner into the general election. The professionals also know the rule that the party that holds the most harmonious convention and puts on the best show has a real advantage for victory in November. Everyone on stage and back stage knows that the objective is to nominate the party’s strongest candidate (the one already blessed by the presidential primaries and caucuses), adopt the rules, adopt the platform and resolutions, showcase the party’s stars and next generation of leaders, create enthusiasm among the activists and interest groups represented inside the arena and get out of town without giving the media anything negative to write about. The parties and candidates know that a successful and positive convention is likely to lead to a post-convention “bounce” in the polls of usually 5 to 10 percent. That, along with a fired- up party base, is what they want. Since at least 1972, the conventions ceased being the center of decisionmaking on who the nominee will be, and the presidential primaries became pre-eminent in that role. The role of the conventions changed to making the nomination official and launching the fall campaign with as much positive coverage as possible. The media know this too and are determined not to play the game so easily. They look for dissent, conflict and controversy. They know that party harmony and praise for the nominee do not make good copy. So, they seek out the dissidents, the disgruntled, the outrageous and those who are simply interesting and colorful. The media people have their own ideas about what is newsworthy and what the framing of the convention message will be, and they pursue their objectives without much regard for the objectives of the organizers in charge of the convention. This difference in objectives is especially evident in the hours of coverage devoted to the national conventions by television
Continued from Page 14
and especially by the networks. From 1952 (when convention coverage by television really got started) until 1980 and 1984, the three major national networks were dominant in the news fields and in convention coverage. ABC, CBS, and NBC would generally provide “gavelto-gavel” coverage of the conventions. When the conventions were in session, the networks were there. After all, it was summer, and summer reruns had become boring by August anyway, so there was an audience for such political fare, especially if a good floor fight was in the offing. Beginning in 1980, the networks cut their coverage and reduced it more sharply in 1984, and the audiences declined. As the parties became increasingly concerned about putting on a good show, the television executives became less and less interested. At first they cut back to providing coverage only in prime time, and then they reduced this to only an hour wrap-up at the end of the evening. The cable networks, especially CNN, Fox News, and CNBC stepped into the void to some extent by providing more extensive coverage than the broadcast networks did; however, only CSPAN stayed with the traditional gavel-to-gavel coverage of the earlier era. Ironically, today the more the parties and candidates focus their attention on getting positive coverage, the less likely the mass media, especially television, are going to give them more than perfunctory coverage, except for the intense focus on internal conflict or the introduction of a compelling new face like Sarah Palin in 2008. This is one reason why we are now seeing a shift to the new media platforms. In 2008, the Obama campaign pioneered the use of the internet and new technologies to rally their troops in the field and stimulate favorable convention coverage. Both sides will undoubtedly take this to new heights in 2012. For example, the delegates and the campaigns will certainly make good use of the social media, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, to keep up with each other, with each breaking news story and rumor, and to communicate with their friends and supporters back home. Bloggers of the
G TEWAY J OUR NAL IS M R E V I E W
Page 34 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
right and the left will certainly be in abundance. It has been reported that Time magazine will keep tabs on the delegates and get them news and solicit commentary. There will undoubtedly be other innovative uses of the new media unveiled by both parties. In April, Google officials announced that the company had been selected to be the official “social platform” for the Republican National Convention. This means Google will live-stream all of the speeches during the convention and sponsor hangouts with the major speakers via YouTube. They also planned to try to reach the same agreement with the Democrats. After the conventions, the candidates and their entourage rush on to a bus tour or fly around to the key battleground states. The media rush on to a fresh examination of the vice-presidential nominee or signs of internal dissention among the various factions that make up the candidate’s core supporters and to how it is all playing with the independents. The spotlight shifts to the fall campaign, and especially to the debates that are just around the corner. The polls record the ups and downs of each candidate and both camps as the general election unfolds. Soon it is the dawning of November and it all ends. So, why even have quadrennial political conventions? The answer is that they are still functional for the parties, for the candidates and for the overall political system. Nominations must be made official; the party activists need to come together and celebrate old victories and add to the tradition, while also discovering new faces. The conventions still “work,” even though they are not the kind of television drama they once were, and there are flaws and shortcomings with every plan advanced to replace them. Like live television, they are an anachronism from an earlier era, but tamed down and prepackaged though they may be, they still serve a purpose. John Jackson is a Political Science professor at Paul Simon Public Policy Institute
Access Gateway Journalism Review Online Search Twitter for gatewayjreview or go to www.facebook.com/gatewayjr
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
As good as it gets? becoming more concentrated in a smaller population group that reads, watches and listens more. “[N]ot all citizens have to follow the news in order for detailed media coverage to strengthen accountability because an evenly well-informed electorate is not a necessary condition for political accountability,” Prior argued in a recently published book chapter. “As a result of more media choice, the task of holding elected officials accountable rests increasingly on a relatively narrow segment of the population: — news junkies.”Whether those more attentive consumers of news information recognize and act out that monitorial role, Prior acknowledged, is harder to assess. The transformed media environment also puts the onus on the remaining newspapers to be more discerning. In their new book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein fault newspapers for burying fact- checking in the back pages rather than weaving that expository work into page one stories. A second concern is the appearance of partisan language in traditional media
Continued from Page 15
news coverage — an obvious pitfall in a highly polarized and partisan public square. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, for example, tracked signs of the “messaging war” around Obama’s health care reforms seeping into newspaper coverage. Canvassing the top 60 news sources between June 1, 2009, and March 31, 2010, Pew found more than 18,000 instances of specific language promoted by opponents of the overhaul — such as “more government involvement” and “rationing health care” — and more than 10,000 cases of pro-overhaul phrases such as “more competition” and “greedy insurance industry.” “One of the biggest challenges in the new era is how to filter what comes at you and maintain focus,” Lambrecht said. Amid the fluidity and flux, however, John Yemma, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, sees a settling of roles among the new and traditional media. He cited the dust-ups around two politically charged statements. The first, by Romney: “I like being able to fire people.” The second, from Obama: “The private sector is doing fine.” In both cases, a sentence was isolated and run through the partisan new media
Great — and not so great — expectations Turkle cements this erosion of boundaries between the real and the virtual with her final chapter, where she discusses Zhu Zhu pets, a popular toy for children, and Chatroulette, and online chat room that allows people to randomly connect throughout the world. Zhu Zhu pets, Turkle states, are advertised as “living to feel the love” — a stark contrast to Chatroulette, where users quickly go through, or “roulette” through, people, always ready to connect or meet the next person before they have even gotten to know the current person on their computer screen. In this way, Turkle validates her title: Zhu Zhu pets (even Tamagatchis and Furbies)
are designed to be loved, nurtured and cared for while people are “objectified and quickly discarded” in Chatroulette. Machines are personified and nurtured by humans whereas people are not people but profiles, a “something,” such as a movie or piece of mail — things that can be flipped through, tossed out, experience once only to be traded in for another, similar thing. This book is the culmination of more than 30 years of Turkle’s work. She has studied the interaction between person and machine. Technology has, without argument, changed the way people communicate. But in doing so, has technology also changed what it is
Page 36 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
gotcha mills. Then the campaigns, partisan blocs and Super PACs picked it up. Finally, the traditional media stepped in, restoring the context in which the statements were made and checking the facts behind them. Digital technology, Yemma noted, provides an antidote to the stress all news organizations face from their funding sources. Tweets and links serve the cause of fair-minded journalism as much as the more partisan alternatives. “The promise of the network effect is that we don’t have to do it all ourselves,” Yemma said. “We can point to other good journalism, which is a perfectly valid exercise of our judgment.” If there is a detectable thread running through attempts to grapple with the effects of a boisterous and constantly changing communications marketplace, it might be hope — not that potential moderating mechanisms will safeguard the public trust, but that they might. That may be as good as it gets. Kurt Shillinger is a former national political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and Africa correspondent for the Boston Globe. Continued from Page 19
to be human? “Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on people’s values and direction.” With this statement, Turkle frames her book with the pessimistic title as a declaration of power. This is the time for everyone to take advantage of this current movement to define their own importance. However, her chapters illustrate that we already have — and our preference is to replace human error and unpredictability with a “being” we have control over.
Jennifer Butcher is a Ph. D. student at Southern Illinois University and production editor of Gateway Journalism Review.
Minority voice in U.S. media Another aspect of the book that worked well was the chronological order in which the story was told. This helped it not only cover a period of mass media that solely relied on a print medium, but also allowed the authors to cover the birth and reception of radio, and television and digital forms of news as well. At around the halfway point of the book, the story begins to talk about the radio and all the new possibilities it allowed. It also explained how even though news was evolving, stereotypes still were present. The entire last section of the book was dedicated to the age of the Internet and bloggers. This section was used as a tool to bring the readers back to current time and shows what media have done since the beginning of the book (the first newspaper), not only explaining breakthroughs the internet has allowed to minority groups,
Continued from Page 21
but telling of its shortcomings, as well. Like all good endings should do, it brought all the information the story gave into perspective and drove home the point of “look at how far we’ve come” as an industry, as well as a culture. While the authors make it clear that mass media have come far since the first newspaper, they make it known that things are still far from being perfect in the media. For example, while there are many websites that make a solid effort at exposing events and problems in minority communities, “News for All the People” explains how these sites are not getting enough attention from the mainstream media. The book then lists the names of the websites and praises these sites for all they have contributed thus far in the age of the Internet, almost promoting the websites to its readers.
WikiLeaks pushes sourcing envelope Beckett is a director of Polis, a media think tank at the venerable London School of Economics, and Ball is a journalist with the Guardian newspaper and a former WikiLeaks staffer. Readers could have expected them to provide an authoritative answer as to the nature of WikiLeaks from the height of their combined expertise. Luckily, this is not the case. Instead, they hedge their bets in the very introduction to the book between a seemingly assertive first sentence (“WikiLeaks is the most challenging journalism phenomenon to emerge in the digital era”) and the concluding statement (“Welcome to the Wiki World and era of uncertainty”). And this is how Beckett and Ball see it. After reading their volume, most readers will still be left with their own convictions (and doubts) as to exactly what hit the media, politics and society in the form of the WikiLeaks meteorite. All told, I hope to avoid a dire contradiction by advocating that this book becomes supplementary reading in classes teaching mass communication and society, even at the 100 level. Why? The book has a clear structure, crisp narrative, and offers a reasonable framework for studying not just WikiLeaks but also the questions most pertinent to the interplay among present-day media, politics and societal developments. Much in this book concerns what lies ahead. The authors ask more questions than provide
Unfortunately, the book’s weakest aspect is its inability to attract readers who may be interested in the subject, a shame considering how eye-opening some of these facts are. While the information in this book is extensive, it may only appeal to a select group and in this will be most likely overlooked by popular media. Overall, “News for All the People” takes a stand against the white profile of mass media and urges readers to build a brighter tomorrow with the hard work and understanding of all races, a goal the book contends media may be closer to than ever before.
Austin Flynn is a student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Continued from Page 22
answers, thus laying fertile grounds for discussion. The book has four chapters, of which the first addresses the novelty of the WikiLeaks phenomenon. The second provides a case study of the massive dump of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and U.S. embassy cables. Chapter 3 ponders the future of journalism, especially of the public kind, and the final chapter deliberates about WikiLeaks, social media and effects of a networking world on the future of power. No discussion of WikiLeaks can stray far from mentioning its controversial founder, Julian Assange, who has been hailed as an e-messiah, condemned as e-villain and exculpated as e-goat (the last tongue-incheek term coined by the editors of the Economist). As of this writing, Assange is seeking asylum in the embassy of Ecuador in London, attempting to save himself from a likely extradition to Sweden — and, ostensibly, to the United States. He has run afoul of authorities in more than a few countries, albeit for different reasons. Yet the WikiLeaks model is more than Assange, as authors take some pain to point out. To them a more interesting question, for instance, is the cooperation WikiLeaks managed to establish with several mainstream media organizations. Any such work would require updates virtually from day one of its shelf life. The authors appended an epilogue with
some recent developments, which were already at least six months old by the time of publication. This is one more reason readers will appreciate their chosen approach to provide a framework for studying WikiLeaks and maybe other entities that may build on this model, rather than strive for a definitive tell-all narrative. Interested readers should get their hands on the Beckett and Ball book and refresh their memory on the ups and downs of the WikiLeaks story. Ethical, practical, philosophical and political questions raised by WikiLeaks are not going away soon. Too, readers should follow the release of any new document caches, dig into them energetically, and remember that no source should be considered an end in itself. Beckett and Ball are cautiously optimistic about the future of journalism, “whose business cannot just be this kind of mega-leak.” They believe that in a Wiki World digging up stories, revealing abuses of power and making sense of complex problems remains a joint venture among mainstream reporters, enterprising journalists, Wiki-leakers, whistleblowers and an engaged public above all.
Christopher Karadjov is associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at California State University, Long Beach. His latest research studied social media and their influence in Eastern Europe.
Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 37
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
And that’s the way it is —or isn’t more negative attention on Republican candidates than on Democratic candidates, but concentrating their coverage on the negative aspects of the campaign. The networks also tend to cover more stories centering on conflict or scandal and have lowered their standards of vetting stories before they run. The authors point to other sources and
Continued from Page 23
give credit to PBS’ NewsHour for its coverage of elections and election cycles and also credited Fox Networks’ Special Report with Britt Hume for being more evenhanded in its election coverage than the three major networks. Farnsworth and Lichter provide a statistical analysis of a problem many scholars and media professionals recognize. Traditional forms of tele-vision media are not doing the
job when it comes to covering presidential elections. The authors offer new paths to better coverage, including the Internet, but the reality is - and they recognize this - that these suggestions have been made before. Until network television recognizes its problem and makes the effort to change, it most likely won’t happen. Scott Lambert is managing editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.
Author examines investigative journalism 40 years after Watergate scandal outside mainstream journalism. Edward R. Murrow is credited for standing-up to abuses by Senator McCarthy. Civil Rights and consumer culture reference Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at any Speed, at the same time as the Freedom of Information Act. The author weaves stories into a developmental framework about whether investigative reporting “went underground” during the era between World War I and Vietnam. Reporters: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett questioned policies during the LBJ years, and CBS News’ sticking-up for “The Selling of the Pentagon” is also duly noted. Coverage of Watergate begins in chapter four, titled “Calling the Plumbers,” and enumerating Nixon’s nutty White House; a summary of what took place before assuming office. For those of us who lived it, reading the atrocities in tandem: the war, political assassination, and protest may seem easy. Beyond “All The President’s Men,” a reader will gain even better understanding of the “why” — about someone who regarded the press as natural enemy, while thinking he could
break the law and get away with it. While Watergate is well-documented, this perspective on elements at play includes anti-press performance by Spiro Agnew, and each press person is examined, beyond Woodward and Bernstein: Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, Walter Cronkite and Seymour Hersh. Very interesting are accounts by Phil Meyer, Washington correspondent for the Knight news chain, admitting he did not know where to find the stories Woodward and Bernstein were uncovering, or CBS’ Bob Schieffer saying: “I can remember reading about it and thinking, ‘What could this be about?’ Why would anybody break into a campaign headquarters?’ This is where they keep the yard signs and things like that.” The last section reminds us there are efforts to retain independent, investigative reporting. The author provides current examples, including use of blogs, moving toward community-based, online, Web-only publications, such as the St. Louis Beacon. Marshall takes time to discuss how such efforts are funded, and what kinds of strategic models are emerging. He
It doesn’t look good “[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge,” Mann and Ornstein write, “one of the two major parties, the Republican party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional under-standing of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Making their case requires chronically two concurrent trends. The first is the legacy of Gingrich’s strategy of tarnishing
Continued from Page 24
describes the work of many organizations, including the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He goes back in time to describe historic collaboration such as the Better Government Association working with the press to fight Chicago gangster Al Capone. This is a valuable book. For those who argue for a passage of time before judgments are rendered, there is convincing evidence here. The Notes and bibliography sections extend almost a hundred pages. Coverage of Watergate, how it unfolded, provides an excellent review and interesting reporting primer. Some people maintain that independent, investigative reporting is part and parcel of what is best described as a defiant “spirit of America.” Nothing in this book indicates otherwise. It reinforces the notion that the kind of iconic “disturbers of the peace” we often most enjoy, almost always find a way. Michael D. Murray is distinguished professor of Broadcast Journalism Mass Communication at University of Missouri St. Louis. Continued from Page 25
the institutions of government — particularly Congress — attacking political adversaries and abusing parliamentary procedure to gain power. The second is the rapid transformation of the media in the electronic age. These two threads, they argue, are not so much parallel as intertwined. For journalists, Mann and Ornstein write, the dysfunction in modern politics requires rethinking how the professional standards of fairness and objectivity are applied. Put differently, they argue that the traditional media are too quick to assign equal blame. Yes, both parties use holds
Page 38 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
and filibusters to tie up the Senate when in the minority. Yes, both sides exploit loopholes. But “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon” – they coin the phrase “asymmetric polarization” — “is a distortion of reality,” the authors argue. “Our advice: don’t seek professional safety through the unfiltered presentation of opposing views.” Mann and Ornstein cite a range of factors contributing to the current state of American politics. They examine the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which essentially erased 40 years of campaign finance laws. They
point to tribal party politics, manipulation of parliamentary procedure, and strategies to tilt voting districts and voter participation. Yet not a section of their argument concludes without reference to the media. In a coarsened, fragmented and more raucous public square, they seem to be saying, the traditional media — what remains of it — has an obligation to spend its professional capital as they have done — to point out who is driving the
dysfunction and how without “clinging to a false equivalence.” That call should echo through every newsroom and journalism school. A year ago, in its cautiously celebratory survey of the new technology-driven media environment (The Future of News: Back to the Coffee House, July 7, 2011), the Economist soberly noted that “as news is becoming more opinionated, both politics
Is Christian Science Monitor still viable as a news source? relative independence disentangles him from the risk that personal history and relationships will color his writing. The downside is that the color, texture, heat and humor of the Monitor can be missed. This is particularly true of an organization like the Monitor, with its lofty reputation and unusual roots. Can you “bless all mankind” and have fun doing it? While Collins’ pages contain some of the famous anecdotes of Monitor lore, the overall impression is of a weighty, earnest, serious operation. A more fully immersed insider might protest: “Yes, but it was fun, too.” Still, Collins manages to bring drama to the story. There are dust-ups between reporters and editors, the ring of history as World War I approaches and evidence of the unusual relationship between publisher, editor and readers at the Monitor owing to the fact that many readers are also contributing church members. The main predecessor to Collins’ work is the 1958 book Commitment to Freedom: The Story of The Christian Science Monitor, by legendary Monitor editor Erwin Canham. That book dealt with the newspaper’s first 50 years and had both the virtue and weakness of being penned by a true insider. While not a career journalist, Collins brings great reverence for the Monitor to his writing, in particular, what he calls the newspaper’s “healing work.” Collins treads on sensitive ground here. Monitor journalism is meant to be fair, independent,
If there is a thesis statement for this book, it is Collins’ assertion that “when the paper forgets its healing mission, it crashes.” The art of Monitor journalism, therefore, lay in its ability to penetrate complex events yet to do so in ways that were neither preachy nor lacking in compassion. This is no obituary. The book leaves us hopeful as the Monitor transitions to the digital world, a process begun in 2009 when the daily print edition was dropped and focus shifted to the web and a weekly edition.
J OUR N A LI S M R E VI E W
Kurt Shillinger is a former national political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and Africa correspondent for the Boston Globe. Continued from Page 26
global and constructive while at the same time strictly non-religious, save for one overtly religious article clearly labeled as such. It is, as Monitor readers will attest, a “regular” newspaper. So when Collins writes about “healing” there is the risk that non-Christian Scientists will start to wonder just how “regular” the Monitor is. Collins’ navigates this important terrain by making the case that the Monitor represented a critical part of Mrs. Eddy’s larger church structure in the sense that it was presenting readers, many of whom were church members, with a clear-eyed and perceptive dissection of world problems, plumbing beneath surface events to the thinking that lay beneath. For church members, this is the information necessary for prayer and healing. For others, the Monitor approach holds value simply by getting beneath the surface of problems. Yet it is the necessity of prayer and healing that closes the loop of the Monitor’s reason for being, according to Collins.
G TEWAY
and the facts are suffering.” It remains for the academy to elucidate this change through empirical study. But in the middle of a watershed election year, Mann and Ornstein have credibly amplified the warning.
Collins points to encouraging trend lines of greater readership and exposure, thanks to the web. And also cost reductions as printing costs are replaced by near-free digital distribution. In the end, Collins’ benchmark for success — hewing to a healing mission — is subjective both in terms of the meaning of “success” and how one defines that mission as it relates to the often messy business of journalism. And he has an easier time looking back than at the present. Is the Monitor “closer now to fulfilling its mission than it was before the Web-first strategy kicked in?” Collins asks. “The jury is still out,” he answers. What is partly missing here, understandably, is a bell-ringing definition of what makes Monitor journalism rise to its lofty ambition. Editors have struggled with that, and so does Collins. But, in a way, that is the point. Founder Eddy set the bar high with her “injure no man, but to bless all mankind” goal. So high, in fact, that attaining it has been a century-old work in progress, as this history chronicles. Paul Van Slambrouck is an associate professor of mass communication at Principia College, former editor of the Christian Science Monitor and shares a Pulitzer Prize with the news staff of the San Jose Mercury News for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
gatewayjr.org Summer 2012 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 39
Book Reviews Former ABC chief Westin recalls forest, trees in “Exit Interview”
Continued from Page 27
not always come out the right way. His description of Peter Jennings’ work on September 11, 2001 and the days after is the picture of what a leader and a journalist should be.
He also has a habit of taking his personal observations too far at times. His discussion of a sailing trip days before the September 11 attacks did not have the affect he was working for as a writer.
of journalism makes this a good read for journalists and journalism educators. It’s a book that should be used in classrooms soon.
Sometimes Westin’s writing drags. He has a habit of making a point, then trying to remake that same point multiple times.
Overall, Westin did hit the mark and mixing each chapter with a major event his network covered with a major theme
Scott Lambert is managing editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He worked as a sports journalist and editor for 13 years.
Illinois eavesdropping law controversial — and unresolved cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties,” he wrote. In addition, Judge Frankland held that the law violated Allison’s First Amendment right to gather information about his case — the citizen version of a journalist’s right to gather news. In another colorful case from Chicago, a jury acquitted Tiawanda Moore, an exotic dancer who recorded a police officer trying to dissuade her from filing a complaint about another officer. Moore went to police headquarters to complain about an officer she said had fondled her and left her his personal phone number. When an officer receiving Moore’s complaint tried to talk her out of pursuing it, she began recording the conversation with her Blackberry. When
officers discovered what she was doing, they charged her under the eavesdropping statute. The jury acquitted Moore after hearing her four-minute recording in which the internal affairs officer told Moore she would certainly lose because it was her word against the policeman’s Most states, such as Missouri, allow conversations to be recorded as long as one party to the conversation consents. That means that a newspaper reporter in Missouri, for example, generally can record a telephone conversation without telling the person on the other end of the line. Twelve states have two-party consent laws for eavesdropping, meaning that all parties must consent to an audio recording. But Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts have the toughest interpretation and enforcement. The other nine states have
KEEP UP TO DATE
on the latest industry news
Continued from Page 28
an exception to the law that allows recording of public police conversations. In Maryland, one of the three states with tough laws, the state attorney general has issued an opinion indicating that those taping officers in a way that does not interfere with their work should not be prosecuted. Prosecutors and police in Illinois, however, think the strict enforcement of the law is important. The Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago said audio recording of police on the street performing their duty could affect how the officer does his job.
GET FREE WEEKLY EMAILS FROM
MEDIA LEADERS
Civil liberties groups say that is exactly what they hope. William H. Freivogel is director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and contributes to the St. Louis Beacon. He is a member of the Missouri Bar.
BOOKMRK GATEWAYJR.ORG TO
READ THE NEWEST BLOGS
Call or e-mail for advertising packages and specials 618-536-3361 • gatewayjr@siu.edu Page 40 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
SUBSCRIBE TO
GJR TODAY GATEWAYJR.ORG/SUBSCRIBE
Opinion
And now, for something completely different: Times-Picayune forges transition path P a t L ouise In May the owners of the award-winning New Orleans TimesPicayune announced they were redefining the way newspapers transitioned into the next life. Rather than die a slow and (to the Newhouse family) costly death, the T-P — which actually still made money as a newspaper — would instead commit print suicide by putting a newspaper in subscribers’ mailboxes just three days a week. The 200 job cuts in New Orleans — one-third of the staff, or half of the newsroom — will combine with other Advance Company-owned newspapers in Alabama to put 600 newspaper employees out of work by October. Those not offered a severance package can stay, but they had better like whatever job they are given in the fall. Like it? Frankly, they might well have a hard time understanding it. Because just as those who stay will no longer work for the Times-Picayune, but instead for the Nola Media Group, Advance Company has redefined just what it means to be a reporter. For decades, we all went along with the accepted Webster’s definition of reporter. Mainly, one who reports. If we wanted to sprinkle in some details, we could add “for a newspaper or media outlet”. A news hunter and gatherer. Such a simple and straightforward definition now appears to have gone the way of a seven-days-a-week print publication. The Nola Group advertised for reporters in June; the ad included a 15-point list of talents and characteristics that even Clark Kent would struggle to understand. It begins: The Reporter (did the AP Stylebook approve this capitalization?) will report and produce news stories. Ok, so it’s more of a reporter-producer role. Much like a fire truck can be both a tanker and a pumper. Ah, but the lead-in continues. ‘‘Report and produce for various platforms’’ – platforms, did this get mixed up with an ad for an architect? – and ‘‘act as a statewide expert and discussion leader on high-value topics, meeting audience demand for immediacy, depth and engagement.’’ Statewide expert? Discussion leader? Meeting audience demand? “Hi, I’m Oprah Winfrey and I’m here about the reporter ad.’’ Bullet point No. 1 asks that the reporter, excuse me, Reporter, “write journalistically sound news elements.” A reporter required to be a journalistically sound writer? Isn’t that redundantly obvious? And it goes on, stating “the information must be balanced and factual, timely and topical and wellsourced and contextually correct.’’ Oh, the Reporter is only required to be contextually correct, not factually accurate. If the mayor says that aliens took over
Page 42 • Gateway Journalism Review • Summer 2012
the Superdome, no need to check that. Just be sure that you don’t say they are blue if he said they are purple. Bullet point No. 2 says the Reporter “must learn and employ all techniques for effective digital beat blogging.’’ I’ll give it this: The ad puts “beat blogging” in quotes. And well it should be. But it would be more helpful to have been given hints about the parts of speech “beat” and “blogging” play in this ad. Is it beat blogging as in, “I’ll give you such a punch,” or Dick Clark giving it an 85 for a catchy melody? And let’s be adult and honest here for a moment. When Reporter comes home and the significant other asks, “How was your day, dear?” will Reporter really answer thus: “Pretty good. I spent a lot of it at my desk ‘beat blogging.’” While we might have a vague idea “beat blogging” is something we won’t tell Grandma, Bullet No. 4 leaves no clue as to the actual activity. “Engage in story aggregation and topical link posting.” I had to look up aggregation. It didn’t help. A group, body or mass composed of many distinct parts or individuals. Isn’t that what Jeffrey Dahmer had in his refrigerator? Bullet No. 7: “Interact on social media platforms (just how big is this platform?) with story shares, objective commentary, promoting your topic and news organization’s content initiatives.’’ Story shares? I’ll trade you one New Orleans Saints bounty hunter story for two BP oil spill updates and a look back at Hurricane Katrina. And yet, the Reporter is required to be both objective and shamelessly self- and company-promoting. No, really, I’m not just saying this because I wrote it, but you should go to our Web page and share my story with all your friends on Facebook. It would make my boss happy.
Place your business in front of thousands of influential professional media decision-makers. Professional Journalists • Professors • Media Producers • Anyone interested in the integrity and future of journalism
I could go on, but will wrap up with this gem. Bullet point No. 9. “Maintain operational communication with editor.” Operational communication? Couldn’t we just … talk? And since when did reporters and editors engage in anything that resembled communication? That’s just not natural.
Take advantage of this unique opportunity to promote
None of this is natural, actually. It certainly does not seem as if the Pulitzer Prize winning New Orleans Times-Picayune, now to be known as Nola Media Group, is taking steps forward in the name of journalism. Then again, maybe it is. One giant step into nothing, right off that platform.
a specialized group of journalism leaders, owners
When Pat Louise started her first job as a reporter for the Corning (NY) Leader many years ago, her boss handed her a map of Steuben County and said, Go find news. She is distraught to realize she is no longer qualified to be a Reporter, even though she spent six years working at a Newhouse-owned newspaper.
one of three established journalism reviews in the
your business to media professionals in the Midwest. Gateway Journalism Review subscribers consist of and academics. The subscription base continues to grow and expand across the region. Now residing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, GJR is
Call or e-mail for advertising packages and specials 618-536-3361 • gatewayjr@siu.edu
United States; GJR’s 16-state Midwest focus differs from that of its two East Coast counterparts.
618-536-3361 • gatewayjr@siu.edu