She Wept, And Understandably So.

This is a photograph of the chief flight attendant on the airliner that crash in San Francisco last weekend. My understanding is that she and her fellow crew members performed heroically in the event. That said here is the caption accompanying the photo at the Lens blog today.

"Kim Yoon-ju, a flight attendant on the Asiana flight that crashed in San Francisco last week, became emotional during a news conference near Seoul." Photograph © Kim Hong-ji/Reuters.

When did it become impossible to say that a person wept or cried or shed tears? When did the press decide it is necessary to speak euphemistically about a simple, normal reaction to stress and sadness and fear? Can I say that I find the phrase became emotional incredibly irritating? I just did.

Greenwald & the "Journalists" (2)

This You Tube video contains a longish speech Greenwald has given regarding journalism, The Guardian, the NSA & Edward Snowden. A transcript of his speech is available here.

Greenwald & the "Journalists"

"You can be a journalist who is an advocate and advances a political point of view. Or one who remains politically agnostic. Both are legitimate. But what really matters is the information that enters the public sphere, its validity, how it is presented, and any debate it provokes. Not who put it there in the first place, or even why they did it."

My friend Michael Shaw forwarded a link to this smart commentary by John McQuiad at Forbes (of all places) on the more or less hysterical reaction in the mainstream press to Glenn Greenwald's role in breaking the NSA surveillance story.  The commentary is mis-titled "Why Glenn Greenwald Drives the Media Crazy." McQuaid actually does not do more than document that Greenwald does drive them nuts. He never gets around to telling us "why."

My take is that most journalists in the U.S. play the role of stenographer to talking heads from (mostly center-to-right wing) "intellectuals," business mouthpieces, and government officials. And if that is what it means to be a journalist, then Greenwald surely is not one. But, that is hardly a defensible conception of "journalist." In any case, the conclusion to the piece (quoted at the top) is just right. The enterprise of policing the boundaries of journalism is a sideshow. The mainstream media ought to be concerned less with professing to report news from some fantasy world of detachment and objectivity and more with figuring out what is going on in the world and letting the rest of us know. The story here is about widespread, secret government surveillance of regular citizens.

Niall Ferguson: Peddling Lies and Bullshit

Well, in his role as drum-major for failed economic policies (namely austerity as a cure for all that ails us) Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has produced this piece in Newsweek that has generated a storm of critical responses: James Fallows, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein and Brad DeLong have deflated Ferguson's attack on the Obama administration. Ferguson remains undeterred.

Among the claims at issue is one where Ferguson insists - putatively on the basis of analysis by the Congressional Budget Office - that the Affordable Care Act will violate Obama's 2008 pledge not to raise taxes on middle-income Americans and that it will contribute to the nation's deficit woes.

It is scant surprise that Ferguson, who was an adviser to the unsuccessful and unlamented 2008 McCain campaign, has little patience for Obama or his policies. (I myself don't have much either!) But it is some surprise to learn - as reported here and here at Politico - that not only do the folks at Newsweek not fact check submissions, but they don't seem to mind that Ferguson seems to have been simply "makin' shit up" for this piece. One would think that a self-respecting journalistic outlet would want essays it publishes to be sound. And one would think that an historian would find it important to get basic facts right. One would think. And instead we get silence from Newsweek and what we can only call the Bullshit defense from Ferguson. Here is an appropriate reply from Brad Delong:

"And his only excuse--now, it's not an excuse for the lie, it's a "I can lie cleverly" boast--is: "I very deliberately said 'the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA', not 'the ACA'".

Fire his ass.

Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast.

Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.

There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it."

And here, at The Atlantic, is a more temperate riposte, in which their business and economics editor slices and dices Ferguson's claims. Niall? Newsweek?

Passings ~ Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)

Journalist Alexander Cockburn, who wrote for The Nation among other outlets, has died of cancer. His colleague Jeffrey St. Clair announced his death here. Update: And here is John Nichols from The Nation. Update 2: An obituary here from The New York Times.

What Genre is This?

Today, the NPR program "This American Life" issued this press release retracting and apologizing for a segment they had run a while back on the way Apple does business in China. I linked to the TAL segment in this post but don't think the fabrications being discussed in the retraction make any substantive difference to what I wrote.

The retraction will likely bring out two constituencies. First, there will be the Apple devotees who simply cannot imagine that Saint Steve or his legacy can be criticized. That resurgence should be squelched promptly by the fact that there have been a plethora of other reports of Apple's troubling policies. Second, there will be the right-wing press who no doubt will take this as an indicator of how the ultra-liberal media juggernaut that is NPR needs to be brought down a notch or two more.

In any case, this episode highlights another recent essay, this one in The New York Times Sunday Book Review a couple weeks back. The issue is how to sort out journalism from fiction from creative non-fiction in reasonably clear ways.* Responding to "The Lifespan of a Fact", Rebecca Solnit sent this letter to The Times in which she suggests why it is important to get that task right:

To the Editor:

I was so pleased to see Jennifer B. McDonald take on and take a stand on one of the big issues in contemporary writing, the mixed-up, messed-up mash-up between truth and fiction. The potential for serious damage grows as this approach creeps out from memoir (where maybe you’re sort of entitled to lie about yourself, if not anyone else) and into works about strangers, including people who — as the stalwart fact-checker Jim Fingal points out — are not going to be publicly represented any other way, and about politically and culturally complex figures and events. When I teach, I tell my students that it’s a slippery slope from the nasty thing their stepfather never really did to the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq never really had.

A good artist is not hindered by her responsibility to both subject and readers, but stimulated to go deeper, look harder, write better. Maybe that’s because the stories don’t belong to you. You belong to them.

REBECCA SOLNIT
San Francisco

And that is why the retraction the folks at "This American Life" have issued is important.
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* I took up this matter a while ago in this series of posts on Ryszard Kapuściński.

P.S.: You can find the report that led "This American Life" to retract their segment on Apple in China here. I will note that part of what provides the background to this episode is the ridiculous notion that moralism is the proper response to political-economic exploitation or hardship. As one of the people interviewed for the follow-up suggests: “Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good. . . . That’s a great simple message and it’s going to resonate with a public radio listener. It’s going to resonate with the New York Times reader. And I think that’s one of the reasons he’s had so much traction.” (The 'he' is Mike Daisey, who produced the initial TAL segment.) Of course, the point of my initial post on Apple and working conditions in its supply chain were directed specifically at that error.

Robert Fisk on Journalists and Heroism

I came across this provocative essay on war journalism by Robert Fisk at The Independent. I have repeated posted on the deaths and other travails of Western journalists. I've also repeatedly posted on the propensity to ignore the dead and wounded - whether they were intentional targets or "collateral damage" - of American military adventures. My point in commenting about the various risks and actual costs of reporting on conflicts and violence is that absent the willingness of reporters to do so we would typically be even more ignorant than we are about events in the world.

I think Fisk's essay is astute, but it risks condemning journalists for doing their jobs. Only at the end do we get the proper target clearly in focus - the news outlets that define for journalists what their job actually is. Which conflicts get covered? Why? Sontag is only exaggerating slightly when she complains that a war without photographs never really happens.
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Update (4 March 2012): Ironically, I somehow missed this piece by Tyler Hicks that appeared in The New York Times yesterday. In it, Hicks, a photojournalist, relates his experience with Anthony Shadid, a celebrated journalist who died last week covering the ongoing war in Syria. It seems to me that Fisk and Hicks are in conversation and we are eavesdropping.

Framing OWS

This image graces the cover of The Economist this week, my copy of which arrived in the mail this morning. Two things are worth noticing. The first is the seeming incongruity between the anti-capitalist OWS protester and the American flag he seems to be carrying. There is, it seems, an increasingly apparent disconnect between traditional "American values" like equality and freedom and the force of cash in the polity. When so much current talk about the movement has to do with the convergence (or otherwise) between OWS and the Tea Party, this seems like an important point to make. The second is the way the editors at The Economist frame the image. I cannot find a larger version of the cover, but even the thumbnail at left makes clear the upper border of the image is presented as having a roughly and unevenly torn edge. This gives a certain air of urgency, danger even, to the red on black headline - Rage Against the Machine. What is the point there? If anything, it seems that while frustrated and angry, the OWS folks have kept any "rage" they might experience well in check. To be fair, the cover essay acknowledges the reasons people have for their deep, abiding dissatisfaction with the political economic system - even as it then proceeds to sketch wholly inadequate remedies. But this cover seems to be locating the source of our difficulties less with capitalism and more with its vaguely threatening critics. What is rending the social and political fabric is not protesters who've reached the end of their tether, but the excesses of capitalists in both the economy and in politics.

Last Day to Contribute to Prison Photography on the Road

Pete Brook, who runs the extremely insightful and important blog Prison Photography is setting out on a longish tour of the US the purpose of which he describes like this:

'Prison Photography' on the Road is a journalism project. I will conduct over 40 audio interviews, publish them online and make them available to the prison reform and photography communities free of charge via Creative Commons licensing. My writing during the trip will also be CC licensed. I'm doing the legwork so others can enjoy the ride and use the results.

Pete has been raising money to fund the project on Kickstarter and, while he seems to have met his threshold, he surely could use a bit more funding. So, if you can swing it and you have not already done so, link through to the Kickstarter page and make a donation. His fundraising campaign ends September 29th.

Memo to Joe Nocera (and the People Who Hired Him): Try Harder!

Some of you may have noticed that The New York Times has added a new columnist to its editorial page. His name is Joe Nocera and, as a long time correspondent for business periodicals, he seems now to be the official mouthpiece for corporate insanity at The Times.

To date Nocera has published not one but two columns trumpeting the virtues of hydraulic-fracturing as a way of extracting natural gas. I have posted here several times about the stupidity of that process. Nocera seems not to have read my posts. I suppose that is excusable. But he also seems not to have bothered reading this series of articles that his own newspaper published last month on the lunacy of "fracking." And he seems to have missed the stories running in The Times today on (1) the actual practice of (as opposed to the imagined oh-so-nice-and-clean industry propaganda about) drilling for natural gas and (2) the campaign from the right to subvert state-level environmental regulations.

What is wrong with this sort of oversight? Well, there is the obvious problem is that it makes Nocera look exactly like a shill for industry. But there are a couple of other reasons. The first is that Nocera simply is dismissive of those who raise well-founded objections to natural gas drilling. His standard retort is that skeptics are somehow "biased" or self-interested. The second is that his own position depends and depends crucially on the good-will of industry and the competence of regulators. Unfortunately, there is no basis for either of those presumptions.

In his first column Nocera announced that his thinking on the "fracking" issue specifically and on natural gas drilling more generally owed a large debt to his friend T. Boone Pickens. Talk about a credibility deflating admission.* Of course, good ole T Boone is unconcerned with the money. Ask him and he'll say as much. And as for the safety of natural gas extraction here is Nocera: " In Texas and Oklahoma, it has been used for decades, with nobody complaining much about environmental degradation." You know, those two southwestern states who've built a well-deserved reputation for environmental stewardship!

This is reasoned argument? Yet Nocera has the temerity to attack the credibility of the Cornell University scientist who - as The Times reported - published research findings suggesting that just maybe natural gas is no panacea. Here is a simple asymmetry to ponder. The Cornell scientist might just possibly have come to his policy conclusions on the basis of his research; spokesmen for the extractive industries in Texas came to their policy views on the basis of the profits they have made or stand to make. We are supposed to think of the common good, the national welfare and so forth; they are allowed to speak for their economic self interest. Of course, many property owners in Pennsylvania and "upstate" New York are concerned about their property values. They might also be concerned about the water pollution and other environmental degradation that follows on gas drilling ('fracking' or otherwise). They may also be worried that the Northeast will turn into Texas or Oklahoma (and I mean that in the best of all possible ways!). Nocera never countenances either possibility.

Instead, Nocera promises us nirvana: "The truth is, every problem associated with drilling for natural gas is solvable. The technology exists to prevent most methane from escaping, for instance. Strong state regulation will help ensure environmentally safe wells. And so on." All we have to do is set aside all the reporting, all the research. Or perhaps, like Nocera, we simply need to place our faith in a world in which vigorous regulators and virtuous energy companies will take great care and avoid the incompetence and venality we've come to expect from them. Any takers? How about all those city dwellers in NYC who get their water from reservoirs upstate?

If you cannot muster the faith, Nocera will invite you on the guilt trip. The one that meanders through the corpses of American military personnel dying for oil in the middle east. There is a leap! Basically, Nocera's "argument" amounts to non-sequitors, ad hominem attacks, cozy-ing up to gas industry billionaires, leaps of faith in industry and regulators, and a plea to believe him (as opposed to reporters and researchers) that natural gas exploration is clean and safe. All this in the first few weeks of his residency on the op-ed columns. What a joke. The Times cannot be that desperate for columnists.
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* Memo to Joe: Simply admitting that you are working as a mouthpiece for the rich and financially involved does not excuse sloppy thinking or make otherwise incredible statements believable.

Calling a Lie a Lie

This post by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com is worth your time. How can journalists live up to their (usually vastly exaggerated) claim to 'speak truth to power' if they cannot say that something is false? I am not a fan - at all - of Anderson Cooper. But Greenwald suggests how deep the problem actually goes:

"Had Anderson Cooper used such harsh language to describe the statements of someone universally despised in American mainstream political circles (an American Enemy -- such as, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez), it would likely have gone unnoticed. But here, Cooper used such language to condemn one of America's closest and most cherished allies, and it was thus gently deemed a departure from journalistic propriety. But had Cooper said such things about a leading American political official, then a true journalistic scandal would have erupted."

Orwell's Shadow (2) ~ How "Torture" Disappeared From (or, Was Banished By) American Journalism

"Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute (sic) experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language." ~ Robert Fisk

In my last post (here) I recommended the essay by Robert Fisk on journalism and the language of power from which I've lifted this passage. The "we" and "our" he refers to are journalists. His complaint is that the press (print and broadcast) have embraced the language of the powerful. Sometimes this is because of the putative need to retain "access"; sometimes it reflects the convention of being "fair" or "neutral" or "objective." Either way, capitulating to the powerful and their claims leads, as Fisk indicates, to decidedly partial and political reporting.

As if on cue, yesterday Glenn Greenwald posted on a newly released report on the U.S. media entitled "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The study finds that the four largest circulation national print news outlets - The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today - capitulated more or less completely to the campaign by the Bush Administration to redefine interrogation techniques commonly recognized to be torture as something other than torture. They did so in a sharp break from their own historical practice, reaching back nearly a century, and from their own descriptions of practices in other countries. ("They" torture, "we" don't; we simply rely on "enhanced interrogation techniques.") These outlets, thereby, did not maintain "neutrality" or "objectivity" or "fairness" but actively connived in legitimating the torture policy that the Bush administration implemented.

This is a damning report. We are not talking about the clowns at FOX "News" here. We are talking about the purportedly "liberal" media. Fortunately, as Fisk notes, people are not stupid. They know torture when they see it and can call it by its name.
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P.S.: While I don't want top ring my own bell on this one (too loudly), this is a pattern that I have posted about repeatedly - see here and here and here, for instance.

P.S.(2): You might want to see Andrew Sullivan's post on this, and the reply issued by the lackeys at The New York Times. Why read Pravda, when you can read the American mainstream media.

P.S.(3): Update 7/6/2010 ~ See this follow-up by Glenn Greenwald on the vapid response of editorial higher-ups at The Times.

Roxana Saberi ~ Journalist Detained In Iran

How to help North Dakotan held in Iran
By Jill Burcum
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Last update: March 2, 2009 - 6:15 PM

Roxana Saberi, a brave young journalist from North Dakota now detained in Iran, has some heavyhitters pushing for her release: North Dakota’s two senators, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, as well as Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar.

But Saberi also needs the public’s help. Phone calls and emails to the Iranian mission at the United Nations in New York will send a strong message to Iranian authorities that Saberi’s is a global plight and they need to act now to release her.

Saberi, a 31-year-old of Iranian and Japanese descent, is a 1994 honors graduate of Fargo North High School and went on to graduate from Concordia College in Moorhead and Cambridge University in Britain. For the past six years, she’s lived in Iran and has reported for the BBC and National Public Radio and other media outlets. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), she’s been detained by Iranian authorities since January. Details are sketchy about why she is being held and where she is.

Wire services have reported that Iranian officials have accused her of "illegal" reporting activities. In a phone call to her father Reza Saberi in early February, however, she said she was being held for buying a bottle of wine, which is illegal in Iran but also not uncommon. Saberi, a former Miss Dakota and "Miss Scholar" in the Miss America pageant, has not been heard from since that Feb. 10 phone call.

Iran has one of world’s worst records when it comes to imprisoning journalists and activists. Saberi is in a dangerous situation. A young Canadian-Iranian photojournalist died in custody in July 2003 after being held for three weeks for taking photos of a student protest in Tehran, according to CPJ.

The U.S. State Department is making inquiries about Saberi through Swiss diplomatic channels; the U.S. and Iran do not have diplomatic relations. A French wire service reported Monday that the Iranian judiciary will hold a press conference on Tuesday during which Saberi’s situation will be addressed.CPJ program coordinator Mohamed Abdel Dayem said that this action by the Iranian authorities confirms that Saberi is likely being held for reasons far more serious than buying wine. The press conference, he said, is welcome and a sign that "she’s not in as bad a shape as she could be."

Human rights officials believe that generating as much publicity for Saberi will help pressure Iranians to release her — and do it sooner versus later. To register your concerns with the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, call 212-687-2020 or email them at iran@un.int. Emails to the offices of Conrad, Dorgan and Klobuchar will also help. There’s also a fledgling Facebook group supporting Saberi called "Release and return journalist Roxana Saberi from IR custody." As of Monday afternoon, there were just 25 members. Her situation is serious. A full-throated roar of outrage from the Midwest and around the world is a crucial key to this young woman’s well-being and future.

The Press Gets Some Backbone, Finally

President Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday (21 January 09).
Photograph ~ Pete Souza/The White House.

It is safe to say that major news outlets fell down on the job during the eight years of BushCo. Arguably, they allowed the administration to restrict access to and distribution of information and visuals to an unprecedented extent. They failed, in other words, on matters of global import - like war and torture and terrorism. Now, with the advent of the Obama administration, they clearly have mended their ways. They've decided to draw a line in the sand, take a stand, and all that. The issue? Whether they have access to ceremonial 'first day in office' photo-ops or whether they will simply distribute images from the White House photographer. 'Hell no!' say Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. They are saying 'Here I stand, I will go no further!' and have refused to distribute the official images. It's a matter of principle, after all. Finally. The story is here in The International Herald Tribune.

Murdered Journalists - "If You Write You Will Be Killed"

We in the U.S. have been preoccupied with the inauguration and, before that, with the Israeli invasion of Gaza (Carefully choreographed to end in time for the Inauguration). In the meantime, thugs have been killing independent journalists with impunity. As one would expect, the relevant authorities have initiated the customary investigations.

In Moscow, Lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova were shot dead on January 19th. The 25 year old Baburova had been reporting for Novaya Gazeta only since October, working to bring to light the criminal activities of Russian fascists. Her assassination was reported here at openDemocracy. This is the latest in a series of such killings.

In Sri Lanka, Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of The Sunday Leader was shot dead on January 8th. As editor, Wickramatunga had navigated an independent course, criticizing both the Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan regime. There is a report on his murder here in The Washington Post and close to a handful of reports in The Guardian [1] [2] [3] [4]. Wickramatunga anticipated his assassination (he had received multiple threats) and wrote this remarkable editorial prior to his death; The Sunday Leader published it after he was murdered.

Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007)

Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński died in Warsaw on Tuesday, probably of cancer. You can read the obituary from The New York Times here. I have read only a little of Kapuściński work (and not just because much of it has never appeared in English), but The Times is right to paint him as being perhaps as important for having challenged genre boundaries as for any single piece of his "reportage." In his essays Kapuściński trampled across the border of journalism and literature for reasons that seem immediately important here because of a recent post on Amos Oz. Here are a couple of paragraphs from his obituary in The Times:

"Mr. Kapuściński (pronounced ka-poos-CHIN-ski) spent some four decades observing and writing about conflict throughout the developing world. He witnessed 27 coups and revolutions. He spent his working days gathering information for the terse dispatches he sent to PAP, often from places like Ougadougou or Zanzibar.

At night, he worked on longer, descriptive essays with phantasmagoric touches that went far beyond the details of the day’s events, using allegory and metaphors to convey what was happening.

“It’s not that the story is not getting expressed” in ordinary news reports, he said in an interview. “It’s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town; the smell; the thousands and thousands of elements that are part of the events you read about in 600 words of your morning paper.”"

So Kapuściński and Oz agree that to convey the realities of battle and other sorts of mayhem one needs to focus on details - e.g., the smell - that are extra-ordinarily difficult to put into words. The two writers simply approached that difficulty in different ways. Oz deems it beyond his capacity; Kapuściński proceeded, if not undaunted, at least with determination and considerable success.