MEDIA MATTERS: Who is a journalist?
Welcome to Leading Edge’s media blog. The basic material is written by Jerry Ceppos, former vice president for news of Knight Ridder and former executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News. But the blog depends on you. Post your reactions to Jerry’s thoughts—or your views on any media issue, especially any involving the intersection of the media and leadership, one of Leading Edge’s specialties.
I spent a fascinating four days last week discussing with academics and a few practitioners exactly “who is a journalist.” Two points stick with me from the discussion, at the Whalen Symposium on Media Ethics at the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities:
1. As we all suspected, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are among the most important news sources for young people, according to the academics and to St. Thomas students. (After I returned, I asked a group of 15-year-olds in San Jose about their most important sources of news. Stewart’s The Daily Show was second only to the print edition of the San Jose Mercury News—and the Mercury News result was suspect because the kids knew of my background.)
2. The path from discovering a story to publication isn’t as smooth as most of us think. Doug McGill, who now writes the McGill Report learned through good, basic local reporting in Minnesota that the Anuaks of Ethiopia systematically were being wiped out by their own government.But Doug, who reported for the New York Times for 10 years and edited for Bloomberg for five years, couldn’t get anyone to report on the story because he no longer had an institution behind him, or because “authorities” hadn’t made the same discovery, or because he initially was only an “earwitness” to cell-phone reports about the massacres rather than being an eyewitness. (Doug later visited Ethiopia and verified the story.) To this day, media other than the McGill report have paid scant attention.
I couldn’t help but think of the phone calls that I used to take at the Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury News from folks who claimed they had great stories that no one else had broken. In this case, even a veteran reporter from the New York Times and Bloomberg couldn’t get someone like me to listen. I wonder how many great stories we lose because of our refusal to listen well.
To this day, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press have shown virtually zero interest in the Anuak genocide, despite the fact that about 1,500 Anuak refugees live in the state. This number includes virtually the entire strong, young, healthy male and female leadership of the entire Anuak tribe which now numbers only 100,000 or so in Ethiopia. On the other hand, many other kinds of civic and religious groups in Minnesota have rallied to the Anuak’s aid, especially churches with Anuak in their congregations, human rights groups, and several colleges and universities have organized conferences and special events. How come the state’s largest newspapers aren’t in this good company? They are lagging way behind the non-profit sector on this story. I think if you look at the papers themselves you have a big part of the answer. The papers are getting fatter and fatter with lifestyle, celebrity, and demographic-targeted coverage trying to lock-in young readers, wealthy readers, tech-savvy readers, etc. Meanwhile the news hole shrinks and shrinks and the content generally follows increasingly archaic story forms, formats, and formulas. (Including “he said, she said,” which millions of readers have long since caught onto.) I have to say that in addition, I encountered a great timidity at the Star-Tribune on the Anuak story when I approached them. Even after I had returned from Africa having interviewed several dozen eyewitnesses to the massacre of December 13 myself, as well as having personally interviewed the Ethiopian government official who likely ordered the killings, I was told time after time by the Star-Trib editors (I wrote three drafts, all of them killed) that my sourcing was not good enough. If this genocide was real, how come the United Nations hadn’t said anything? How come Human Rights Watch hadn’t said anything? How come The New York Times hadn’t said anything? This speaks to many things, one of them being mainstream journalism’s Achilles Heel for relying so cravenly on official sources. But also, that even our big metropolitan dailies don’t have many folks on staff with international expertise. It didn’t compute to my editors, who had never lived abroad, that the United Nations might actually be complicit in the African genocide. (Just as it was in Rwanda.) To me, newspapers have been on a slippery slope for a couple of decades, during which time journalism motivated by a public service aim has shrivelled, and journalism serving a profit-making corporation has strengthened. But the latter isn’t really even journalism, in my book. It’s more like advertising or propaganda. The hopeful part though is that a lot of newsroom refugees are starting up civic-centered, idealistic, muckraking journalism again in projects just like this one at Leading Age. Sometimes the journalism is reportage, and sometimes it’s thinking things through at a fundamenta level, as on Leading Edge. Either way, it’s a really invigorating and hopeful trend. Long life here on the Internet, Jerry and Larry!
Doug McGill said this on November 11th, 2006 at 1:15 am