As World Press Freedom Day approaches on Friday, May 3, news organizations around the world are encouraged to join in the “Defend Journalism” campaign.
The campaign is intended to stand up for free, independent and quality journalism. Special editorial coverage dedicated to the campaign will be amplified by UNESCO.
This year’s theme for World Press Freedom Day is “Media for Democracy: Journalism and Elections in Times of Disinformation.” Organizations are encouraged to promote the key messages:
Facts, not falsehoods should inform citizens’ decisions during elections.
Technology innovations should be used to help achieve peaceful elections.
Transparency and the right to information protect the integrity of elections.
Journalists should be able to work without fear of attacks.
Internet shutdown compromise democracy.
An open and accessible internet for all.
Fair and independent reporting can counter incitement and hate.
Informed citizens that think critically can contribute to peaceful elections.
Media contributes to peaceful, just and inclusive societies.
News organisations across the globe are encouraged to participate in the “Defend Journalism” campaign surrounding #WorldPressFreedomDay to stand up for free, independent and quality journalism, and to dedicate special editorial coverage in the build-up to May 3. UNESCO will amplify their content, as they have done with media partners in previous years.
UNESCO is providing news organisations with materials such as banners for print, digital, and social media in the six official UN languages to build momentum around #WorldPressFreedomDay.
The global conference for the Day will take place in Addis Ababa, jointly organised by UNESCO, the Government of Ethiopia and the African Union Commission.
This year, the annual World Press Freedom Prize will be awarded to the two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, imprisoned in Myanmar.
First: UNESCO, for those unaware, is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The U.S. and Israel left UNESCO earlier this year over UNESCO’s organizational bias against Israel, which is only our longest-standing ally in the Middle East. But that’s not the only problem with UNESCO, as Time Magazine reports:
The Trump administration’s statement cited “mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO” as reasons for the decision. Those rationales echo arguments made by the administration of president Ronald Reagan in December 1983, when the U.S. previously announced a decision to pull out of UNESCO: “UNESCO has extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with. It has exhibited hostility toward a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and it has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion.” …
When 37 nations created UNESCO as a human rights organization promoting education, science and cultural causes in November 1945, “it was essentially a western entity, dominated by western funding,” says political scientist Jerry Pubantz, co-author of To Create a New World? American Presidents and the United Nations and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the United Nations. School systems in Europe were undergoing “denazification” and, as part of that process, the U.S. wanted to be sure that they taught World War II accurately. UNESCO was a way to influence those curricula. Likewise, during the Cold War, American officials imagined UNESCO as an advocate for free speech in an era of communist propaganda.
But, as more members joined the group — about 160 members by July 1983 — U.S. policy makers grew worried their voices would be drowned out. The newest members were “largely the decolonized new independent states of Africa and Asia” who “tended to be less supportive of American policies, and more supportive of the Soviet bloc’s position,” says Pubantz.
In addition, some U.S. officials soured on the group because, despite the new members, they felt the U.S. was left footing a disproportionate amount of the bill for UNESCO’s work. Or Jeane Kirkpatrick, who represented the U.S. at the U.N. put it, “The countries which have the votes don’t pay the bill, and those who pay the bill don’t have the votes,” as TIME reported in a Jan. 9, 1984, article.
That feature, “Waving Goodbye to UNESCO,” summed up specific events that contributed to the decision to pull out of UNESCO:
The first real scuffle came in 1974, when UNESCO voted to exclude Israel from a regional working group because it allegedly altered “the historical features of Jerusalem” during archaeological excavations and “brainwashed” Arabs in the occupied territories. Congress promptly suspended UNESCO‘s appropriations, which forced the agency to soften its sanctions. In 1976 Israel was readmitted; in 1977 U.S. funding resumed.
In 1980, at the UNESCO general conference in Belgrade, a majority of Communist and Third World nations called for a “new world information order” to compensate for the alleged pro-Western bias of global news organizations. The goals were the licensing of journalists, an international code of press ethics and increased government control over media content. Although UNESCO backed off under pressure from the West, it still allocated $16 million for a two-year program to study “media reforms.”
The U.S. also chafed at UNESCO‘s increasingly collectivist outlook. The agency’s charter, like that of the U.N., commits its members to support basic human rights. In the past five years, however, the “rights of peoples”—in other words, the state—have taken priority over “individual” rights.
The Administration was rankled further by what UNESCO bought with its money: a bloated bureaucracy with a taste for the good life. Despite UNESCO‘S stated concern for the Third World, few of its staff are deployed there. Indeed, 2,428 of its 3,380 employees work in the comfortable confines of the Paris headquarters, ,where a mid-level bureaucrat’s salary is about $2,500 a month, tax free. Some staffers are better connected than qualified: the important post of personnel director went to Serge Vieux, the cousin of [UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow’s] wife.
A final irritant was the autocratic M’Bow, who, according to Western members, pandered to Third World interests in hopes of some day getting enough votes to become U.N. Secretary-General.
The voters who elected Reagan may have influenced the decision, too. Russell L. Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, adds that the rationale behind leaving UNESCO jibed with the Reagan administration’s overall economic agenda: “It was an easy way to save a little money and could prove to Americans that we [U.S. government officials] were being fiscally responsible.”
Increasing government control over the media and press freedom are oxymorons, and UNESCO’s involvement should make everyone suspect of …
This is the second time in nine months that the media felt the need to rally around and promote itself. The first was due to the orange-haired meanie in the White House, for whom they should be thanking God — or would if they were religious, though they are not — for Trump’s making their work as easy as humanly possible. In the same way that dissent has become patriotic again now that an R and not a D is in the White House, harsh reporting upon said Oval Office occupant and his party is back in style, as it was not between 2009 and 2016.
Some of the aforementioned “key” messages should be noncontroversial. (Point three was lost on the Obama White House, and appears to be lost on this state’s Evers administration, which bars the MacIver Institute from access because MacIver has the wrong ideology.) Point four, about journalists’ working without fear of attacks (I thought the only thing we had to fear was fear itself), seems more motivated by those mean words of Donald Trump than people like Lyra McKee, who was killed in Northern Ireland by “dissident republicans.” Every time a journalist whines about mean Trump, that journalist demonstrates a lack of backbone (which I suppose reads less harsh than “cowardice”) when journalists elsewhere in the world are reporting at risk to their own lives.
That part about “diverse sources” is ironic given that much of the news media’s current problems have to do with a lack of “diverse” sources — that is, intellectually and ideologically diverse, sources beyond the liberal institutional/governmental status quo. Arguably diversity is less of a media problem than reporters’ inability to relate to their own readers.
People will jump, and should, all over the part about “just and inclusive societies.” Our job as journalists is to report, not foment societal change, and those in for the latter reason are in journalism for the wrong reasons. Reporting might start societal change, but (1) remember that “change” and ‘progress” are not synonyms and change can be positive or negative, and (2) it is incredibly arrogant for journalists to assume they know where society should change.
On Sunday’s edition of her weekly syndicated show Full Measure, host Sharyl Attkisson discussed the results of a poll conducted by Scott Rasmussen that reflects very negatively on media credibility. During an on-screen interview with Attkisson, the pollster highlighted the most shocking result of the poll: “78 percent of voters say that…what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking to accurately record what happened” while “only 14 percent think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.” Rasmussen continued: “if a reporter found out something that would hurt their favorite candidate, only 36 percent of voters think that they would report that.” Rasmussen summed up the results of the poll by declaring that voters see journalists as a “political activist, not as a source of information.”
One reason why Republicans and conservatives should support press freedom, including open government records, is in this state, during Act 10 and Recallarama, when, thanks to the fact that election petition signatures are public records (specifically the recall effort against Gov. Scott Walker), we got to find out the people who (1) get government paychecks, (2) are candidates for office, or (3) are in the news media who signed the petitions. That is the public’s right to know.
There will never be support for press freedom from politicians. There is no question in my mind that all the Democrats jumping on the media bandwagon are hoping they will be treated with the same light touch that the media used on Obama, before him Bill Clinton, and after him Hillary Clinton. (Which has a lot to do with mean orange-hair man now in the Oval Office, but you can tell that to neither Democrats nor journalists.) Reporters worth their salt revel in being hated by politicians of any or no party. Then again, reporters worth their salt don’t hold parties celebrating themselves.
Something else you may not see acknowledged today is that the First Amendment does not belong merely to the press. (And the news media includes more than however the media defines itself, with the intent of squelching out alternative voices. The marketplace of ideas should decide which news media outlets are legitimate and which are not based on the quality of their work.) Like this state’s Open Meetings and Open Records laws, our First Amendment rights apply to every American, not just to the news media. It would be nice if the news media acknowledged that fact, as well as our other constitutional rights.
The United States is now “problematic.” Although this conclusion might refer to a variety of suboptimal conditions, the international journalistic advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) applied it to the way in which Americans treat members of the Fourth Estate. In this year’s index of press freedoms, the United States has fallen to 48 out of 180 nations when it comes to freedom of the press.
“Never before have US journalists been subjected to so many death threats or turned so often to private security firms for protection,” RSF’s press releaseread. American reporters operate in a “hostile climate” that owes much to the president’s anti-media antagonism. “President Donald J. Trump’s presidency has fostered further decline in journalists’ right to report,” America’s ignominious profile read. Reporters are subject to arrest or even “physical assault” just for doing their jobs. By way of examples to support this conclusion, however, RSF relies primarily on the murder of four journalists at the Capital Gazette in Maryland last year. “The gunman had repeatedly expressed his hatred for the paper on social networks before ultimately acting on his words,” the organization revealed.
This mass murder was an atrocity, but to imply that it was a product of a general hatred of reporters percolating in the political atmosphere is a gross injustice. The attacker nursed a grudge against this particular paper—not journalists as a professional class—for six years following the 2011 publication of an article involving a criminal-harassment case against him. An earlier RFS study on America’s dangerous climate for reporters noted that two other reporters also died while on the job, but they were killed when they were hit by a falling tree while covering a storm in North Carolina. For this, America ranked along with Syria, Afghanistan, and Mexico as among the most dangerous places in the world to be a reporter. If journalists honestly believed conditions in America are equal to those that prevail in two war zones and a state teetering on the brink of implosion, journalists have far bigger problems than a “climate of fear.”
So, what of the nations that now outrank the United States? According to RFS, you’re freer practicing journalism in places like Jamaica, Surinam, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, Ghana, Cyprus, Papua New Guinea, Botswana, and Tonga than you are in America. But a cursory glance at these countries profiles puts the lie to this assertion. Namibia’s intelligence apparatus is busy criminalizing independent reporting while the state patronizes and prioritizes government media. In late 2017, the Samoan parliament passed a law giving its prime minister license to “attack journalists who dared to criticize members of his government.” In the bifurcated island nation of Cyprus, a haven for criminality and money laundering, the state places restrictions on the capacity to report historic facts and use geographic names it deems inconvenient. “[S]elf-censorship is on the rise and many media outlets are regarded as Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s mouthpieces,” read RSF’s dispatch from Papua New Guinea. And all of Botswana’s major television, radio, and print media are owned by the state and controlled by the government. These are today’s havens of journalistic freedom?
As is so often the case with non-profit listicles like these, no one reads beyond the headline. The perception that America under Trump has become a stultified wasteland of oppression and ignorance confirms the pernicious biases of too many reporters, many of whom already see their mission in world-historic terms. But it takes a special lack of journalistic curiosity to accept RFS’s premise at face value, which is what somanyreportorialinstitutionsdid. In that sense, the threat to the institution of journalism is real and growing, but it’s not coming from Donald Trump. Journalism’s enemy is hubris, and the threat is growing by the day.
The first time Lexington thought of Donald Trump at WrestleMania [last] week was when, to the fading strains of “America the Beautiful”, a helicopter flyover churned the night sky over the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Was the president about to make a surprise reappearance at the annual WWE sports-entertainment extravaganza to which he owes so much of his political method? The second time, well into the seven-hour grapplefest, was as the veteran star-wrestler “Triple H” was ripping out his grudge-rival’s nose-rings with a pair of pliers.
That was not only a reflection on how Mr Trump treats his cabinet. Paul Levesque, as Triple H was originally known, these days spends most of his time as a senior executive in the billion-dollar WWE business, having married into the McMahon clan that owns it. In reality-bending WWE style, he first married and divorced Stephanie McMahon, daughter of WWE founder Vince, fictitiously. This was part of a story-line in which she and her brother Shane, both WWE executives who appear in WWE productions as villainous executives and wrestlers, tried to steal their parents’ business. Triple H then actually married and had three children with her.
Those developments are now part of his wrestling character. As Triple H was mock-torturing his rival Batista this week, a WWE commentator—broadcasting live to 180 countries and one of America’s biggest television audiences—said mock-fearfully: “That’s my boss…” This disorienting mix of business, dynasty and entertainment—scrambling performance and reality, ham interests and financial ones—is the defining characteristic of professional wrestling and of its chief emulator, the president.
Mr Trump is another sometime WWE performer with close ties to the McMahons. A longtime fixture at WrestleMania, he launched a semi-scripted assault on Vince McMahon at the 2007 version. Having been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, he returned the favour by appointing Vince’s wife Linda to his cabinet, as head of the Small Business Administration. She will soon leave it to run a pro-Trump SuperPAC. Yet such personal links do not begin to do justice to Mr Trump’s stylistic debt to spoof wrestling.
To appreciate that, consider why it has proved so alluring. It is not because fans think the fights are real, exactly. Testifying before the New Jersey Senate in 1989—when the McMahons were trying to evade regulations on competitive sport—Mrs McMahon admitted they were fake. After this unprecedented flouting of “kayfabe”, as wrestlers call their scripted reality, some said the industry was finished. That it has instead grown hugely is chiefly owing to the power of escapism. The 80,000 wwe fans at the MetLife, typically young men with defiant slogans such as “I’m not dead yet muthafucker!” on their T-shirts, are the heroes of their own imaginations. Many carried chunky replicas of WWE (fake) championship belts. “It’s like Santa Claus, not real, but that’s not the point,” said Jason, a banker from Manhattan with a $300 belt over his shoulder.
WWE has also found new ways, in its scripting and use of digital media, to buttress the fantasy. Most important, it constantly shifts between different registers of make-believe, from real to credible to absurd. Thus, for example, its use of executives as characters. Similarly, its stars appear in and out of character on social media. In a pre-WrestleMania rant Ronda Rousey, a former mixed martial arts champion, slammed WWE as “not real” and vowed henceforth to do “whatever the hell I want”. Such tricks create sufficient doubt about what is real for WWE fans to keep living their dream.
A blurring of the age-old distinction between “faces and heels” also supports this shift towards realism: Triple H, once a heel, is now considered a good guy. So does the frenetic way WWE scriptwriters distract their audience with new talking-points: while it was legal for Triple H to take a sledge hammer to Batista, did it make sense, given his (actual) torn pectoral muscle, tactically?
Mr Trump’s success lies in applying WWE principles where the line between performance and reality is even finer. In “The Apprentice” he played a successful businessman. In politics he saw that the contest of ideas its participants claimed to be engaged in was really a partisan slugfest almost as contrived and absurd as the WWE. He therefore offered a more ghoulishly watchable version of what voters were already getting. Why choose Jeb Bush trying to be a pantomime bad-ass when you could have the real thing?
The president also employs the WWE’s new stagecraft. Mixing family, business and politics infuriates sticklers for the law, but makes his fans think he is somehow more real—or “authentic”—than his rivals. He is also a master of shifting between degrees of make-believe. “I’m not supposed to say this,” he interjects into his speeches, “but what the hell?” And then there are his constantly distracting micro-dramas, breathlessly echoed by a commentariat every bit as emotionally invested in the drama as the press gallery at WrestleMania, which often erupted into spontaneous gasps or applause. How much of Mr Trump’s behaviour is concocted is debatable; private Trump is also pretty pantomime. But that uncertainly merely adds, WWE style, to the reality-tumbling effect.
Mr Trump’s ham performance has been endangered by its own success—represented by two years of unified Republican government. A WWEperformer without an adversary would be a pitiful spectacle. It is therefore testament to the president’s genius that he was able to fill the void, not with policies, obviously, but rather a parade of new enemies: immigrant children, black football players, the late John McCain. Yet with the Democrats soon to choose a new champion, his performance may be about to get easier.
His opponents should be advised by this. The WWE’s popularity suggests their main hope, that voters will tire of Mr Trump’s grim clowning, may be wishful. More specifically, they should recognise that no professional politician can beat him in a grudge match. They would do better, where possible, to ignore him.
You may say that pro wrestling is fake. It is. Real sports do not have storylines and predetermined outcomes. And yet Sports Illustrated covers pro wrestling.
If you watched a lot of the coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s arrest on television Thursday, you likely came away with the understanding that he is some kind of Russian spy who is in trouble because he stole classified documents from the U.S. government.
That is not true. It’s factually incorrect, and saying so is not a defense of Assange. We’re not here to promote him or excuse any number of things he said over the years that we disagree with quite a lot.
But just so it’s clear, whatever his sins, Assange did not steal documents from the United States government. He did not hack the DNC servers. He didn’t break into John Podesta’s Gmail account.
There is no proof that he is working for the Russian government or ever has worked for the Russian government. Assange has never been charged with any of that and wasn’t on Thursday, no matter what they tell you.
If you’re upset about the theft of classified documents from the U.S. government — and there is reason to be — we already know who did that.
A 22- year-old Army private named Bradley Manning, now called Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Manning pleaded guilty to stealing secret material and got 35 years in prison for it.
Shortly after that, President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence. This allowed Manning to leave jail decades early, go back on television as a commentator, and then run for political office.
So if your real concern is America’s national security, you have someone to be angry at — Barack Obama. And yet strangely, nobody is.
Instead, they’re furious at Julian Assange for posting the documents that other people stole. “Julian Assange has long been a wicked tool of Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence services,” wrote professional moralizer Ben Sasse, who also serves in the U.S. Senate. “He deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Wicked? The rest of his life in prison? Idi Amin ate people and never faced this kind of scorn.
Not even close. Nor, for the record, was Amin ever extradited. He died at 78 years old in his own bed, leaving behind 43 loving children.
So what’s going on here? A couple of things. First, Julian Assange embarrassed virtually everyone in power in Washington.
He published documents that undermined the official story on the Iraq War and Afghanistan. He got Debbie Wasserman-Schultz fired from the DNC.
He humiliated Hillary Clinton by showing that the Democratic primaries were, in fact, rigged. Pretty much everyone in Washington has reason to hate Julian Assange.
Rather than just admit that straightforwardly – that he made us look like buffoons, so now we’re sending him to prison — instead, they’re denouncing him as, you guessed it, a Russian agent. “Justice should come to Julian Assange for his role in Russian meddling in our election and the sooner the better,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
Okay, so once again, just to be totally clear, no one has ever shown that Julian Assange is a Russian agent. The indictment against him does not say that; t doesn’t mention Russia at all.
But that has not stopped virtually every politician in Washington from repeating Senator Blumenthal’s line, including many Republicans. Robert Mueller nearly killed the Russia collusion hoax. Julian Assange is allowing them to keep it alive.
You’d think journalists would say something about this. Assange is, after all, one of them. What do you call a man who publishes news for a living?
Assange is no sleazier than many journalists in Washington; he’s definitely not more anti-American. He’s broken stories the New York Times would have won Pulitzers for. And yet many of his colleagues have disowned him.
So why all the hostility to Julian Assange? Assange’s real sin was preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president.
“Oh, please,” wrote Alexia Campbell of Vox. “Assange is no journalist. We know who he works for. ” (Meaning Russia.) “Julian Assange is not a journalist,” explained Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker, without actually explaining. Ken Dilanian of NBC, who doesn’t so much cover the national security state as he writes memos on its behalf, noted that, “Many believe that if Assange ever was a journalist, those days ended a long time ago.”
At NBC when they tell you “many believe” something, it means they believe it.
So why all the hostility to Julian Assange? Assange’s real sin was preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president.
Former Democratic staffer and current CNN anchor Jim Sciutto explained it this way: “He is central to several cases. He is central to Russian interference in the election. The U.S. intelligence views him as a middleman, a cutout that he was in effect part of this interference.
He’s central to questions about what the Trump administration or Trump campaign, I should say, knew prior to the release of those materials, right? What were the communications between Roger Stone, et cetera? It’s possible that this has something President Trump himself is not particularly excited about.”
It’s remarkable to watch this. It’s bewildering, actually. There was a time, not so long ago, really, when reporters didn’t applaud the arrest of other journalists for publishing information.
In 1971, the Washington Post and the New York Times published a trove of stolen classified documents about the Vietnam War.
It was called the Pentagon Papers. Remember that? Liberals loved it. Books were written celebrating their bravery.
As recently as 2011, the Washington Post saw the connection: “A conviction of Julian Assange would also cause collateral damage to American media freedoms.”
A Post op-ed said that year, “It is difficult to distinguish Assange or Wikileaks from the Washington Post.” And that’s true.
But that was before the Trump election and the total war that followed, a war in which the media have definitively chosen a side.
Press freedom?
Sure, as long as we agree with your politics. The First Amendment? Well, that all depends. Who did you vote for?
The guardians of speech or now the enemies of speech.
The people charged with policing power are now colluding with power.
There’s a reason you see John Brennan on NBC all the time. They’re all on the same team now.
We’re not saying any of this to defend Julian Assange.
We just want to be absolutely clear about who hurts this country more — and it’s not him.
The disappearance of a pregnant woman out West became national news. What possibly could have happened to her? Her husband expressed his grief and anxiety in front of a national TV audience. I turned to my wife next to me on the couch. “He did it,” I said. And so he did.
Between cop shows and real-life crime stories, we all recognize the trope: The first suspect is the partner or spouse, often the one who reports the crime.
Detectives are trained to sniff out the truth. That’s why the slang for them is bloodhounds — because they “track down” the killer. The metaphor is apt.
Science writer Marc McCutcheon notes that “The bloodhound’s epithelial membrane, or ‘sniffing organism’ is 50 times larger and thousands of times more sensitive than a human’s. The trace of sweat that seeps through your shoes and is left in your footprints … is a million times more powerful than the bloodhound needs to track you down.”
Let’s hear it for the nose. Journalists have all kinds of noses, or maybe just one nose, but a nose with a third nostril.
Among professionals, journalists are the dogs. They are guide dogs and watchdogs, trackers and pointers, but never lap dogs. They stand guard in the public’s yard. When danger, or even uncertainty, approaches, they bark. It’s a form of news telling. Hey, pay attention! Look at this! This guy doesn’t smell right!
Reporters as dogs.
My wife and I are again on the couch. A story out of Chicago of a young celebrity, Jussie Smollett, black, gay, the victim of a hate crime. At 2 a.m. on a frigid Chicago street, he is assaulted by two vicious thugs who claim allegiance to President Donald Trump, pour some liquid over him, and place a noose over his neck.
“This doesn’t smell right,” I said. She gave me a disgusted “you doubt everything” look.
I have spent 40 years listening to journalists and learning their lingo, their slogans, their metaphors. “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” That’s an old one. But at one time it may have been even more cynical. Melvin Mencher, an influential and curmudgeonly teacher at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, offered this version: “If your mother calls you Sonny, check it out.”
In other words, not only may your dear mother not love you, but how can you be sure that she is your real mother at all?
The distinction that most matters is the one between skepticism and cynicism. The practical skeptic doubts what he knows. His concern is about knowledge. The skeptical editor asks: “How do we know that?” Or “How can we know that?” The cynical editor has doubts about the ability of humans to act with good will. Her concern is about morality. That editor assumes the worst about people in general, especially those being covered.
“I better check that out,” comes from the skeptic. “They all lie, all the time,” comes from the cynic, a word, by the way, that comes from the Greek meaning “dog.”
Cover politics for any length of time and you will learn that, indeed, they all lie, all the time. Cover police and courts for any length of time and you will learn that, indeed, most of them lie, most of the time. However cynical you are about politics, you’re not cynical enough. Abyone who has something to gain by lying will.
I polled my Facebook friends — mostly the journalists among them — to get their sense of what it means when “something doesn’t pass the smell test.” How did journalists come to grow a third nostril?
Here are some of their ideas:
Veteran editor Walker Lundy wrote, “I always used the Two-Minute Mile Rule. It’s impossible for a human to run a two-minute mile. If you come across a story that sounds impossible, it probably is.”
Adam Hardy wrote: “If something doesn’t pass the smell test for a journalist, I think that’s shorthand for ‘More reporting is needed.’”
Dean Miller riffed on that strategy: “If too good to be true, too starkly good guy/bad guy, more reporting is needed.”
Tamara Lush wrote, “If you’ve covered crime long enough, you come to notice patterns. In motives, how events unfold, even how perpetrators/witnesses/victims tell stories. When things don’t fit those patterns, the intuition kicks in. That’s not to say a reporter shouldn’t pursue the story, but it’s one of the caution lights.”
Every veteran journalist I have ever met could tell me a story about being fooled or misled by sources. As a result of those experiences, reporters learn to be cautious with the statements of public figures, but sometimes the source seems so reliable that fabrications, falsehoods and distortions sneak through.
When editors intervene, they are looking for holes in stories, gaps of important information. At times, an editor will smell something in the text that is a little off and requires verification. In a collaborative spirit, the editor prosecutes the story, a kind of journalistic devil’s advocate. We love this story and want it to be true, and because we want it so much, we owe it to everyone to check it out, down to the last factoid.
Andrew Meacham, an expert practitioner of feature obituaries, shared this classic case on Facebook:
As an obit writer on a daily deadline, I was delighted to learn of a recently deceased physician who only did house calls. How quaint! Usually I checked backgrounds on potential subjects before investing a lot of time. But because he was a doctor, somehow that didn’t strike me as something to do immediately.
For me the “something isn’t right” element was physical but not olfactory. More like a nausea you try to deny or ignore until it’s just about time. In this story it was the too-pat responses from the widow about why he gave up his clinic to treat elderly shut-ins. He just enjoyed it more! He found it fulfilling. No anecdotes about that decision, maybe something he said about why he liked house calls better. It felt like a false bottom.
Four hours into my reporting I started searching his name, and quickly learned that four female patients had accused him of improver behavior. It was the state’s Board of Medicine that said he could no longer work out of an office, not some nostalgic desire to return to small-town America of the 1950s. We killed the story.
In summary, here are things I have learned about the smell test:
Think of your nose as an early-warning detector. If you smelled something unusual in your house, you would get up off the couch and check it out.
In the process of getting a story, more reporting is the antidote to many poisons.
Both writers and editors must be willing to “prosecute” stories, especially the ones we most want to believe.
A good question reporters can ask themselves: “How do I know this?” A good question for editors to ask reporters: “How do we know this?”
If “everyone” believes something, it is still worth checking out. If that thing turns out to be wrong, that will make its own important story.
You will not become a better reporter by assuming that everyone is lying to you. That makes you a cynic. Double-checking the assertions even of trusted sources makes you a dutiful, practical skeptic.
The best way for an inexperienced reporter to develop a third nostril is to hang around with reporters who have one. Follow the work of such reporters and ask them how they sniffed out the evidence.
All of these are versions of the same sensibility: “This doesn’t smell right.” “This doesn’t feel right.” “Why does my gut hurt?” “Where’s my B.S. detector?” “My spidey-sense is tingling.”
You are not born with a third nostril; you grow one. In other words, this alert response is not based on instinct, which, technically, you are born with. These responses are learned, which is why more experienced journalists recognize and trust them.
Your nose is more powerful than you think.
This last point is confirmed by science writer Marc McCutcheon in the book “The Compass in Your Nose”:
All humans have a trace amount of iron in their noses, a rudimentary compass found in the ethmoid bone (between the eyes) to help in directional finding relative to the earth’s magnetic field.
Studies show that many people have the ability to use these magnetic deposits to orient themselves — even when blindfolded and removed from such external clues as sunlight — to within a few degrees of the North Pole, exactly as a compass does.
And, for the record, if your mother says she loves you, you should probably say “I love you too, Mom,” but don’t be surprised or offended if she checks it out.
Well, aren’t we full of self-regard. Care to guess how much real investigative reporting most reporters do in your careers? Answer: None. We might like to tell ourselves we investigate as part of our jobs, but the fact is that most of us lack the time and resources to dig very far into stories.
How much investigative reporting do you think political reporters did during the Obama administration? Even worse, how much investigative reporting took place during the Clinton administration? (Notice any investigative reporting taking place in Wisconsin about the current governor, in stark contrast to his predecessor?) Similar to the way that dissent becomes patriotic during Republican presidential administrations, investigative reporting becomes cool again once the occupant of the White House has an R after his name.
Until I read this I had no idea who Clark was, or is. Maybe it’s unfair, but I have a hard time believing Clark has ever met a reporter from a real newspaper — that is, a newspaper where the staff isn’t angling for an appearance on the Sunday morning TV talk shows in order to further their careers. In other words, the veracity of this opinion doesn’t pass the smell test, since discerning readers can count the number of times big-time media either screws up something or fails to report what it should report. Bloviating such as this is a big reason the media is in poor regard in the eyes of the public, and getting worse by the day.
Readers know that I have bemoaned the lack of quality movie and TV depiction of journalists.
It turns out that 50 TV seasons ago, there was a quality depiction of journalists, though realism, as with most fictional entertainments, was not its forte.
Fifty years ago, TV had mostly one flavor, and it was vanilla. In fall 1968, the airwaves were full of blandly loopy family-friendly fare like The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle and Petticoat Junction. But on Friday nights on NBC, slipped between a Bonanza-clone Western called The High Chaparral and the troubled third season of Star Trek, there was an unusual little series that, even more than Gene Roddenberry’s show, seemed to be beamed in from the future.
The Name of the Game was a 90-minute cable-style adult drama that came on the air decades before anybody had heard of cable TV. Centered on the glamorous Howard Publications magazine empire and the adventures of its various writers and editors — played by Tony Franciosa, Gene Barry and Robert Stack, with Susan Saint James as their frequently kidnapped secretary — it drilled down into the inner workings of a media company a half-century before HBO got around to doing it with Succession. With a Game of Thrones-size budget ($400,000 an episode, the largest of its day) and a roster of soon-to-be-famous behind-the-camera talent — including a just-out-of-college story editor named Steven Bochco and a 23-year-old neophyte director named Steven Spielberg, along with directors Marvin Chomsky (cousin of Noam) and Leo Penn (father of Sean) — it opened up a world of glamour and luxury that TV mostly wouldn’t explore until Dallas and Dynasty. Even the name of the magazine the characters worked for was prescient: It was called People, six years before Time Inc. launched the real publication (“The dumbest title I have ever heard of,” cracked Fanciosa when he read the script).
“It was flat-out entertaining melodrama,” says Sid Sheinberg, then the maverick Universal exec overseeing the show (he would later become the studio’s president). “I actually looked forward to it every week. I would go home and sit on the floor and watch it every Friday night.”
As it happened, though, The Name of the Game was as melodramatic offscreen as it was on-. And after a tumultuous three-year run, the show exploded in a spectacular flameout during an episode shot in, of all places, Las Vegas.
The series’ three leading men rarely overlapped on one another’s episodes; in fact, Stack and Franciosa never appeared on the other’s at all. As Jeff Dillon, Franciosa was a lady-killing rulebreaker who’d grown up in East Harlem, spoke fluent Italian and, when he wasn’t flaunting a breezy insouciance, surfed and drank vermouth cassis.
Universal cast Gene Barry as imperious publisher Glenn Howard, a World War II veteran whose position atop his hard-built empire was epitomized by a sumptuous office with a private elevator and a Roman bath.
Robert Stack, by then famous for his portrayal of Eliot Ness on The Untouchables, channeled that same stentorian sobriety into Dan Farrell, the senior editor of Crime magazine and a former FBI agent whose wife had been murdered when a meeting with an informant went horribly wrong.
Tying the trio together was Saint James’ Peggy, a husky-voiced Seven Sisters-educated research assistant who typed 60 words a minute.
Never a huge hit, The Name of the Game failed to rank among the top 30 programs in any season. But its neoteric story arcs, groovy opening credits graphics and space-age bossa nova theme song (by Dave Grusin) helped NBC break out as the network of bold, innovative and comparatively highbrow programming. Its leading characters drove snazzy convertibles (Stack’s even had a car phone), bribed sources and upended the primrose publishing world of 1959’s The Best of Everything, the soapy tale of career girls taking Manhattan, turning it into a muscular boys’ club overflowing with cocktails, intrigue and penthouse sex. “Universal had sold NBC on the concept that Name of the Game was not going to be television, it was going to be movies. It was a pretty big sales job,” says Dean Hargrove, who produced Barry’s episodes. “And when it came down to it, it was pretty high-gloss television.”
The segments quickly took on each star’s personality. Stack’s law-and-order stories tended to stagger under the weight of his bellicose speeches. “Candidly, I thought Bob Stack’s episodes were the dullest of the three,” the late Bochco, who served as Stack’s story editor for two seasons, recalled, “because it was the dullest premise.” Adds Ed Asner, who appeared on the show, “He was not impressive as an actor at all. He was too stiff.”
Barry’s episodes tilted to the cerebral, and pivoted on international subterfuge and the misdeeds of the powerful. But the plots often took second billing to the star’s innumerable costume changes. “Gene was very interested in his wardrobe — perhaps more interested in it than he was in the scripts,” says Hargrove with a laugh. Bochco concurred, “What everybody used to say was, ‘If Gene has a problem, just get him a new blazer.’”
It was Franciosa’s character, prowling like a jungle cat amid a rogues’ gallery of loonies and wicked women, who gave The Name of the Game its snap, crackle and style. “[His shows] were more entertaining, more fun,” says Peter Saphier, a production coordinator who would later co-produce Al Pacino’s 1983 remake of Scarface. “There was more of a theatricality about them that played into what we were trying to do with the series.”
The mood on the three actors’ sets vacillated just as wildly. Stack, who reveled in his film-star bearing, showed up prepared and on time and played poker during breaks. He had a disarmingly wry wit but was slightly aloof and eminently unknowable. “I would look into his face,” says Ben Murphy, who played reporter Joe Sample, part of a trio of square-jawed, rheumy-eyed pretty boys brought aboard to inject some beefcake into the Stack and Barry sequences. “As an actor you do that, play off of someone’s expressions, emotions. And I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘This guy is not going to give me anything to work with.’”
The vibe on the Barry set was far more rococo, as if the star were appearing on Masterpiece Theatre. Saint James was instructed not to speak to him off camera; Dick Blair, Barry’s makeup artist, recalls the star regaling him about one episode filmed in London. “’Oh, they were so wonderful to me,’” Barry told him. “’They met me in a Rolls Royce — and the car had my initials on the license plates!’” Blair howls at the memory. “That was because [the letters] stood for ‘Great Britain.”
“I think he’d had so much smoke blown up his ass by this time he thought he was a demigod,” adds Cliff Potts, who played reporter Andy Hill. During one taping, Barry remarked to him, “I have a great idea: I think you should call me ‘Chief.’” Says Potts, “I think he meant on the show, but I wasn’t sure.”
By contrast, the Franciosa set was a roller coaster that rose and fell on its star’s notorious temper. He was forever micromanaging the props, lighting and camera angles. He occasionally disappeared for long stretches. He struggled to memorize lines. And he burned through producers. One of them, Leslie Stevens, told TV Guide, “Tony likes to be able to change the script. He likes to come in a half-hour late. He comes in knowing the lines but not ‘feeling’ it right. He is dedicated to The Tony Franciosa Performance. It is to his credit, but the physical drain leads to psychosomatic complaints.”
“To get the producers of the Tony Franciosa episodes, you’d need a group photograph,” says Hargrove. “He didn’t get along with very many people.”
At one point, Saint James approached Hargrove. “I was talking to Tony,” she said. “He saw one of [Barry’s] episodes and said, ‘Can we get him to come in and produce the show?’”
Hargrove went cold. “Whatever you do,” he told her, “tell him, ‘No.’”
There was a method to the Franciosa madness. His episodes were the highest rated and, by far, the best written and acted of the series. “It wasn’t just a job to Tony,” says Carla Borelli, who guest-starred a few times. “It was art.”
Despite the offscreen histrionics, The Name of the Game became appointment television for the younger, affluent demographic that advertisers craved. In its second season, it was nominated for an Emmy for best drama.
And then Tony Franciosa went to Vegas.
The episode was titled “I Love You, Billy Baker.” It revolved around a soul singer secretly tortured by his culpability in the death of a young woman years earlier. Planned as a 10-day shoot at Caesars Palace in summer 1970, it was a spectacle with a particularly dazzling array of guest stars, even by Name of the Game standards: Peter Lawford, Ray Charles, Redd Foxx, Ike and Tina Turner — with Xavier Cugat and Charo to boot. Billy Baker was played by none other than Sammy Davis Jr., wearing an odd Julius Caesar wig and enough groovy fringe to costume a Western.
Franciosa had only completed one episode of season three, and a lot was riding on the high-cost Vegas excursion. The executives in Universal’s notorious Black Tower, located on the studio’s sprawling lot smack in the middle of Hollywood, were nervous. They had reason to be.
For years, Franciosa’s mood swings and fickle behavior had rattled a string of publicists. There were volatile marriages to Shelley Winters and Judy Kanter, the daughter of Paramount Pictures CEO Barney Balaban. There was the time Franciosa belted an L.A. news photographer. And, once the show was in full swing, there was an incident in which Franciosa chased producer Dick Irving around the set with a two-by-four. During one scene, Franciosa deliberately kept darting into the path of guest star Darren McGavin and, after several frustrating takes, McGavin finally knocked Franciosa out of the way. “We used the shot,” Sid Sheinberg says dryly.
On another occasion, Franciosa threw a tantrum and stalked back to his trailer, phoning the unit manager to say he wouldn’t come out until he saw his psychiatrist. The doctor arrived and disappeared into Franciosa’s dressing room, finally emerging to announce the star would return to work after lunch. Perplexed, the unit manager asked what the problem was.
“His problem?” the psychiatrist asked. “He’s crazy, that’s what his problem is.”
For Norman Lloyd, the stage and film actor who produced four Franciosa episodes, the end had come a year before, during production of a gothic tale about a lost Shakespeare manuscript, a sort-of homage to Jane Eyre. (Peggy was, unsurprisingly, kidnapped.) At one point, Franciosa blithely announced he was going to perform a monologue from Henry V during the show.
A furious screaming match ensued between Franciosa and Lloyd, with the latter finally storming off the set. “I was on my way back to the office,” says Lloyd, today a hale 103, “and thinking, ‘I have to get out of this, this is ridiculous.’ This guy wants to do Shakespeare, and he can’t speak English properly.”
In the end, director Leo Penn agreed to film the Henry V bit — then edited it out. But Lloyd, who would go on to play Dr. Daniel Auschlander on the ’80s medical drama St. Elsewhere, broke his contract with Universal rather than endure the madhouse that the Franciosa set had become. “I don’t think it was any secret that he was on something,” he says.
By the time filming of “Billy Baker” commenced, gossip about Franciosa’s drug use was commonplace. Worried, Sheinberg assigned a staffer to tail him. “It’s one thing if you send a script to an actor on Thursday and start shooting on Monday and the actor turns to you and says, ‘It’s a piece of shit and I am not doing this,’” he says. “It’s quite another if you can’t find the actor.”
Rita Thiel, a German fashion model who was by then seriously involved with Franciosa and would become his fourth wife, accompanied him to Vegas. There, she often overheard the crew joking about his habit. “There would be all of this gossip going on: ‘Oh, you know, he’s probably going in his trailer to take something,’” she remembers. “That really hurt me.”
She admits that Franciosa went through a period where he was coping with what she calls “his demons,” but insists there were many days when shooting went fine. Sammy Davis Jr. gave impromptu concerts in his palatial suite; Franciosa arranged for Rita to meet Elvis Presely. She contends that Franciosa’s erratic behavior in Vegas wasn’t the result of drugs but rather a tactical effort by the star to get himself fired. “It was the third season,” she says, “and I think he already had so much hostility from people not having his back, especially friends, people he used to hang out with.”
Things quickly disintegrated. Franciosa became paranoid, believing that he was being shot in an unflattering manner; one day, he insisted on filming a scene in which he swims in the hotel pool in the rain, then comes out, sits by the edge in the lotus position and simply grins silently for a full minute. Director Barry Shear did his best to mollify his star, often to little avail. “They gave in a lot,” says Saint James, who remained agog at Franciosa’s talent, even as she watched him unravel. “And when you’re in a scene, and you’re doing 15 takes, and the one that the other actor finally gets right is not anything close to your best, and it’s after midnight …” She trails off. “What face do you put on after take three, after five, after eight?”
“Tony got into some fit and punched someone,” remembers Carla Borelli, who also co-starred on the episode. “It was quite a scandal.” Before filming concluded, Franciosa was fired.
“They love you, love you, love you,” says Saint James. “They’ll break their backs for you. And it’s, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘Yes sir,’ and then they’re, like, ‘We’re done.’ And then you might as well be dead.”
The remainder of “Billy Baker” was scotch-taped together with body doubles, solo scenes of Saint James and heavy padding with Vegas acts shown in their entirety: a staggering 13 musical numbers and three comedy monologues. To top it off, there was that scene of Franciosa swimming in the rain. NBC, desperate to stretch out Franciosa’s appearances, ran the episode in two parts — three hours in all. But even though he would continue to show up in the opening credits, Franciosa never filmed another scene. And without its No. 1 attraction, the series began to limp toward cancellation. It was Game over.
Franciosa’s remaining episodes were filled by guest actors such as Robert Culp and Robert Wagner, their characters Dillon in everything but name and swagger. “They didn’t rewrite,” Saint James says. “They were just waiting for Tony to come back.” Only he didn’t.
As it was, the third season had already gotten off to a rocky start: The Nixon administration had ordered every TV series to produce an anti-drug episode, resulting in arguably the series’ worst program ever, a feckless Stack story about a group of recovering teenage addicts. It was Bochco’s first solo TV writing credit. Writer Phil DeGuere called him after the second commercial break and said, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Realizing the curtain was coming down, Hargrove took some risks. In one episode, a Mamas and Papas-type Greek chorus sings spooky tunes in between scenes; in another, flashbacks show Barry as an Old West gunslinger wrongly judged by history.
But it was with an episode titled “L.A. 2017” that The Name of the Game may have made its most lasting mark.
Spielberg was a wunderkind who’d just directed Joan Crawford in a gripping installment of the Rod Serling anthology Night Gallery. Sheinberg wanted Spielberg to direct “2017,” but got pushback from Dick Irving, who he says “acted like I had suggested Adolph Hitler. And I said, ‘What the hell is this? Do you think I get a commission on Spielberg or something? I am responsible for Universal. I wouldn’t suggest somebody I didn’t think was a good idea.’” After Crawford called Universal chief Lew Wasserman to personally lobby for the young director, Spielberg was hired.
The script, by Philip Wylie, centered on Glenn Howard waking from a car accident to find himself transported into a postapocalyptic Los Angeles. The episode’s dark edge and creative pedigree became Name of the Game lore. That particular show, Spielberg remembers, “appealed to me because it was a cautionary tale about a future United States, no longer a country but now a corporation. But I was ambitious with it and got in trouble with the executive producers for going into overtime, incurring many meal penalties.”
The Name of the Game’s final episode aired March 19, 1971. Stack would later insist that the banning of TV cigarette advertising, in 1970, had killed the show — and that it might have stood a chance if only he’d been allowed to star solo. “There arrives after a certain amount of time a matter of ego and identification,” he said in 1975. “It’s my show. I work so hard; therefore I want the credit, or I want the blame. I don’t want to be lumped into a package with two other guys.” He would find a new generation of fans as the booming narrator of NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries; Barry also reinvented himself, playing on Broadway in La Cage Aux Folles. (Stack died in 2003; Barry in 2009.) Saint James went on to co-star as Rock Hudson’s meddlesome spouse on McMillan and Wife, where once again she was kidnapped regularly.
As for Franciosa, Rita says that after leaving the show he detoxed alone, “just locked himself in a room, and just got rid of it all” — a Method actor to the end.
Franciosa would star in two short-lived ABC series. He suffered a heart attack in the living room of his rustic Brentwood cabin in 2006 and died shortly thereafter.
“Funny enough, I think he was quite proud of [the series],” says Rita, today still a wispy, ravishing brunette. “He wished it would have been different, whatever his issues were. But I think he liked it very much.”
Today, The Name of the Game is television’s Atlantis. It is a program that virtually no one has viewed since the Nixon administration. And most of its real-world traces have simply vanished. All, that is, except one.
Spielberg’s most enduring memory of the program revolves around a particular doomsday scene. “We shot the Los Angeles River,” he says, “and in futuristic font painted serial numbers above a sluice gate that has just enough room underneath it to allow our futuristic car to make its entrance. Weirdly, that gate is still visible from my office window on the Universal Studios lot. It has survived 41 years of erosion and flood-stage conditions.”
If only The Name of the Game — a cosmopolitan and cocky series ahead of its time — had, too.
Thanks to YouTube, “Name” episodes are available, though of poor video quality.
The magazine setting allows for more investigative kinds of stories, which bails out the fact that there is not a whole lot of journalism depicted. (As ever.) The episodes I’ve seen so far include a couple of editorial meetings, and Franciosa, Stack and a couple of lesser characters do some interviewing. Saint James does, or is told to do, a lot of research. And it’s all very high-end and glamorous, including a couple of conversations between CEO Barry and reporter Franciosa about the latter’s expense-account spending.
I doubt “The Name of the Game” prompted anyone to go into journalism, but it was entertaining in a slightly offbeat way. As I’ve written here before, the reason there are few good journalism movies or TV shows is that the process of journalism is boring to watch.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice teed up an interesting Facebook exchange following Brian Hagedorn’s apparent victory. Bice provides insight into the newsroom’s mindset regarding Hagedorn’s traditional Christian views. It’s a reminder of how far the paper has drifted away from traditional journalistic standards.
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty chief Rick Esenberg argues in a column that Judge Hagedorn’s victory is a “vindication for religious tolerance.” Interesting spin on Hagedorn’s less-than-tolerant position on same-sex marriage and gay rights. Intolerance = tolerance.
Got that? Hagedorn is “less-than-tolerant” for adhering to a traditional Christian view, one that also is prominent in Hebrew and Muslim doctrines.
Bice thus passes judgement. Reporters are not supposed to do that. While a “columnist” is afforded leeway in expressing personal views, Bice’s writing in the recent campaign constituted a key part of the Journal Sentinel’s news coverage. It’s crystal clear here what he thought of Hagedorn’s beliefs while reporting on the campaign.
At a later point in the Facebook exchange, Bice adopts the classic Journal Sentinel pose of neutrality and objectivity:
I let people know that Hagedorn had written a number of controversial things on his blog. I also wrote about Neubauer’s family ties to Planned Parenthood. I didn’t ask either candidate to do anything in response. I let voters know about this info. They decided the merit of the info.
But other comments from Bice offer a much different perspective. Amazingly, at one point he includes opposition to same-sex marriage in a litany of bona fide historical American black marks. Check this out:
Religious people in American history have used their faith to argue for slavery, Prohibition, eugenics and against civil rights and same-sex marriage.
As Esenberg separately noted in the exchange, “…as recently as 10 years ago, Barack Obama would have been ineligible to be President” if opposition to same-sex marriage was a litmus test.
In a vintage Journal Sentinel style mastered by the paper’s editor, George Stanley, Bice also knocks down some straw men.
He says, for example, “Because people base their political positions on faith doesn’t mean those opinions are above scrutiny.” I know of no one who said Hagedorn’s political positions are “above scrutiny.” The objection to the Journal Sentinel coverage was that is so obviously reflected a non-neutral assessment Hagedorn, i.e., he is “less-than-tolerant.”
Bice includes me in his straw men targets, to wit, “George Mitchell‘s point about religious tolerance is nothing more than an effort to shut down public debate — an odd position for a free speech advocate.” Yeah, I seek to “shut down public debate.”
Many factors, Craig’slist, for one, explain the precipitous demise in Journal Sentinel circulation. Other issues, notably the newsroom’s blinders when it comes to loss of objectivity, also are prominent. I, for one, thought the early 2019 hits on Hagedorn from Bice and Molly Beck doomed the Hagedorn campaign. Never have I been more encouraged to have been so wrong.
There is another dimension here of how the media (about whom I wrote here yesterday) might have contributed to Hagedorn’s win and with the slump in newspaper readership. My thesis is that most people in my line of work are out of touch with their readers.
In the shower the other day (where I do my best thinking) I came up with a five-part test for people in the media — is or are (insert journalist name here):
Married?
A parent?
A homeowner? (Side question: Do you work in the same community where you live?)
A regular church attendee?
Someone who owns guns and uses them (i.e. hunting or target shooting)?
Notice there is no mention of the journalist’s political worldview, though the more No answers, the more likely someone is to be a liberal. The first three get to the subject of commitment, and questions two and three are about commitment where you are, not merely considering where you live to be your next stop on your career journey. Moving when you own a house is not a very snap decision.
Marriage (as opposed to living together) is making a public commitment to your spouse. (It also reflects on the ability of a journalist to remain in journalism given that many journalists are the smaller contributor to their household income.)
Being a parent only changes your entire life, and in ways you can’t predict when you find out a child is on the way. Being a parent means you become concerned about the state of the schools your children attend, but also how much they cost in terms of property taxes on your house. Property taxes fund other government services, so home ownership translates into interest in local government.
The last two relate to how the journalist relates to the dominant culture in “flyover country.” Media in at least the Madison and Milwaukee markets fail this test repeatedly. Maybe that’s why the Madison and Milwaukee media, at a minimum, guessed wrong about Donald Trump’s winning Wisconsin and the future Justice Hagedorn.
Emily Erdos wanted to be a reporter so badly that she begged administrators at Princeton to allow her to study journalism — a major the Ivy League school didn’t offer. She was denied. “Too vocational,” they said.
But the Massachusetts native kept at it, and, along with a dedicated professor, eventually helped persuade faculty members to approve a formal journalism program, a first for the school. This year, she’ll be part of the inaugural class of students to graduate with an undergraduate certificate in journalism.
It’s an industry that’s being decimated by layoffs — from the tiniest weekly newspapers to the sexiest digital start-ups to the largest legacy conglomerates — and facing more distrust from the public than ever before, thanks in no small part to a president who has deemed journalists “the enemy of the people.”
Nonetheless, Erdos still wants to be a reporter — one whose work proves to critics how the work serves American democracy.
“I don’t see backing down as an option,” she said.
Interest in studying journalism hasn’t waned at the region’s top schools since Donald Trump’s election, and in some ways, criticism of the press may actually be energizing student journalists, students and faculty say. What’s different now is that an increasing number want to do more than report on problems. They want to solve them.
Look at Penn State, which has one of the largest communications schools in the region. Enrollment in the journalism program had declined steadily from 654 students in the spring of 2008 to 504 students in spring 2016. But those numbers have since bounced back, with 630 students enrolled in the program in spring 2018.
“Whether the president wants to do this or not, he is elevating the role of journalists in society,” said Marie Hardin, dean of the school’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. “He is making them more important.”
Hardin said five years ago, prospective students and their families were worried there weren’t enough jobs in journalism. Today, she said, she hears fewer of those concerns and more excitement around “the role and impact that these young people feel they can make as journalists.”
David Boardman, dean of Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication, said applications to the school’s journalism major are up this year after several years of decline (although the school didn’t provide figures). He said the response to the president’s attacks on the press are just a part of “a rebirth of awareness and commitment” to the idea of a healthy Fourth Estate, as young people witness the power of the press not only in politics but also in the #MeToo movement, which was largely driven by investigative reporting.
Boardman, who is also chair of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns Philadelphia Media Network, added that even in just the last 5½ years since he’s been dean, students have taken more of an activist role, which reminds him of when he decided to study journalism in the 1970s in response to the Watergate scandal.
Hardin said that while the majority of students still want to do traditional reporting, an increasing number are coming to learn the skills without archetypal journalism jobs as the goal.
“Their goal is not to work for the New York Times,” Hardin said. “Their goal is to work for Greenpeace or Doctors Without Borders.”
Although Lila McDermott, a senior journalism major at Temple, has loved her classes, she recently decided she wants to pursue law school so she can work in human rights or immigration. Working for the ACLU is the ultimate dream.
“I’m just looking around, and there are all these things I see that are so fundamentally wrong,” she said. “I want to not only bring light to that but be a part of the change.”
Her classmate Meghan Costa feels similarly. She’s a senior journalism major who’s thinking about studying psychology in graduate school. She said anti-press rhetoric motivates her to want to seek the truth — it’s the Trump administration, she said, that’s “spreading fake news” — and if she does pursue a career in journalism, it will be about more than telling stories.
“I want to feel like the work I’m doing matters and is making a positive impact,” she said.
Khanya Brann, a 22-year-old senior journalism major at Temple, has been writing since she was in middle school, and published work on a blog for a local organization for black girls. She wants to be a reporter after college, but the dream isn’t to cover the White House. She wants to tell stories about everyday people in underserved communities. Some of her favorite reporting is about women and minority-owned businesses.
“My calling is connecting with people and bringing stories to the forefront,” she said.
Among a group of students who edit the Centralizer, the student-run newspaper at Central High School in North Philadelphia, just a few are interested in pursuing journalism. One of them is Lynn Larabi, a 16-year-old junior and a news editor at the paper, who has written op-eds about climate change and environmentalism. She hopes to minor in journalism and sees it as a way to bring awareness to issues she sees as critical.
“I know it sounds cliche,” she said, “but changing the world is one of the big ‘things’ that I have. Not only should you benefit yourself in a future profession, but you should also be able to help the community you’re in to thrive, and journalism provides a voice to those who are unheard.”
That’s a very different view of the press than the majority of Americans have. A Gallup poll released last year listed U.S. institutions in order of respondents’ confidence in them.Newspapers and television news were at the bottom of the list alongside the criminal justice system and Congress.
That awareness has trickled down to student journalists, even those practicing in high school. Cyndi Hyatt, who advises student journalists at Conestoga High School’s paper, the Spoke, said students last year were dispatched to cover the parade after the Eagles’ Super Bowl win and were heckled by people yelling “fake news.”
Avery Maslowsky, a 17-year-old senior from Berwyn who’s the co-editor-in-chief of the Spoke, said “distrust in the media” after the 2016 election has made student journalists even more diligent about accuracy. She said her staff were constantly working to prove themselves as credible.
She plans to be a journalist after college, and is waiting to hear back from schools including Syracuse and Missouri, two of the top journalism programs in the country.
“People have the right to believe the media is untrustworthy. That just fires me up to want to prove them wrong for the future,” Maslowsky said. “Because if the adults aren’t doing it, then the kids can. And we will.”
Well … you have to admire youthful idealism (such as Maslowsky believing she is not only smarter than everyone else who works in the media, but has superior virtue), even when it’s somewhat misguided.
I predict that most people interviewed for this story aren’t going to end up as journalists very long, even if you don’t include those who are studying journalism but don’t want to go into journalism. My prediction is because they’re going into journalism for the wrong reasons. The purpose of journalism is to report what is going on in the world, not to change the world wherever they think it needs changing. Journalists, by themselves, change nothing.
Moreover, most of journalism meets no one’s definition of glamour. Even reporters covering the federal government start to get sleepy, or disgusted, sitting through a congressional grandstanding session — I mean committee hearing. Murder trials can be professionally fun to cover until you realize (if you can) the human impact of what you’re covering. Most news media outlets lack the resources to send someone on an investigative fishing expedition that results in awards. Like most lines of work, if you’re not willing to do the drudge work, you shouldn’t be in that line of work.
When Woodstein wannabes discover the reality of journalism they become disillusioned and go into some other profession.
The continuing war between the news media and Republicans reached Wisconsin in a strange way last week.
On Tuesday I got this email at work from Carly Atchison of the National Republican Congressional Committee:
Hey there –
Where does Ron Kind stand on leaving a newborn baby alone to die on the delivery room floor?
For weeks, socialist Democrats have blocked a bill requiring doctors to provide care for babies who survive an abortion, so now House Republicans are trying to force a vote using a discharge petition.
Republicans proposed the Born Alive Survivors’ Protection Act in response to far-left efforts in New York and Virginia to legalize abortions up to the moment of birth, and even after birth in the case of racist Ralph Northam.
In the wake of those efforts, polling shows a dramatic swing in voters who now identify as pro-life.
To force a vote, at least 218 members of Congress must sign the discharge petition. Will Ron Kind be one of those 218?
Before we resume: I get a ton of these emails from both parties and organizations that support both parties. They never appear in the newspaper, because they are never news. Nor does anything from a politician who does not represent anyone who reads the newspaper, for the same reason.
Politicians and political groups tend to send self-promotional (either directly or indirectly by bashing the opponent or opposing party) emails whether or not the targeted media outlet is likely to run them. That could explain, I suppose, why that particular email went to the Cheese Reporter, a Madison-based publication whose stance on abortion rights is unknown if not nonexistent.
The correct response to irrelevant political emails is to (1) ignore them, (2) trash them or (3) label them as spam or junk mail. None of those were the response of Cheese Reporter assistant editor Moira Crowley, who emailed back instead:
As you can guess by what you’re reading, Atchison did not leave it there, sending an email to Crowley’s employer …
According to emails provided to the Washington Examiner, Atchison replied: “Moira – My personal story is none of your business, but suffice to say your comments are personally hurtful and disgusting. There is an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email. I hope you learn to conduct yourself in a more professional manner and pray that the hatred you hold in your heart heals. -Carly.”
The reply from Crowley’s account was: “Oh, I unsubscribed Carly. And I just donated $50 to Planned Parenthood in your name.” The Cheese Reporter’s slogan is: “Serving the World’s Dairy Industry Weekly since 1876.”
Facing an immediate backlash when Atchison shared the first email, Crowley, 45, told the Washington Examiner, via the same email address: “Our email has been compromised and the message is fake.”
The @cheesereporter Twitter account sent out a message: “Recently, one of our employee’s email was hacked and deplorable messages were transmitted. Cheese Reporter and the employee ask for your understanding during this difficult time and in no way does Cheese Reporter or the employee condone or endorse any of these hacked messages.”
Another message from @cheesereporter said: “For those who recently began following us for the hacked comments, please unfollow our Twitter account as we do not want to be a messenger for your beliefs.” …
Cheese Reporter is a newspaper and website based in Madison, Wis. It bills itself as “the leading newspaper serving the world’s cheese manufacturing and milk processing industries every week.”
The publication’s previously most political communication appears to have been a tweet sent just after Trump’s inauguration saying: “Obama left office with a pretty noteworthy record when it comes to policy that will be difficult for Trump to top.”
For what it’s worth, there are left-wing farmers. Just look at the National Farmers Union, and I would guess that organic farmers are generally more left than right, though I know that is not universally the case. Nevertheless, I think the percentage of farmers who voted for Hillary Clinton instead of Trump is rather small.
The political inclinations of farmers are not the issue here. The issue is the unprofessional conduct of a member of the news media, who instead of ignoring an email that didn’t adhere to her apparent political views and/or unsubscribing, felt the need to share her views on a topic that is not relevant to her work or her employer using her employer’s resources. (No, I do not believe the email hack story.) Once upon a time that was a firing offense.
Of course, in the way that even a driver hit by another car is legally partially at fault because the driver was there (if the driver wasn’t there, no crash happens), the NRCC probably needs to update its email list. Cheese Farmer might be interested in Congressional Republicans’ positions on issues affecting dairy farmers, but from what I’ve seen of NRCC emails they are less informational than attempting to get people in the media to write opinion pieces about how horrible those Democrats are and how wonderful those Republicans are.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 