Local Man

A bumper crop today for obituaries of the newspaper business, starting with Michael S. Malone’s farewell to newspapers. This newspaper reporter and columnist of 20 years lists all the usual suspects in the murder of newspapers before concluding bluntly:

Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

Then Jay Rosen over at PressThink surveys the scene in a more nuanced but no less apocalyptic outlook at Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die.

And Dan Gillmor weighs in with a piece that agrees with Rosen except on one point: it’s not going to be gentle.

Both Rosen and Gillmor at this point are far beyond asking whether newspapers are in big, big trouble. Obviously, they are.

Both Rosen and Gillmor are even beyond asking whether newspapers as America’s main repository of the truth-gathering, fact-verifying, public service-minded literary craft known as journalism is essentially over.

They both agree on this too.

What they are talking about that is new is how to save journalism at a time when newspapers as society’s main vehicle for journalism dies. The journalism author Philip Meyer has been asking the same question, and providing some possible answers, for a while now.

Rosen and Gillmor want to be sure that if newspapers die — and to them, morphing into ad-laden shoppers stuffed with celebrity and tabloid "news" is as good as dead — they want to be sure that somewhere in our culture, journalism goes on.

What gnaws at Rosen and Gillmor is the nightmare that if newspapers are shuttered or morphed as described above, that great public-spirited journalism itself may die.

As Dan Gillmor puts it:

If the newspaper business does turn out to be dying, we need to make sure that journalism does not. I apologize to my blogging friends for saying this, but the free for all in the blogging world, however valuable (and I love it), is not sufficient to replace what we’ll be missing.

I take a back seat to no one in decrying the weaknesses of the mainstream press.

Yet the mainstream press, with newspapers its heart and core, is still filled with individuals of idealism and integrity who for decades have toiled to uphold journalism as their employers have offered less and less support.

These individuals contain within their DNA the precious idea enshrined by the founders — that the free press is a cornerstone of democracy.

It would be a tragedy if this DNA was not passed on to the new forms of communication where the great journalism of the future will reside.

Here’s a terrific essay by Evan Cornog on the crisis in journalism called "Let’s Blame the Readers."

Cornog’s diagnosis: journalism’s decline is related to a diminished sense of citizenship in the United States.

As the idea of citizenship declines, therefore, keeping up with the news both domestically and internationally declines, because keeping up with the news is essentially an act of citizenship.

What is causing the decline in the idea of citizenship? Well, schools aren’t teaching it anymore, for one thing. Neither do our political leaders promote the idea of citizenship much either in the age of the "ownership society."

The biggest culprit in Cornog’s view is the bought-and-paid-for hijacking of American society by corporate interests, for whom consumership and not citizenship is the ideal social role.

Both our schools and our politics have been bought by corporations, he argues.

Today the number one pitchman for the ownership society, which you obviously have to enrich corporations to join, is the President himself.

The idea of the ownership society is the key to the President’s economic and domestic policy.

Can you think of anything more crassly materialistic and, for that matter, antithetical to the spiritualism that Bush himself says he espouses?

It is incredible that the leader of our country so openly avows that material values and — not civic or spiritual ones — are at the top of his agenda.

"For Christians, it is called Holy Week, the one we’re passing through," a somber and penetrating editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune begins today. "It’s supposed to be about death and this year, especially, it is."

The editorial asks how we can use death itself to seek a larger purpose in life, and thus to avoid for our loved ones, our fellow citizens, and for ourselves the disconsolate and tragic end to life that is so common in this world.

In the spirit of this editorial, I would like to add one more dimension to this search we Minnesotans undertake this Easter. I address these thoughts specifically to my friends and colleagues in the Minnesota press.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch, the world’s largest human rights organization, released a report accusing the government of Ethiopia of "widespread murder, rape, and torture" against the country’s minority Anuak tribe.

Why Pay Attention?

The report says that the Ethiopian government’s "targeted" campaign of violence against the Anuak "bears the hallmark of crimes against humanity under international law," and that murder, rape, and torture is "ongoing and frequent."

The world is full of misery and mass murder. Why should the Minnesotan press pay special attention to this one?

Because for the past decade, the ethnic cleansing of the Anuak from Ethiopia has resulted in more than 1,000 Anuak refugees fleeing for safety to our state, which is now home to the largest diaspora settlement of this tribe in the world.

With only 100,000 remaining members, the entire Anuak tribe with its unique culture and language is under immediate threat of extinction as a result of ethnic cleansing, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based rights group, Cultural Survival.

Self-Interest

What role might we in the Minnesota press play in trying to stop the violence against the Anuak tribe by genocide?

If we clearly see that we are able to play such a role by exercising the freedoms that we enjoy but that the Ethiopian press does not, would we then not only have an opportunity but also a responsibility to help end the genocide of the Anuak?

There is not only a free press argument, and a humanitarian argument, but also a self-interest argument for extending a hand of help to the Minnesota Anuak.

The Minnesota Anuak live in the Twin Cities primarily but also in Mankato, Austin, Worthington, Rochester, and other towns where they work in food processing plants, at megastores as shelvers, and are taking higher education degrees.

For the past year, life has been hell for the Anuak of Minnesota who all have lost family members and close friends to gruesome murders. Parents, children, and siblings have been murdered; mothers, wives, and sisters have been raped. In many cases loved ones have dropped out of sight with no word about their fate.

Rags and Tatters

Since December 13, 2003, when approximately 425 Anuak were massacred on a single day by the Ethiopian army, more than 50,000 Anuak in Ethiopia have been made homeless as they fled the carnage into the malaria-infested bush and to a refugee camp in southern Sudan.

Many Anuak in Minnesota have quit their schooling and risked losing their jobs to spend their life savings to fly to Africa, to discover the fate of their loved ones.

Some Anuak have flown back to Africa only to find their parents, brothers and sisters all killed. In other cases there is simply no trace of them. In the luckiest cases, the Minnesota Anuak find their loved ones living in rags and tatters in refugee camps in the Sudan desert or in Nairobi slums.

The impact on Minnesota of the Anuak genocide can thus be measured in many ways — economic, social, cultural, spiritual.

Educations ended and jobs lost is an obvious economic loss. Time and money spent searching for loved ones in Africa also translates into more domestic crises in Minnesota as rents go unpaid, marriages fray, children get in trouble, and dependence on social services is extended.

Freedom of the Press

Many Anuak in Minnesota, feeling utterly helpless, are suffering depression in silence or need grief counseling to survive every day.

Thanks to the Human Rights Watch Report, the Anuak genocide is now virtually undisputed. Though the numbers of dead and missing are smaller, the genocide of the Anuak tribe is now a fact as solid as the genocides of Rwanda or Darfur.

As potential first-responders, the Minnesota press has the opportunity to demonstrate how the free press in a democracy can safeguard and extend precious freedoms across national and geographic borders, throughout the world.

Our meditation on death this Easter would be fruitful, I believe, if we in the Minnesota press decided to extend the powers and blessings we enjoy to the Anuak.

The Rochester Neighborhood Resources Center (RNRC) is planning to start a citizens journalism web site called RNeighbors.

The site’s success will depend on plenty of Rochester folks doing two things: 1) Starting a blog (short for "weblog") of their own, and 2) Sharing the items on their blogs with the RNeighbors site.

A blog is an online diary or scrapbook in which people post ideas, photographs, and items of interest daily onto the Web. This site, Local Man, is a blog.

Here is a good site on how to start a blog, including links to examples of a variety of blogs people are now creating by the millions.

A new kind of local journalism is now springing up called "citizen journalism" or "hyperlocal journalism," in which citizen-journalists write news stories and share information with other citizens on community news web sites.

Many varieties of these sites are now springing up, each of them taking a somewhat different form. But all are primarily reader-written, usually with articles taken or borrowed from individual reader’s blogs.

Take a look at Northfield.org, created by a citizen’s group in Northfield, Minnesota, as an example. The site is several years old and is one of the best citizen journalism web sites in the country. Other examples using somewhat different models around the country are WestportNow,  Coastsider, and Greensboro101.

Here is a good background article on the new citizen journalism.

What will Rochester come up with? Get blogging!

The community group I am working with, the Rochester Neighborhood Resources Center (RNRC), is looking to fill seven vacancies on their board of directors.

I have two suggestions for the group:

1. Find an immigrant or two for the board. The key is not just someone from overseas but also someone who hasn’t lived here for long and is just now starting to knit themselves and family into the community. The folks at our meeting today are all terrific, dedicated, longtime Rochester residents. But a newcomer has a special point of view, especially on issues like the level of hospitality and openness of Rochester to newcomers and outsiders. As a city whose economy and culture very much depends on having both of those traits in spades, such a person’s point-of-view could be vital for the board.

2. A pet idea of mine is to be sure to invite ethnic cooks and foodstalls to RochesterFest, Rochester’s main annual civic festival. One in ten people in Rochester are immigrants. Every one of them has a direct link to a fantastic world cuisine ranging from Thai, Cambodian, and Chinese cooking to flavors of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Yet as of last year, not a single one of these cuisines was on display at RochesterFest which continues to offer a smorgasbord of brats, corndogs, mini-donuts, and funnel cakes. Food and music are the great unifiers. Here’s a chance to take a unifying civic step with food. 

The biggest development in a story I broke in December 2003, about a continuing but mostly unknown genocide in Africa, is happening tomorrow.

I hope this development finally propels the story into international headlines where it belongs.

Human Rights Watch tomorrow will release the results of a six-month investigation into the genocide of the Anuak people of western Ethiopia.

This is a story I first wrote about on December 22, 2003, a week after a massacre of some 425 Anuak tribe members by Ethiopian soldiers occured in the western Ethiopian town of Gambella.

I was able to break this international story right here in southeast Minnesota because the world’s largest community of Anuak refugees, who have been fleeing ethnic cleansing of their tribe for more than a decade, lives here in towns including Rochester, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Austin, Winona, and Mankato.

On Sunday, December 14, while at my home here in Rochester, I started getting phone calls from distraught Anuak immigrants living here.

They had spent the entire previous day and night talking on their telephones with relatives and friends in Gambella. Their friends and relatives were describing with panic and horror the massacre as it was actually happening.

The Minnesota Anuak could literally hear guns going off in the background of the telephone calls, as well as shrieks and cries for help.

Several Minnesota Anuak told me how they’d been on a phone call with a relative or friend in Gambella, and then suddenly heard the sound of a door in the background being beaten down, followed soldiers yelling and screaming to "put the phone down!," and then hearing a crash and the line go dead.

Within a couple of weeks, Anuak survivors in Gambella had counted 425 bodies of Anuak men and boys on the streets and in a hastily dug mass grave.

In April, I travelled to Ethiopia and to Sudan, where some 10,000 Anuak refugees fled the violence to relative safety in a desert refugee camp. 

In interviews with dozens of survivors of the Gambella massacre in Pochalla, Sudan, and in interviews with Ethiopian government officials, I was able to report that the December 13 massacre was the worst day of violence in ethnic cleansing incidents by the Ethiopian government against the Anuak that stretched back more than a decade.

The December 13 massacre was led by uniformed Ethiopian troops who killed Anuak men and boys with their assault rifles, and who incited mobs of local Ethiopian highlanders to attack Anuak men and boys with spears and machetes.

Here is what Human Rights Watch says in the announcement for tomorrow’s press confrerence, when the full report will be made public. The report is titled "Targeting the Anuak: Human Rights Violations and Crimes Against Humanity in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region" (my italics):

Following the December 2003 massacre of some 400 Anuak civilians in a Gambella town by mobs and soldiers, the Ethiopian military launched a series of attacks on Anuak villages that have forced several thousand Anuak civilians to flee their homes.  Since then, the Ethiopian military has committed the widespread abuses of murder, rape and torture against the Anuak population that could amount to crimes against humanity. The report details the continuing pattern of abuse of Anuak communities, and urges concerned states to pressure the Ethiopian government to halt the abuses and prosecute those responsible.

This is the story of a Darfur-like genocide on a smaller scale, carried out against a tiny African tribe that for a variety of reasons stands in the way of the Ethiopian government’s intentions in the remote western part of the country.

In years past, the Ethiopian government could get away with mass murder in Gambella, precisely because the region is so remote. Today, however, thanks to cellular telephones and the Internet, the Ethiopian government has been unable to hide the fact of its ethnic cleansing, i.e. genocide, against the Anuak.

Borzou Daragahi, an American freelancer journalist who has done yeoman’s work from around the war zones of the Middle East for the past three years, writes an occasional e-mail letter to friends from his current post in Baghdad.

His latest note describes his "awful life" cloistered in a Baghdad hotel at night, going out in the day with his team including two armed drivers, a translator, and an Iraqi bodyguard who keeps a Russian-made Mikarov submachine gun with him at all times. Borzou writes:

Should I even be here? Certainly there are high-minded reasons to keep returning. If journalists like me stop coming to Iraq and honestly covering the ongoing war, then who will?

But I have to be honest with myself about what draws me back to Baghdad again and again, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a kind of compulsive behavior. War may be hell for the civilians who bear the brunt of the violence and despair, but for its combatants and chroniclers it becomes an irresistible adrenaline rush, the ultimate extreme sport.

In recent Local Man posts, I’ve talked about moral disengagement, the journalist’s Faustian bargain, and what I call the consequence of ceaseless shock.

Borzou’s searingly honest e-mail lies at the crossroads of these concerns, and I give him a standing-O for tackling them.

While war coverage brings such concerns front and center for a journalist, they are present for every journalist whether he or she is covering a fire, a rent hearing, a frisbee team, or a firefight in Fallujah.

There is nothing more important than what we do, which is to put into words the flow of life as we live it. We are given the privilege and the responsibility of stopping time and presenting to readers moments of life that are trapped in amber — a word painting of life as we know it.

Borzou agonizes that he may be involved retailng human anguish, tapping into human suffering for something so crass as the "human interest" that sells newspapers.

What he wonders will be the consequence of the ceaseless shock that he submits himself to, both upon himself and upon his readers and the people he covers?

Journalists are capturing plenty of profoundly emotional and personal moments in photography and print these days — amputee war heroes, soldiers on patrol, anguished widows at home.

We journalists grab for these moments so deeply drenched with adrenaline and tears. We want to tell these stories. We feel more alive when we tell them, and we give to readers if we are successful something of that same jolt we feel when we write.

It’s right for Borzou to ask, where is all this heading? Does this way of doing journalism actually make us better as people? Does it make readers better as people? Does it help our country find the best way forward as it makes and enforces the policies of war and of peace?

And it’s right to ask what moral and ethical lessons war coverage may hold for us as we cover the fires, school murders, casinos, meth epidemics, and medical ethics dramas that are closer to home. Are we covering them the best way possible?

Or are we milking them perhaps for every drop of drama they are worth, while missing their quieter inner lessons of real value?

Could journalism try some of that?

What broke Chris Hedge’s faith in journalism’s code of objectivity was covering war.

He saw mass graves in Bosnia and interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses to the massacre, then would file a story and be told by editors in the home office to go interview the Serb killers, to be sure the story was "fair and balanced." 

His conclusion:

Balance and objectivity have become code words to propagate the insidious and cynical moral disengagement that is destroying American journalism. This moral disengagement gives equal time, and sometimes more than equal time, to those who spread falsehoods and distort information. It tacitly sanctions the dissemination of lies. It absolves us from making moral choice. It obscures and often shuts out the truth.

This moral disengagement is going on in newspapers, magazines, and TV news in the United States. In local and domestic news it’s more often done these days in the name of gaining audience than anything else.

More and more, daily newspapers are guides to consumer and pop culture with snippets of news slipped in. The front pages are filled with teasers to the celebrity and lifestyle sections, and serious stories increasingly get tabloid spin.

War stories about heroic amputees and war widows fit this mold and we are seeing plenty of them now. I find it unbearably sad because the press could be, and should be, so much more of a critic and an analyst of public policies.

The Letterman kidnapping-that-wasn’t was a popular front pager in many newspapers last week. Now it seems that news doesn’t even have to happen to get on page one. Just so it’s got that tabloid flavor.

"Yes, but it’s what people want and makes them pick up papers."

Well, okay. But if you stapled a  deep-fried Snicker’s bar to every paper, you’d sell a lot more papers that way, too.

Are news editors considering the impact of the diet they offer on the health of the civic body? Endless entertainments lead to a certain kind of obesity.

Has media criticism, the scourge of the MSM ("mainstream media") as it’s become known among bloggers, itself gone mainstream?

I found a quote by the media beat journalist Ken Auletta printed on my Starbuck’s coffee cup this morning:

There are those who believe a liberal or a conservative bias permeates the media. I don’t. The operative press bias favors conflict, not ideology, and it is lashed by a market-driven bias to boost ratings or circulation with more wow stories, more sizzle.

That’s a "yes," both to the quote and to my original question.

I saw Mike Tucker’s and Petra Epperlein’s documentary "Gunner Palace" yesterday, about life in Baghdad with a GI artillery unit whose headquarters is in Uday Hussein’s former pleasure palace. 

As I watched the film I was reminded of a friend who says that whenever she watches a TV news interview in Iraq, she always looks over the shoulder of the person being interviewed to catch a glimpse of the reality of Iraq.

The beauty of this film is that it keeps its focus on the background — wide-shots of an Arab street, the Gunner Palace swimming pool, or a Baghdad neighborhood — while zeroing in from time to time on the human stories in the larger picture.

With the wider context established, the close-ups gain not only added poignance but added meaning.

An American GI in a Baghdad nursery tries to interest an Iraqi infant in a Spongebob Squarepants doll. An Iraqi orphan glue-sniffer is unloaded off the back of a troop truck by GIs with all the tenderness in the world.

The chaos of a post-bomb night scene near a mosque resolves in GI’s speeding away from the scene in a humvee, with the sound of rocks pelting down on the roof and trunk and windows. As they pass one group of kids throwing stones, one GI says "I’m fucking going to fuck up those motherfuckers."

Just that afternoon the gunner’s unit had been handing out candy to groups of kids just like the one that was now throwing stones.

If watching the movie sometimes feels like boredom punctuated by chaos, I’m sure Tucker and Epperlein had precisely that in mind.