Bearing Witness

I attended a book signing for my book Free for All:  The Internet’s at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Alumni weekend last Friday night.  Prior to the signing, Ron Suskind, the author of such terrific books as A Hope in the Unseen (my personal favorite), The One Percent Doctrine (very scary, especially the result), The Price of Loyalty and others, received a distinguished alumni award. A very funny and entertaining speaker, Suskind had a serious and direct message.  The role of journalism, he said,  (and I am paraphrasing here) is to chronicle that we are here; that we live in this time and place; and we have done our best to tell the story or our times.  It seems to me that bearing witness is a  core value of journalism that makes it all worthwhile.  Taking the time to bear witness says we are alive; we are awake; and our lives matter.

Pulitzer-prize winner Ron Suskind

Pulitzer-prize winner Ron Suskind

April 27, 2010 | Journalism4u | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

There is a Pony in Here Somewhere

A lot of people know Frank Sesno from his days as the Washington bureau

Former CNN Bureau Chief Frank Sesno, now a dean at The George Washington University

Frank Sesno is fired up about journalism.

chief for CNN. At some point he was getting a lot of quality air time. Well, Sesno has left CNN to become the Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University and he just delivered the annual Caulfield Lecture at Loyola University Maryland, where I teach.  It was excellent. Sesno is one of the first “old school” journalists who is not only not wringing his hands about journalism, he brims with enthusiasm about the future.  He talked to students about  some exciting start-up projects like Global Post and his own school’s Planet Forward.  His main message–the 20-something generation is going to invent the future of journalism and while invention is scary and hard, it is also a lot of fun.  I am working with my own students to try to reimagine crime reporting.  I admit that our the blog Big City Crime started out as an epic fail, to use the current terminology, but it is getting better and it has been fun.  And I guess it is too much to expect to invent the future in six weeks but it is worthwhile to try things to discover what might work.  In any case, to me, Sesno was very motivational. He was excited about what he was doing in journalism. In fact, the title of this post comes from a joke that Sesno said President Reagan used to tell about pessimists and optimists. The punchline is that the optimistic finds himself in a room full of manure but nonetheless he is happy as can be because, he tells his father, “I know that there is a pony in here somewhere.”  Sesno seems to think there is a pony as well and so do I.

April 22, 2010 | Journalism4u | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

The Tea Party Examined

The so-called Tea Party movement has certainly gotten a lot of media

Angry member of the Tea Party

An angry Tea Partier

attention since a year ago March.  Generally portrayed as angry–very angry–and not too bright–best demonstrated by the quote “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare”–the coverage has conjured  a lot of cultural assumptions.  Consequently, the results from a poll that The New York Times has been publishing over the past couple of days have been very interesting.  Not surprisingly, the Tea Party is largely male, white and older.  Since the days of Network’s Howard Beale, older white men have been on anger’s vanguard.  What is surprising is that Tea Party members are better educated and richer than expected. And what is very surprising is that many members of the Tea Party feel that personally they are doing just fine, thank you, although they think the country is going to hell in a handbasket, so to speak.  The contradiction between their anger at the direction of the country but their sense of personal well-being seems to me to point to a more inchoate sense of loss, which is probably hard to address politically.  As always, despite what the polls say now, the Tea Party movement’s real electoral strength won’t be tested until–okay this is kind of obvious–there is an election.  The results of the Times poll suggests that at least to some degree, the Tea Party are Ross Perot voters redux–only older, angier and even whiter.  And while the Perot movement generated a lot of heat, it did not change the direction of the country.

April 20, 2010 | Journalism4u | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

ESPN: Pardon the Interruption

ESPN's Tony Kornheiser

ESPN's Michael Wilbon

ESPN's Michael Wilbon

I find ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption as the most amusing talking-heads-disagreeing-with-each-other show on television.Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon are both very knowledgeable and they have great chemistry.  To use a cliche, they disagree without being disagreeable.  They take sports seriously but don’t seem to think that being right is the be-all and end-all of existence. If political talking-head shows could be conducted in the same way, they might even be fun to watch.

The show is also very well organized.  The list of topics to the right of the screen let’s viewers know what to expect. And the buzzer at the end of each segment keeps the show moving without cutting somebody off mid-sentance.  The best part is that though Wilbon and Kornheiser disagree, I always get the feeling that after the show, they would like to get a beer and continue the conversation. Maybe because they are talking about sports and not something weightier, to me, they come across as two friends debating issues that interest them.

The “combatants” on political talking-heads-disagree shows always seem like they truly hate each other. I don’t find that much fun to watch.  PTI is a great model for simple, entertaining and informative television.

April 14, 2010 | Journalism4u | Tags: , , , , , | 5 Comments »