Media Nation

Like many observers, Media Nation has been heartened by signs that journalists are finally starting to push back against government officials, even if it took the worst natural disaster in American history to goad them into it. (Jay Rosen’s roundup is here.) CNN’s newly angry man, Anderson Cooper, is becoming more prominent by the day. Yesterday morning, Cooper got front-of-the-arts-section treatment in the New York Times. By last night, he was expounding on “The Charlie Rose Show.”

But is the media’s get-real moment, uh, real? Not to generalize; I’m sure most of what we’ve seen, heard and read is heartfelt. Yesterday, though, Drudge flagged a stray paragraph deep inside Michael Kinsley’s Los Angeles Times column that makes you wonder. Kinsley – who is reportedly stepping down today as editor of the Times’ editorial and opinion pages – wrote:

KINSLEY: The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to “get angry.”

Kinsley’s column is really about something else: the human instinct to ignore warnings about disaster until they actually occur. And his “get angry” line is tossed off in such a way that it doesn’t appear he attached much importance to it. But if this has become standard operating procedure at CNN rather than just an odd moment experienced by one of his Times colleagues, then it’s worth investigating further. Spontaneous anger and staged anger are two different things, obviously.

In a post on The New Republic’s website yesterday (sub. req.), Franklin Foer argued that Cooper is nothing but “a Yale-educated Geraldo Rivera.” After describing several examples of Cooper’s heart-on-his-sleeve reporting, Foer continued:

FOER: Cooper, who at times seems to posses a sophisticated ironist’s view of his business, must surely appreciate the dangers of this brand of emotionalism. The suits at TV networks swoon for tears and outrage because they draw larger audiences. (It’s the reason that Geraldo keeps getting hired.) But melodrama and sputtering outrage aren’t precisely the same as truth telling. In fact, they are often the enemies of it. (See Fox News for the obvious case in point.)

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with journalists asking tough questions of government officials, whether those officials are inclined to answer them or not. For too long, the Bush White House managed to avoid those kinds of questions. But to substitute fake anger for supine cravenness isn’t an improvement.

Please understand: I’m not saying that Cooper’s anger is fake. As best as I can tell, it seems to be genuine. But Kinsley’s tidbit suggests there may be something deeper and more disturbing going on at CNN. I’d like to know more.

Last night Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix I helped lead a discussion about a play that is built around a toxic brew of race and the media. As it happened, it took place within the context of a different real-life public controversy over race and the media taking place in and around New Orleans. But first, the play.

“The Story,” written by Tracey Scott Wilson, is based on the downfall of Janet Cooke, the young African-American reporter for the Washington Post who was forced to return her Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after it was revealed that the 8-year-old heroin addict she had heart-breakingly portrayed didn’t really exist. “The Story” is built around a young African-American reporter named Yvonne (played in the Zeitgeist Stage production by Nydia Calón), whose journalistic lapses are more morally ambiguous than Cooke’s, but who nevertheless finds herself in a world of trouble because of those lapses.

For good measure, “The Story” also draws on the Charles Stuart spectacle. In 1989, Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol DiMaiti Stuart, were found shot in their car in a black neighborhood of Boston after having attended a childbirth class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Carol was dead; Charles, seriously injured, claimed they were attacked by a black man. Boston’s black neighborhoods were turned upside-down for weeks before Charles – who had in fact murdered his wife for insurance money – leapt from the Tobin Bridge.

More than anything, what leads Yvonne and her white editor/boyfriend, Jeff (Gabriel Field), to ruin is their naivete about some serious racial realities – the same naivete we’ve seen on display in New Orleans, as credulous news people, virtually all white, have gone ballistic over the mostly black looters, rapists and murderers who have supposedly run wild in the path of Hurricane Katrina.

Of course there have been some looters, although many of them – stranded by officialdom – were simply helping themselves to life’s necessities, mainly food and water. But the idea that there was a complete breakdown of the social order in New Orleans is now giving way to actual evidence.

The Boston Globe yesterday published an important story by Christopher Shea on what really happened in New Orleans. Shea wrote:

[A]s journalists like Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune and Matt Welch of Reason magazine, have pointed out, many widely reported rumors have proved false or are at least unconfirmed.

”We don’t have any substantiated rapes,” the New Orleans Police superintendent Edwin Compass told the British newspaper The Guardian, speaking of the situation at the Superdome. Nor have any bodies of victims of foul play turned up there. The Federal Aviation Administration and military officials have cast doubt on the story of the rescue helicopter that came under fire outside Kenner Memorial Hospital on Aug. 31.

And television reporters’ tales of refugees from New Orleans hijacking cars at gunpoint in Baton Rouge or rioting in shelters there, Witt wrote, turned out to be groundless too. The Baton Rouge police told The Washington Post that crime levels had not risen noticeably in that city. There were clearly armed thugs on the street in New Orleans – and there are five murders there a week in ”normal” times, among the highest per capita rates in the country – but something not unlike the fog of war has so far kept us from determining just how many.

For the likes of Sean Hannity, the notion that New Orleans was taken over by black criminals is a comfortable trope. The truth, though, appears to be that the looting was grotesquely exaggerated, and the murders and rapes remain unproven rumors.

There’s not much in common between “The Story” and New Orleans except that a ghettoized newsroom, with few African-Americans in a position of power and influence, can lead to a complete misunderstanding on the part of white editors of what’s going on in the community. “The Story,” of course, is fiction (even though it’s based on real-life events). The consequences in New Orleans are quite a bit more serious.

By the way, “The Story” is terrific. It’s playing at the Boston Center for the Arts, in the South End, through Sept. 24.

After deadline: One of the anonymous folks who left comments to this message is right in suggesting that I could have found a better Hannity link. Here’s one.

Jay Fitzgerald asks: “Am I the only one who thinks Gillette’s James Kilts is wallowing in a form of self-pity?” Uh, no, Jay. Everyone thinks the greedy mogul who sold Gillette down the river is wallowing in self-pity. And Kilts’s attacks on his critics last week (click here, here and here) give a whole new meaning to the phrase “PR offensive.”

“He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt.” Here is Time’s must-read deconstruction of Michael Brown’s résumé. The magazine did a heck of a job on Brownie.

Salon has posted a video highlight reel of outraged journalists reporting on (and from) New Orleans. Although watching Ted Koppel and Tim Russert skewer Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff is irresistible, the best part is when Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera put Sean Hannity in his place. (If you’re not a subscriber, the ACLU ad you’ll have to sit through is pretty good, too.)

Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix and I will lead a discussion about race, ethics and the media following this Sunday’s showing of “The Story,” being presented by the Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts. The play gets under way at 7 p.m., and the discussion should start at around 8:30. The Boston Globe’s Ed Siegel reviewed “The Story” yesterday.

Here is the complete statement from Reporters Without Borders on the matter of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist whose political imprisonment was reportedly helped along by Yahoo. The heart of it is this:

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS: Yahoo! obviously complied with requests from the Chinese authorities to furnish information regarding an IP address that linked Shi Tao to materials posted online, and the company will yet again simply state that they just conform to the laws of the countries in which they operate. But does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?

Pretty far, apparently. The New York Times reports on the story today, in a piece buried inside the business section. Among other things, we learn that Reporters Without Borders’ predictive powers are outstanding, as the Times quotes from this Yahoo corporate statement: “Just like any other global company, Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”

InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds points to this post on the Berkman Center’s Global Voices blog. The fact that Reynolds is on the case guarantees that this is going to spread across blogland – as it should.

Earlier this year I wrote an article on how big Internet companies could violate your privacy with the supposedly non-personal information they collect as you go about your business online. The example I used was Google, simply because it’s bigger than everyone else. But, as Shi Tao has learned to his sorrow, it’s something any Internet company can do. Shame on Yahoo.

David Brooks of the New York Times begins his column today with this: “As a colleague of mine says, every crisis is an opportunity.” A colleague of his? If you Google the phrase “every crisis is an opportunity,” you’ll get 466 hits. Not exactly something he needed to attribute, never mind to an unnamed source. Then again, he didn’t have to tell us he’d never met Judge Michael McConnell, as he did a couple of months ago. Think, David, think.

WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) is respected and admired, but it isn’t loved. Long defined by the prickly personality of former general manager Jane Christo, who transformed it into the essential news service that it is today, the public station’s image has suffered since 2001, when its signature personality, Christopher Lydon, was fired in the midst of an ugly contract dispute.
It only got worse recently, when interim general manager Peter Fiedler canceled Lydon’s former show, “The Connection,” and laid off its workman-like host, Dick Gordon, as well as “Inside Out” documentarian Michael Goldfarb. Given the financial straits in which Christo left the station, those moves were probably necessary. But they contributed to a sense that WBUR’s best days were behind it. And it didn’t help that Lydon has been back on the air since early summer, broadcasting his intriguing new show, “Open Source,” from the studios of rival WGBH Radio (89.7 FM).

So it makes sense that Boston University, which holds ‘BUR’s license, would name Paul La Camera as the new permanent general manager. (Phoenix coverage here; Herald coverage here; Globe coverage here. You can listen to WBUR’s own report, which includes an interview with La Camera, here.) As the longtime general manager of WCVB-TV (Channel 5), La Camera built a reputation as someone who was extraordinarily well-liked. Channel 5’s local news operation was regarded as among the best in the country before corporate-ordered budget cuts began taking their toll. Part of La Camera’s legacy is “Chronicle,” a half-hour magazine show that could be a model for the kind of local coverage that hasn’t exactly been ‘BUR’s forte. (That said, “Chronicle” is too soft for my taste.)

The coverage of La Camera’s hiring has focused on his ties to community leaders, which may translate into fundraising prowess. There’s no question that that’s WBUR’s greatest need. Despite complaints about La Camera’s lack of experience in radio and public broadcasting, the reality is that his most important job will be writing checks to National Public Radio, which supplies the station with “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and other programs. At this point in its history, WBUR needs a businessperson. La Camera happens to be a nice businessperson, which is a bonus.

Among the folks whose e-mail got stuck in my Northeastern inbox were Bug and Ms. Priss, also known as Bryan and Bethany Love, the Appalachian Trail thru-hikers whom I wrote about on Aug. 19. They answered a few questions about their online trail journal, to which they post observations and photos.

Bryan, 32, is a hospital pharmacist. Bethany, 26, is an interior designer and home-furnishings specialist. They e-mailed me on Sept. 1 from a hostel in Andover, Maine. Without any further ado:

Q: Why did you decide to record your thoughts and photos on the Internet during your thru-hike?

A: We wanted a lasting journal for ourselves, and we also wanted our families & friends to share in our experiences. Most people don’t understand what the AT experience is like, so we’re also trying to educate & encourage our audience to get out and hike.

Q: How do you do it – that is, hardware, software, Net connection and the like?

A: We use a Pocketmail (www.pocketmail.com) device to send our journals to my best friend who then uploads them to our TJ website. The device sends the emails via built-in modem after dialing a 1-800 number. The device weighs ~8 oz, which is an important factor for most AT hikers. Photos are more difficult to get onto the site. We usually wait until we are in a large town and have CD’s made which we then mail back and are uploaded by the same friend.

Q: In what ways do you think doing this enhances your experience?

A: It forces us to think about our daily experience, so I think our memories will be more vivid. The pocketmail device has definitely been a conversation starter.

Q: Can you think of any ways in which it detracts from your hike?

A: Time … it definitely takes more time than we thought it would. After a long day of hiking, it is hard to be disciplined and journal.

Q: How many readers do you have?

A: We have had almost 36,000 hits on our website. I would guess we have had 100-200 readers.

Q: When do you plan to reach Katahdin? Are you planning anything special for
your online audience when that happens?

A: We estimate summiting on/around 9/20. We’d love to post our final journal the day we summit. We’re also planning to submit a few post-hike journals detailing our reacclimation back into society.