Everyone Has a Story

This past weekend, I went on Kairos, a retreat devoted to learning about oneself and others. It was a pretty eye-opening experience. More than anything else, this weekend taught me that you never know what someone has going on in their life. Everyone has their own struggles that they cope with each day. Along these lines, one of the mottos of Kairos is "everyone has a story."

This reminded me of my blog, because news is all about telling stories. As my journalism teacher always says, a journalist's job is to "gather facts and tell stories." Be it an author or a rose farmer, everyone has a story. I didn't always thing of news as storytelling-- I really just saw it as a way to let people know about big events that were happening. But the journalism industry has the capacity to do so much more and bring to light the stories of people behind the big stories.

Stories are everywhere, and have been a prominent theme in our English class this year. We began the year with The Things They Carried, which beautifully emphasizes the importance of stories in people's lives. We continued by talking about myths and the narratives of our lives, an idea that is central to Kairos. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, we again were exposed to the impact of people's personal stories.

Basically, stories are everywhere. Everyone has one. I would like to urge readers to consider this when living their day-to-day lives. Next time your friend is in a bad mood, consider that she may have just fought with her parents. Instead of ridiculing a person who dresses differently or sits alone in the lunch room, consider the ideas that their sibling may be seriously ill or their parent might be battling a drug addiction. Everyone's life is a story that has had a serious influence on the way they act and live. And that can't be overlooked.

Silenced Voices

Last week, I was thinking a lot about people without proper opportunities to have their voices heard. This was obviously perpetuated by the Day of Silence which GBN observed on Thursday rather than Friday, and was also a factor in English class in which we eco-critically looked at mainstream news articles.

The article I was looking at, about a dam being built in Brazil, had many aspects that were interesting to look at from an eco-critical perspective. The most interesting to me, however, was the article's assertion that the displacement of indigenous populations is one of the major concerns being brought up by people opposed to the dam's construction. However, the article did not include any quotes or perspective from the indigenous people themselves. As someone studying journalism, I see this is as a major fault of the author and of the New York Times. If the article claims that the indigenous people are going to be those most directly affected by the dam's construction, why put words in their mouths when the journalist could talk to the indigenous people themselves? When this was brought up in class discussion, I was made aware that this is a common fault of journalists-- indigenous people do not often receive coverage.

This article indicates that coverage of indigenous people is often stereotypical and offensive. People may have an image of how they think indigenous people live. They may think that they're very different from the norm or that they're impossible to understand. This could all be fixed if the people were simply talked to. It could be discovered that they're not very different from us at all. Either way, they deserve coverage in the media, and not negative coverage. They are people with voices, and their voices deserve to be heard.

Media Ethics

When I sat in an information session for the Medill School of Journalism a few weeks ago, I was impressed by what I was hearing about the variety of courses that would be taken and the extent to which students were immersed in journalism. Particularly, I recall being somewhat surprised at the number of journalism ethics classes to which students were subjected. There is always an issue in journalism of whether or not it is ethical to report a certain story if people are going to be exposed in an undesirable way, if there would be other adverse consequences for the people involved, etc.

I hadn't really thought about this too much until I was reading a blog which covered this very topic, with regard to the recent violence in Afghanistan in response to the burning of the Quran by a Florida pastor who had threatened to carry out his plans in the fall, but was eventually talked down, only to follow through in March. As a result of the coverage of the Quran burning in March, violence broke out in Afghanistan that left at least a dozen people dead. There was allegedly only one person working for a news organization present at the Florida church. He submitted the story that was picked up by Google and Yahoo the next morning, and then a Pakistani source which spread the story to the Middle East, leading to the violence.

Since the very start of this story in the fall, it was clear that action taken by the pastor in Florida would almost necessarily lead to some sort of violent reaction in the Middle East. So when the actual event took place in March, should news sources have avoided it so as to prevent the death of a dozen or more people, which they potentially could have foreseen? Or would they have been shirking their duties as journalists by not giving the event any coverage? Was it a significant enough event that the failure to cover it would have been a major failure on the part of the journalism industry?

It's clear why ethics classes exist for journalism students. Issues like these must come up every day, though perhaps not on the same scale. There doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between what is ethical and what is not. Journalists need to grapple with ethics on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. It can't be easy. I hope when I go to Duke in the fall, I'll be able to take an ethics class or two to see just how professional journalists deal with these issues.

Overshadow

As the front pages of all major news outlets indicate, Japan and the Pacific were recently rocked by a mind-numbing display of Mother Nature's wrath in the form of an enormous earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. It's horrible to think of the suffering that's currently being experienced by thousands upon thousands of people as a result of this disaster. This story deserves immense coverage. However, it's interesting to me that the top story of the past few weeks is suddenly difficult to find on the New York Times front page. The uprising in Libya has certainly not ended, but its coverage has steeply declined in favor of coverage of the earthquake and tsunami.

I don't mean to sound like I don't think the tsunami is tragic or important. Of course, I know it is. I am just as horrified as anyone else by the eerie and devastating footage that's all over the internet. It's just interesting to me that the general population does not seem to be capable of comprehending two major news stories at once, or at least that's how the media are making it seem. It doesn't seem fair to the people fighting, protesting, dying in Libya that they should lose the attention of the world in favor of another disaster. I wish the media could continue to cover the Middle East crisis while simultaneously giving the recent weather terror the coverage it also deserves.

News outlets are showing us that the general public isn't capable of empathizing with two groups of people at once, and that makes me embarrassed. There isn't a specific quota of suffering that cannot be exceeded in the world. Just because a new group of people is suffering doesn't mean the Libyans aren't anymore. I know that this trend in coverage won't change any time soon, but I think we should be mindful that we don't just forget the plight of one group of people once another major story comes up.

Women in Journalism

Journalism seems as though it would be a relatively gender-neutral profession. It doesn't seem to have a gender-specific prototype like other jobs do. Nonetheless, a post by Editors Weblog indicates that 3/4 of U.K. news journalists are men, and only 1/3 of business/political journalists are women. The number of women in high editor positions is also low. And in the U.S., women make up 37% of traditional print journalists. It's hard to think of a source of this bias in the industry. While long ago female writers were not respected, that was at a time when women were discriminated from all sorts of industries. In today's society, though gender bias has not been completely abandoned, it's much less of an issue. Journalism doesn't seem to be a profession that would have a gender attached to it the way surgeons may be assumed to be male or receptionists or secretaries may be assumed to be female. Why would there be such a small proportion of women in the journalism industry? It doesn't seem like there is a shortage of women interested in journalism. Are companies being discriminatory in their hiring practices? For the sake of my future career, I sure hope not!

Meanwhile, Tina Brown, the new and first ever female editor of Newsweek, is launching a premiere issue that is geared heavily toward female readers. Hillary Clinton is featured on the cover for a story about Clinton's push to give women a more prominent stance in the world order. There are also two other stories about the power of women. It's interesting to me that the first ever female editor of such a prominent news magazine would release such a blatantly feminist-- or at least female-oriented-- issue for her very first endeavor. Of course, I've never been a pioneer in the journalism industry like Brown has, but I think if I were in her position, I would want to prove to the world that women can provide quality, unbiased news just as well as men can. Brown says she hopes to attract more female readers, but I think there are more subtle ways to accomplish that than by saturating the news magazine with an above average proportion of female-oriented content. I think Brown should have spread out the stories about women into upcoming issues because none of them seems to be particularly urgent.

It's interesting to see if women will hold more prominent roles in the journalism industry as time goes on. There's lots of room for innovation and new ideas in the industry; hopefully women will take advantage of new opportunities in order to make the numbers of men and women slightly more even. And, hopefully women will be wise with their new positions.

Critical journalistic approaches

As we read Hamlet, we are studying different critical approaches to the play that have been applied to literature through the course of history. It's interesting to incorporate critical approaches such as feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic into a reading of a text that may otherwise have been read by me simply in a more traditional formalist manner. Between these critical approaches, there is a multitude of details that are made apparent as being relevant to a certain approach.

While I attempt to better understand these approaches, it has become clear to me that approaches like these don't apply only to literature, but to more everyday media, including the news. Different news sources report from different perspectives. One such news source is the World Socialist Website, whose perspective is akin to the Marxist critical approach. Many people are aware of liberal or conservative bias among major news networks. News networks blatantly report facts that aren't completely accurate or frame information in a way that construes something different than the reality of a scenario. Of course, it's difficult to determine what is the "correct" perspective on an issue; there's always a different way to interpret facts and cause an effect. Such is one of the points of the new historic critical approach.

But anyway, I thought it would be interesting to compare two articles from different sources, written about the same issue. The first article is from the World Socialist Web Site. The second is from CNN. Both are written about intervention of world leaders in Libya. One noticeable difference is that while the CNN article refers to US forces or the British Prime Minister, socialist article consistently refers to "imperialist" forces and "imperialist" leaders. It's a small difference, but nonetheless makes a difference in the mindset of a reader and adds to the socialist slant of the article. There are many points in the socialist article that are blatantly biased, and the author intends for them to be, it is also the smaller aspects of the article that stick with a reader and add to the different approach to the issue.

The CNN article quotes two politicians...

Gadhafi and those around him must be held accountable (for any actions) which violate international legal obligations and common decency," she said. "Through their actions, they have lost the legitimacy to govern."

Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called Gadhafi "delusional," adding that "when he (Gadhafi) can laugh when talking to American and international journalists while he is slaughtering his own people, it only underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality."

Meanwhile, the WSWS article says,

Gaddafi is a criminal who deserves to be brought to justice, but none of the imperialist leaders currently denouncing him have any standing to point the finger elsewhere. They are all complicit in wars of aggression and colonial-style occupations that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and are implicated in all of the attendant crimes, including torture, rendition and indefinite detention.

The apparently less biased article does not give any indication that world leaders have anything but disgust for Gadhafi, while the socialist one gives another perspective that readers otherwise would probably not get. Who's to say which is right? Both present facts; they just frame them in different ways. It's interesting how different critical approaches can apply not only to reading literature, but to reading as well as portraying news.

Valentine's Day

In honor of today's delightfully floral, candy-coated, pink and red holiday, I decided to search "valentine's day" on the New York Times website. I was unsurprised to see headlines for a column about the nature of love and a feature on different celebrities' celebrity crushes. However, I was quite interested to see the headline, "Behind Roses' Beauty, Poor and Ill Workers." I guess I should have realized that there must be some negatives behind such a seemingly frivolous holiday, but somehow I was still taken aback to see an article about one of these negatives on Valentine's Day in such a prominent paper.
When I showed this article to my English teacher, she was substantially less surprised than I was, and quite aptly pointed out the movie Blood Diamond, which also points out the horrors behind a product that is typically considered to be romantic. While this is a very similar situation, it somehow seems more acceptable, seeing as it's coming out of the film industry, which seems more of a typical medium for dramatizing situations, rather than an everyday newspaper like the New York Times.
It makes me think, though, about the whole concept of investigative journalism. Should a journalist always look for the other side to a story, even if it's unpleasant? Or should news industries be content with the stories they have, and leave the joyful holidays untouched, so they can go on being joyful? While I'm typically a pretty optimistic person, and would love to see Valentine's Day as just a day full of love, I think newspapers have every right to dig deeper wherever they can. Many people are probably hesitant to taint the image of pleasant holidays. But if there is something serious that people have a right to know, why shouldn't a paper publish it? Many people may feel a twinge of guilt after reading such an article, and then go on happily receiving their roses, even with the knowledge that they were the product of hard labor and toxic conditions. There may, however, be a handful of people inspired to do something about the situation, and change it, so that such an article may not exist in a few years. It's a stretch, but it's a possibility.
Personally, I believe that newspapers are entitled to provide readers with this sort of information. If someone was personally being harmed or attacked through an article, it would be a different story. But in the case of revealing the plight of a group of people that work to make Americans' Hallmark holiday more enjoyable, I believe that newspapers should keep doing what they're doing.
What do you think? Should newspapers continue to put a slight damper on people's Valentine's days in this manner? Rose farm in Ecuador

Perspective

In the blog Common Sense Journalism, author Doug Fisher referred to an article written by Tim Radford: "25 Commandments for Journalism." These 25 commandments are really intriguing to me as an aspiring journalist, as they bring up points that I have learned about, points I hadn't considered, and points I wish major newspapers would adhere to. One of my favorites is number 5--

5. Here is a thing to carve in pokerwork and hang over your typewriter. "No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand."

This calls for simplicity in journalism, and is very refreshing for someone like me, seeing as I often find myself lost when reading newspaper articles that attempt to include every detail and intricacy of a story. Radford certainly adheres to this principle throughout the writing of his 25 commandments, as he cleverly yet simply illustrates the points he wants to make. Another of the commandments that I really like is number 20--

20. English is better than Latin. You don't exterminate, you kill. You don't salivate, you drool. You don't conflagrate, you burn. Moses did not say to Pharaoh: "The consequence of non-release of one particular subject ethnic population could result ultimately in some kind of algal manifestation in the main river basin, with unforeseen outcomes for flora and fauna, not excluding consumer services." He said "the waters which are in the river ... shall be turned to blood, and the fish that is in the river shall die, and the river shall stink."

Radford makes a point without beating around the bush.

But the commandment that really strikes me and can be related to our current study of different perspectives and criticisms is number 9.

9. So if an issue is tangled like a plate of spaghetti, then regard your story as just one strand of spaghetti, carefully drawn from the whole. Ideally with the oil, garlic and tomato sauce adhering to it. The reader will be grateful for being given the simple part, not the complicated whole. That is because (a) the reader knows life is complicated, but is grateful to have at least one strand explained clearly, and (b) because nobody ever reads stories that say "What follows is inexplicably complicated ..."

I think that this doesn't just apply to journalism, but also explains why literary criticism exists or why people look at Hamlet and other works of Shakespeare's from different angles. Shakespeare's plays are so intricate and multifaceted, and a reader can often become lost in the word play and even the sometimes confusing plot lines. Just as journalists are instructed by Radford's commandments to clearly explain one side of a story, rather than trying to present a confusing and garbled account, so do literary critics attempt to explain a story through one lens, rather than trying to cover all possible interpretations of a story.

To use Radford's metaphor, it's much easier to eat one piece of spaghetti at a time, rather than trying to shove the whole plate in your mouth at once. This helps me understand the benefit of reading about different literary criticisms of Hamlet. Doing so will help me, as a reader, to put the pieces together in order to understand Hamlet, or any other piece, more easily. Next time I'm writing a news story, I'll keep this concept in mind, eager to give readers the ease of understanding that's presented when literary critics explain one strand of a story.

State of the Union

Obama's State of the Union address isn't technically journalism. However, it's a hot topic, and it still deals with giving people information, which is what journalism is all about. As a high school girl with little interest in politics, the State of the Union address has never really interested me. This year, however, I took the time to watch (partially because I was instructed to do so for school) and I found myself quite interested.

I had heard that the SOTU was going to be different this year-- less of a laundry list of tasks and more of a broad address with less focus on very specific goals. I feel as though Obama's speech was crafted in a way that it could appeal to many Americans ranging in age, political leanings, and political knowledge. As I mentioned earlier, my political knowledge and interest are limited. However, I found myself engaged by Obama's speech and able to keep up (for the most part) with what he was referring to. I think this says a lot about how information is presented: it's much more manageable when set up and placed in context. When Obama made big (and, I must admit, wholly unrealistic) goals of doubling exports by 2014 and running the country on 80% clean energy by 2035, it stood out because he didn't throw out all his assertions and numbers at once; rather, he provided more general information to which he could connect his more specific strategic claims.

Again, the SOTU address isn't journalistic by any stretch. However, some of the concepts that made Obama's speech so easy to listen to could be applied to good journalism. Just as I illustrated in this post, it helps for information to be presented with background information. That is, it helps when the writer doesn't assume that the reader (or listener) knows everything.

Conveying information is no easy task, no matter what the medium is. Obama demonstrated that it is possible to reach a large and diverse group of people without sacrificing information. It's true that Obama didn't include as many hard facts as perhaps have been given in past years, but he still showed the possibility of giving information in a listenable context, just as it is possible to give news in a readable context (journalists should use facts to write stories). Whether I agreed with Obama's ideas or not, I cannot deny that he did a great job connecting to Americans in a meaningful way.

Book Review: Come Back

How does an L.A. honor student from a loving home end up shooting speedballs in rural Indiana?

What does a desperate mother do when she learns that her runaway daughter has been living a secret live for more than a year?

Come Back, a joint effort and true story told by Claire Fontaine and her daughter, Mia, chronicles Mia's journey from being molested by her father as a young child and battling severe drug addictions as a teen. The story is told in sections alternating between mother and daughter, as Claire tries to help her daughter in every way she can and Mia suffers in rehabilitation.

Both authors do a great job of integrating straightforward narration along with artful reflection. The book is very raw-- the first person narration from both mother and daughter create a very intense mood and make the book extremely difficult to put down.

The memoir tackles some difficult issues-- sexual abuse, drug abuse, rehabilitation, and familial strife. I don't think these topics could have been captured more effectively in any other mode of narration. The juxtaposition of the teenager's personal journey and her mother's reactions and desperate need to help paint a very complete picture of the issues. The book is an excellent representation of drug abusers as more than just screw-ups-- Come Back shows that there is a whole host of factors that can turn a happy child into someone under the spell of hard drugs.

I was introduced to this book by one of the authors, Mia Fontaine, who spoke at a leadership seminar I attended. It was all the more interesting to read Come Back after having seen the main character in blue jeans and a plain back sweater, a normal woman who attended Georgetown University and wrote for National Geographic and the New York Times. To find out that such a successful woman lived a good portion of her life living in a van or in rehab really preached that you never have an idea of what someone is going through or has gone through.

Come Back is an excellent, quick read for anyone interested in learning about rehab or drug abuse, or just for someone who wants a captivating story. While the writing is not Nobel prize worthy, it's still extremely good and works very well for the story being told. I'd give Come Back 4/5 stars.