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The Post-Fact Society

Monday, August 30, 2010

Timothy Egan’s recent piece  in The New York Times asserts that “forty-six percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim,” while “twenty-seven percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen.” And those who think the president is Muslim, according to a recent Pew survey, think that they got this information from the media.

What media? Egan singles out right-wing radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh as one who effectively and underhandedly raises doubts whenever it suits him, eliding the facts, and Fox News, whose parent company recently gave $1 million to the Republican Party - hardly a separation of journalism and politics. And he also blames the more reputable media for not forcefully responding to these innuendos.

Egan’s concerns resonate with the hundreds of posts in photography circles criticizing various kinds of photographic manipulations, whether via Photoshop or by staging events for the camera. But in a society where consumerism and the myth of choice is dominant, why should there be facts to get in the way of our opinions? Aren’t we entitled to a world made in our own image, whether by changing someone’s religion to justify our anxieties and enmities, or by changing what we saw in the camera? The consumer, we have been repeatedly told, is king.

What kind of world are we now in the process of creating? Which kingdom are we to inherit? It’s certainly not just a question for the Republicans, but for all of us who need to live together in this society.

AND IT IS NOT GETTING ANY BETTER —THIS JUST IN FROM NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE:

“A full 14 percent of Republicans said that it was “definitely true” that Obama sympathized with the fundamentalists and wanted to impose Islamic law across the globe. An additional 38 percent said that it was probably true — bringing the total percentage of believers to 52 percent.”

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“On the Line”

Monday, August 30, 2010

Another piece on war, On the Line shows the devastating toll on returning American soldiers. Just published on the VII magazine site, photographer Ashley Gilbertson’s images of exhausted, emotionally taxed phone operators are overlaid with a soundtrack of their voices as they try over and over again to coax veteran soldiers to resist suicide or any other kind of violence. The Centers for Disease Control recently announced that 18 US veterans commit suicide every day.

While this four-minute piece is overwhelming and terrifying, making evident the hell that so many former soldiers are going through, it would benefit from a second part in which these people “on the line” trying to deal with soldiers in extreme moments of agony get to tell us about the traumas that they themselves go through. What is the effect of these many painful, fraught conversations? How have their lives been changed because of them? How can they keep talking? Why do they do it?

As Gilbertson’s short essay makes clear, it’s not just the soldiers who suffer from war’s horrors–and we need to know what happens to the civilians on the other end of the line as well.

Filed in Photojournalism, The World | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Traveling with Taliban

Sunday, August 29, 2010

—-An extraordinary, modest short film about a group of Taliban fighters was recently shown on Australian television and now appears on the Huffington Post. Despite considerable anxiety about his own safety, Paul Refsdal, a Norwegian cameraman, traveled with a group of men and boys into the mountains of Afghanistan. His work is intimate and revealing, and portrays these Taliban as much less demonic (compared to their depiction in most of the Western press), exhibiting fear for their own lives and concern for children, as well as a certain amount of honor and a great deal of faith, and most of all wanting to be left alone. Behind Enemy Lines (an unfortunate title) is a great companion to Restrepo or Brian Palmer’s Full Disclosure (reviewed here), and a reminder that none of us has a monopoly on passion, frailty, or humanity.

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What is Journalism?

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Somehow I don’t think that anyone really knows what journalism is anymore. We do know what the journalistic industry used to be - various institutions telling us what is happening in the world. We have, increasingly, rejected that approach, finding the system manipulative, commercial, high-handed, ethnocentric, and untrustworthy.

Many have adopted the “journal” part of journalism, keeping a journal as a personal vehicle - what happened in my/your day, what do I/you think of what the old journalism industry is telling us, etc. Part of this trend is due to the powerlessness that comes with being a rather passive recipient of news that one cannot do much about - what is the point of knowing about one disaster after another if they will just keep happening and all one can do is send a bit of money? A blog gives at least the illusion of impact, and is usually less institutional and remote.

So what then should journalism schools - such as the one at the University of Colorado that is thinking of closing (see the previous post) - be teaching? Certainly knowing how to operate multiple technologies is only a partial answer at best - taking pictures, writing articles, interviewing, creating audios and videos, cannot be done well by any single person. And who or what should these emerging journalists be focusing upon?

We know that covering celebrities is cheap and titillating, and lots of potential readers and viewers are enthusiastic voyeurs. Viewing the horrific effects of the floods in Pakistan or an explosion in Afghanistan becomes a nasty voyeurism - they suffer from a seemingly safe distance - while watching an actress wear revealing clothing, or a sex-obsessed golfer talk about his woes, is salacious but not as fraught with self-recrimination. The Huffington Post, like English tabloids, is an example of the allure of sex and gossip to sugarcoat and render nearly irrelevant the news - like the previous Playboy magazine combination of centerfold and articles.

So what then should journalism be today? Infographs? Short video clips? Factoids? Obviously we would want more, but in a society of diminished attention spans, combined with the embrace of freedom of choice (consumerism) and the lack of political will, journalism has to be constituted quite differently.

Rather than the famous inverted pyramid of news writing (the most important information up top) there may have to be a variety of new metaphors for interactive screen-based media. Maybe one might be based upon those Russian babushka dolls where smaller ones are nestled inside larger ones- the reader/viewer’s attention is caught by the big idea, the infograph or image, and if interested, then each shell can be removed to reveal more complexity underneath. And if it is all presented in such a way that arriving at the next layers is intriguing, even fun, then maybe we will be able to maintain the constant feedback for a “user” that is necessary in an interactive medium - the reader/viewer has to be able to be constantly active, made to feel in charge, not consigned to just reading or looking. (Is interactivity actually another way of saying the customer is always right?)

It is difficult to presume that generations of people who have grown up manipulating video games and grazing on Google will quiet down and focus while immersed in media where each segment is made to be quickly clicked, scanned, and left behind - we mistakenly think that because the subject matter is important that this will overcome the frenetic culture of the medium itself. It is no surprise then that the average reader of print newspapers is climbing towards 60.

Experiments such as this one - the babushka doll vs. the inverted pyramid - need to be attempted for us to know what to teach when teaching “journalism.” This is what journalism students should be doing - it’s not about the camera or the microphone, but about  ways of structuring and presenting information to try and help the contemporary reader understand the world. And it is about our future journalists (or “intelligent agents”) creating different strategies of exploration - what should be focused upon, from which perspective, and how?

The question - “what is journalism? - has not been answered, which makes the idea of a “journalism school” somewhat suspect unless it is involved in trying to answer this question.

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A Future for Journalism Schools?

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

How long can journalism schools keep feeding students into an industry that is staggering? Well, the University of Colorado at Boulder announced today that it will start the process of “program discontinuance” for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Another university committee, according to an AP report, will look into what a new “information and communication technology” program might constitute at the University of Colorado.  The 741 undergraduate and graduate students are being assured that they will be able to complete their degrees, whatever the decisions that will be made.

The time of reckoning is fast approaching in media education. One hopes that such committees will come up with compelling solutions, and not just for the sake of the students and faculty but also for the good of the larger society. It is not an easy task.

Filed in Journalism, Photojournalism, The Future of Newspapers | Tagged | Comments (0)

The worship of AI

Monday, August 9, 2010

There is a very interesting op-ed piece in today’s New York Times on the growing worship of artificial intelligence as replacing and transcending human intelligence. Written by Jaron Lanier, a musician and longtime innovator in virtual reality and other realms, the article can be found here, titled “The First Church of Robotics.” In the headlong embrace of the transforming qualities of the Web, whether via Web 2.0 (social media) or Web 3.0 (the so-called “intelligent” Web), we are consistently downgrading the contributions of individuals–just look at our relationship to intellectual property. Lanier’s piece is a strong wake-up call, and a necessary one.

Filed in New Technologies | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Debilitating Static of Spam

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

As I move to reinvigorate this blog, writing more, keeping more in touch, I find that the enormous amount of spam that arrives is an obstacle to any real work–I have had to eliminate more than 5,000 “comments” over the course of this blog as others seek links for products ranging from sexual aids to insurance, with comments that attempt to simulate an actual analysis of something I’ve written but give themselves away by their generic blather. It’s like a simple Turyn test, where the point is to figure out what has been written by a human and what by a machine, except in this case the issue is to read so as to find the interested human and leave out the self-interested ones. Despite a long list of banned keywords that begins to read like a pharmaceutical display, these fake, machine-like and ultimately insulting comments keep getting through.

So more to come as I finish the shoveling…

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US State Dept. Reverses Decision

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Last week a reversal of a previous decision by the US State Department will allow Colombian journalist Hollman Morris to attend Harvard University through the Nieman Foundation program. See http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/newsitem.aspx?id=100140. (Thanks to Anne Cronin for pointing this out.)

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Now We Ban Journalists…

Friday, July 16, 2010

I have great respect for the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, for which I have written articles, the most recent one in the last issue of their magazine on the future of visual journalism (my piece is here). The Foundation also offers coveted residencies for mid-career journalists to study, reflect, and expand their knowledge base at Harvard. Now an invited Colombian journalist has been refused a visa to attend by the US government, the first time that this has ever happened.

I leave it to Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation, to explain the importance of what has happened, cited from the Los Angeles Times:

“It is not uncommon for international journalists who come to Harvard University as Nieman fellows to be out of favor with their governments. They often work in countries where free expression and the rule of law exist in name only. They report in an atmosphere of danger where threats, and sometimes violence, are common tools to encourage self-censorship and silence truth-telling.

“Colombian journalist Hollman Morris has long worked in challenging conditions, producing probing television reports that document his country’s long and complex civil war. He has built contacts with the left-wing guerilla group known as the FARC and told stories of the conflict’s victims. He has revealed abuses by the country’s intelligence service and enraged government officials, including the president, Alvaro Uribe, who once called him “an accomplice to terrorism.”

“Morris was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in journalism this spring and planned to travel to the United States to begin his studies at Harvard in the fall. But then, last week, he was told by a U.S. consular official in Bogota that he was being denied a visa under the “terrorist activities” section of the Patriot Act.

“In the 60 years that foreign journalists have participated in the Nieman program, they have sometimes had trouble getting their own countries to allow them to come. The foundation’s first brush with the harsh reality of journalism under repressive regimes came in 1960, when Lewis Nkosi, a black South African and writer for Drum, a magazine for black South Africans, was awarded a fellowship. His application for a passport was denied by the country’s apartheid government. Angry and bitter, he applied for an exit visa. It enabled him to leave, but he was forbidden to ever return.

“Morris, though, is the first person in Nieman history to be denied the right to participate not by his own country but by ours. The denial is alarming. It would represent a major recasting of press freedom doctrine if journalists, by establishing contacts with so-called terrorist organizations in the process of gathering news, open themselves to accusations of terrorist activities and the possibility of being barred from travel to the United States….” (to continue reading, click here)

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Of Cameras and Machine Guns

Monday, June 7, 2010
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Soldier who leaked this video said to be under arrest.

The soldier accused of leaking this video is under arrest.

In a provocative piece called “Are Cameras the New Guns?,” Gizmodo points out a new and disquieting trend:

“In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.”

It reminds me in an opposite sense of the South African photographer David Goldblatt, who is quoted in a review that I wrote as having said, “the camera is not a machine gun.” He argued for the documentary photographer as a credible, even dispassionate witness, not an overtly militant advocate, even during the years of apartheid. The police in several American states, as in countries throughout the world, evidently now see the person holding the camera quite differently.

All this leads into the latest news: The arrest by the military of 22-year-old US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of having surreptitiously released the widely viewed video of a US attack on Iraqi civilians from a helicopter, resulting in numerous civilian casualties, including two Reuters journalists. Manning’s role was allegedly reported to the FBI by an ex-hacker, Adrian Lamo, in whom the soldier is said to have confided; Lamo himself was previously convicted of having broken into the New York Times computer system. The story is that much more compelling given the confluence of the military, journalists, alternative journalists, and an ex-hacker, all focused on the leaking of a video of killings of real people that seemed to many to have been carried out as if part of a video game.

Whether virtual or actual, it all adds up to a sense that as long as media still has an impact on society, then those with any power (military, police, politicians) will try and control its use. For the most part, however, it appears that it is no longer the media professionals who are seen as their primary threat, but the soldiers and bystanders who have access and cellphones.

While those in power have learned to largely defuse the Michael Moores, they are still having trouble with the Rodney Kings.

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