BUY INTO A POSSIBLE DREAM

Having once again fallen into an opportunity at a kind of professional heaven, I am asking you to help me furnish it.

Taking a share of the news director job (with Zelie Pollon) at KSFR, Santa Fe, NM’s community radio station has presented me with a multiplicity of opportunities in which, I am hoping, you will invest.   

Here’s my plan.

First, nothing about KSFR’s news programming is broken; nothing needs fixing.  Already we offer 2 hour-long news programs at 7AM and Noon, and news summaries that feature local news and BBC bulletins hourly from 6AM to 7PM.  We program 4 hours of BBC World Service news overnight and an hour of BBC News at 6PM, and Amy Goodman and Democracy Now every afternoon at 3.

To that, I propose to add energy, innovation, and lots of shoe-leather.  Zelie and I will be recruiting an at first small, but rapidly growing group of volunteers and interns who will be trained in the fine crafts of reporting, editing, writing, producing and delivering radio journalism.  It is my hope to have a well-prepared reporter with a digital recorder covering every neighborhood, every community, every police or political jurisdiction, every pueblo and tribe in our listening area.  With their help, we will bring to our listeners both the finest and the fullest coverage of our incredibly varied, diverse, accomplished region.

I guarantee that anyone who listens carefully and works hard will graduate from the Marash Kollege of Newsical Knowledge a clearer thinker, a better writer, and should this be their ambition, a more employable broadcast journalist.

But the hard truth is, only Zelie and I come cheap.  The equipment interns will need, digital recorders, a few office computers to edit and assemble their packaged reports, even the new office furniture that will help make a former cd music library into a newsroom cost money.  This is where you come in.

News is an indispensable element for a successful democracy.  News not only informs citizens, it’s constant process of creating, destroying and recreating conventional wisdom provides the basis for reasoned dialogue, for civil disputation.  News done well enables people to make their own opinions based on established facts.

“Doing” news may involve managing complex subjects and conflicting interpretations, but it is a simple process aimed at 4 simple goals, which, when I first devised them for my students at Shantou University in China, I called “The 4 C’s:”  factual Correctness, presented in Context, with Clarity, to be perfectly understood, and Communication, to be remembered.

We will also be teaching how reporters prepare, gather elements, assemble and order them, then how they edit the sound and write the script and voice it for maximum impact.

Then we turn ‘em loose, and when they come back to base, monitor and mentor them as they construct their reports.

Oh, there’s one more thing I’d like to sell you.  Once our building program is well launched, I plan to take myself back to the airwaves for an hour-long news interview show tentatively titled Dave Marash: Here and There.

The title reflect the focus of the show: 2 interview segments, one examining a story or issue local to Santa Fe or New Mexico, the other, bringing to our listeners the observations of reporters or experts who are where world or national news is being made.

53 years of experience in radio, TV and even print journalism, covering news, sports, science and the arts (what I call “the most various and least cumulative resume in broadcast news,”) will inform my interrogations of informed people who are or have recently been “at the scene of the crime.”

Your contributions will help get me some assistance in putting these shows together (We’ll start with one a week and see…) as well as underwriting a training program that could become a model, not just for digital reporting, but for local or independent news coverage.

Here’s the best news, you (and everyone else in the world) can listen to the result on ksfr.org’s 24 hour livestream.

Here’s how to give.  If you go to the website, repeating – ksfr.org – you will see in the upper right, a button soliciting contributions.  Easy instructions will follow your keystroke.

Or you can call in your contribution, locally at 505 428 1383 or there’s a toll-free number 1 866 907 5737.  Call between 9AM and 9PM ET (7A-7P MT).  And yes, there is swag, baseball caps, tote bags, stainless steel water bottles and tumblers, all proudly bearing the KSFR logo.  Ask the volunteer who answers the phone.

Feel free to mention my name or the news training project (or not).  But please call and help.

Good things will happen.

A NEXT BIG THING IN NEWS

            It started in 1980 with a manic idealist’s most idealistic dream, CNN, the Cable News Network, as conceived by Ted Turner, would be the global television news channel which would bring to the world, if not peace and harmony, civility and as he titled his made-for-TV, almost-Olympic games, Goodwill.   CNN was meant to change the world, to a place which had no “foreign” countries, and it did and it didn’t.

Turner’s CNN used traditional journalistic values and the latest communications and video technology to show the people of the world the reality, in particular and in general, they live in.

            A shambolic piece in the Washington Post by Henry Farrell, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, somehow never mentions Turner in his analysis of the “big news for journalism,” that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is jumping into the news business.  Omidyar has hinted he’s ready to match the $250 million Jeff Bezos paid for the Post to fund his own new venture into news on the internet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/17/why-glenn-greenwalds-new-media-venture-is-a-big-deal/

            The money alone has Professor Farrell certain it will be “a serious journalistic enterprise.  Capital of USD $250 million can hire some very good people.”

Perhaps.  But, also perhaps Farrell has never heard of Rupert Murdoch, who started Sky News in the UK in 1989, and has seen his huge investments into video journalism turn into profits and power, but not, at least where his Fox News is concerned, into “a serious journalistic enterprise.”

But Fox News has been a dead serious expression of Murdoch’s unbridled, “robber baron” capitalist values, and it has been more successful, or at least more sustained, in selling Murdoch’s POV than the one-time Chicken Noodle News has been for one-worlder Ted’s. 

Then there is the also Farrell-ignored Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, the founder of Al Jazeera Arabic in 1996. The Emir’s investment has not yet turned a profit, but it has greatly magnified his power and influence, and without doubt has transformed (if painfully incompletely) the politics of the Arabic speaking world.

These guys, like Bezos and Omidyar are avatars of the Age of the Super-Rich, Millennial Media Moguls, phenomena you would think would be of interest to an academic who “works on international and comparative political economy.”

Apparently not, although in Omidyar’s case Farrell jumps directly from a promised investment to a series of unsupported conclusions about what it will produce.  First, he asserts that Omidyar’s great wealth will free him from “the kinds of political relationships that most newspapers are embedded in.”

Farrell deduces this from the E-Bay guy’s anti-establishmentarian first 3 hires: investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, of the ongoing Edward Snowden, NSA revelations, and Jeremy Scahill, whose world-class reporting has ranged from Serbia and Iraq, to North Carolina and the Blackwater military contracting company he shamed into Bogus Corporate Name Protection Program.

The trio represent a great start but –.  Bill Paley, quite the fabulously rich media man of his day, hired his most famous CBS radio and TV newsman Edward R. Murrow for journalistic reasons, and tossed him aside over politics.

And, for all Farrell’s cheese-paring quotations from former NY Times editors Bill Keller and Max Frankel, gaming political pressure to kill stories down to, “You win some, you lose some,” and his hints that Wikileaks’ Julian Assange found working with mainstream news organs to be “difficult,” those “kinds of political relationships” did not prevent the Times from publishing The Pentagon Papers or James Risen’s more recent explorations of high-tech domestic spying by the NSA and international covert actions by the CIA.

 Nor has Greenwald ever complained that editors at The Guardian, under enormous political pressure in London, hurt his Snowden journalism.  Even he and Poitras and the team from the Post have all agreed that government deserves both notice of and an opportunity to respond to Snowden’s revelations, and that some secrets should stay secret.  This has not kept them from doing great work alerting the public to the security services’ penetrations of privacy and their lies about them.  Farrell’s insinuations to the contrary are inflated or simply false.

 Of all the telling stupidities in the Farrell article, none of them can top this: he doesn’t even get what the NSA stories are all about.

“Snowden,” he says, “has revealed [no] truly surprising and damaging information.  European and South American governments already knew that the U.S. was spying on them. China was certainly aware that U.S. agencies were trying to hack into its systems.”

Henry, the lead never was, “the NSA spies on other countries.”  It was, despite legal constraints and public denials, “The NSA spies on you,” on us, on Americans by the dozens and hundreds, and potentially, hundreds of millions!!!

Students of George Washington University, Rise Up!! Get out those pitchforks and torches!!  Well, no, not that, but golly, … it’s when the Professor gets to the heart of his lecture, the part he condescendingly cues for you, “(but bear with me — our argument is a little complicated), that his remarkable ignorance really shines..

What Dr. Farrell really wants to talk about is what he says journalism is all about: “Established newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Financial Times play a crucial sociological role in deciding which information is important and trustworthy, and which is not. When one of these newspapers publishes information, it is legitimated as knowledge — which people are not only more likely to take seriously themselves, but may have to take seriously, because they know that other people are taking it seriously.”

Bzzzt.  Bzzzzt.  Bzzzzzzt.  Hello Professor Farrell, it’s 2013.  You know, the Twenty First Century, and the world no longer gets its news, its information, from the newspapers.  They no longer define what is credible and important.  But the ever-more-dominant contemporary sources like TV news do not appear on Farrell’s radar.  Neither do the already-active internet news and information distributors.  Yikes!

The process of selection of “what matters” has not only spread across media, it has spread across the globe.  Millions of people get their info from China’s CCTV, and Russia’s RT, even Iran’s Press TV, not to mention global platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Weibo.  Oh yes, and there are John Stewart and Steven Colbert and a string of daring political comics from Russia and Kyrgyzstan to Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia (check ‘em out on YouTube while they last).

And what they refine information into is not “knowledge.”  It is “common knowledge” or “conventional wisdom,” neither of which is the same thing as knowledge, which is something tested by experience and evidence.

Also, if you’re gonna profess on “knowledge,” you might want to consider what’s new and different about how it is acquired today.  Most people today see information on screens, not pages, from video, not from text. This helps account for the instantaneous global spread of facts and ideas. 

From these disparate, dispersed sources, people today often gather “evidence” on their own.  They hunt down internet sites with their own two to 10 fingers; they literally see the video with their own eyes, and thus, they tend trust their judgments and conclusions more deeply than those validated by the professional reporters, editors and presenters of the brand-name media.  They might call what they derive “knowledge,” but often it is mere supposition. It is not helpful to confuse the two, but it absolutely necessary to note that the “common knowledge” conferred by mainstream media often feels pallid compared to the analysis of internet-derived video and text assembled at home.

What would be “big journalistic news” would be a real assimilation of the deep investigative reporting of people like Greenwald, Poitras and Scahill, along with the shorter-turnaround observations of both professional reporters and editors and the millions of “citizen reporters” who are both literally and immediately “on the scene” with their cellphone and video recorders.  Hopefully, this could restore the working consensus of “common knowledge” from which informed judgment, real “knowledge,” proceeds. It sounds like that may be what Pierre Omidyar has in mind. 

But, with all due respect to those 3 remarkably admirable journalists, achieving that will take more than they can deliver.  It will require an editorial infrastructure of old-fashioned researchers, reporters and editors, combined with new-fangled outreach and collation of visual information “from the ground.”

What Omidyar and his colleagues will build will not be especially new.  News media, old or new, still depend on direct observation, contextual knowledge, and presentational production.  What is new is this: the sources journalists have always depended upon now operate long-distance, in real time, and their testimony, which still must be collated and evaluated and ordered can be not just self-asserted, but self-published.  Thus the inherent questions sources raise, of accuracy and balance, context and value are both more difficult to define, and more immediate in their impact than ever before. 

And all the slipperiness of endless dispersion and often-unknowable dependability slides to the receiving end as well.  Today’s information consumers can seek out and assemble their own dossiers on stories they care about, forcing every  news product, every news producer or distributor to compete for credibility as never before.

It’s an incredible multi-media, global competition Pierre Omidyar and his staff will be jumping into.  Let’s wish them luck, and figure the questions of how true he will be to the intellectual honesty and editorial independence of his people and his platform will be answered for all to see.

And as for Henry Farrell, here’s how he closes his piece: “If governments start to lose control over public knowledge in the information age, it won’t be because information “wants to be free.” It’ll be because of the creation of new ventures like this that create public knowledge without adhering to the old rules about how government has a voice in deciding what gets published and what doesn’t.”

Uh, Professor?  There ain’t no “if” here. 

Governments have already lost control over public knowledge precisely because information is free.

 Ventures like this one exist in a world of hundreds, if not millions of competing voices supplying what each calls information, which is why the old rules of government deciding what gets published are as dead as a doornail.  If they can stop a story here, they can’t stop it there. 

The UK Government has forcefully shown that it doesn’t want The Guardian UK publishing any of the Snowden materials.  But The Guardian (US) in New York, or the Washington Post or Pro Publica or Der Spiegel (or Al Jazeera, or RT or France 24, or…or…or) make that wish, and the forced destruction of digital copies of the Snowden files in The Guardian’s London office, a ridiculous, futile anachronism.

And transforming common knowledge into knowledge particular and true will still be the job, not of the writer, editor or videographer, but the customer.  May the best reporting win his or her trust.

 

WAR-LITE?

What is war for?  Perhaps this brief interregnum before the missiles fly would be a good time to consider that question.

The principal, inevitable consequence of war is destruction, of human life and property.  All the other abstract products of warfare are several quantum leaps behind destruction in impact and resonance.  But let’s look at them.

War can produce (1) conquered territory (2) weakened or eliminated enemies (3) strengthened or strained alliances (4) fear and (5) respect.

Conquered territory, to remain conquered must be held, and territory can be held only with boots on the ground.  President Obama’s proposed Syrian punishment begins and ends with the First Principle, no boots on the ground, so this war (or war-lite) will not enlarge any secured real estate.

Will a few “demonstration” attacks weaken our enemies in the Mideast and, increasingly, all over the Muslim world?   Not seriously, nor, according to Administration hawks like Secretary of State John Kerry, are they intended to.  The missiles, bombs and rockets will not eliminate many enemies they do not directly kill.  In fact, on the conventionally accepted formula of counter-insurgency, "kill one guerilla, create 10 more," they will actually grow the number of people so disaffected from the United States that they are willing to take up arms against us.  Converts from this exercise?  Do you expect many?  I don't.

How about our diplomatic alliances?  Again, it appears the counter-production will far outweigh the positive effects of our (restrained) assault on Syria.  Any damage done to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his largely anti-Zionist populace may be welcomed by many in Israel and accepted in France (at least at the top-of-government level), but the rejection of joining the hunt by the British Parliament has already strained relations between Washington and London, and, polls suggest, the widespread disapproval across Europe, and although there are no analogous polls there that I’ve seen, likely even stronger opposition across Asia and the Middle East signal, the US is neither winning friends nor positively influencing people with its conception of “punishing” the Syrian regime for its almost certain, and certainly awful crimes.

Henry Kissinger the soi-disant descendant, I would say diminishment, of Metternich, used to propose his “madman theory:” that we could get great results from the fear people and states would have of an America capable of insane levels of violence and destruction.  Perhaps, that might once have been true, at least in the “olden times,” of Thomas Hobbes, when life was “nasty, brutish and short,” (a little like Kissinger himself.)  But today, life is globally connected, and people who were once willing to dine happily on the sausages of conquest, now can't avoid seeing with their own eyes war’s sausage-making process.  They get to hear, first hand, through instant or almost-instantaneous words and pictures what war really means.  It speaks well for mankind that this tends to reduce their respect, if not their fear, of the promulgators of ultra-violence. 

Thus, unless a nation is willing to commit to all the responsibilities of post-war, occupation of conquered territory, paying for as well as supervising the rebuilding of states, and the re-establishment of rule of law against the scattered, highly motivated forces of “insurgents,” always present in the transition period after war “officially” ends, the bottom line for wars since 1963 (i.e. since Vietnam) has been consistently written in blood-red economic ink.

Again, take it step by step: war is supposed to increase or secure territory, weaken enemies, strengthen alliances, and induce fear and respect (of as we once long ago put it, the Cheney-Rumsfeld dream of “shock and awe.”)  Raise your hand if you believe this formulation works.

The extreme skepticism, even among nations regarded as our best friends, towards America's claimed intelligence and evidence that allegedly prove that President Assad or his commanders ordered the chemical mass murder in the Damascus suburbs should alert us to how little respect the US presently commands.

In Washington the Obama Administration is claiming that they are proposing something quite different from all-out war, a kind of war-lite. We will attack only a few places for only a short time, aspire to no territory, no regime change, not even a re-balancing of power among the contending forces on the soon-to-be-bouncing Syrian ground.

Again, this seems to me a quaint notion, because “lite” or not, this is going to be war “LIVE.”  Already Israeli radio has announced its plan for real-time coverage, and Israeli TV will also be watching.  And so will the American networks and newschannels, already salivating over their expected jump in audience ratings, and the global newschannels which represent the eyes and living rooms, desktops and mobile phones of China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, Iran, Turkey, Germany, France, Russia, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and, oh yes, Syria.  They will all be tuned it, real-time or damn close to it.

And what they will be watching will not look like war-lite, it will look like war, and unmistakably war of choice, war of the strongest against the weaker, bullying.  Few will be rooting for the big guys.

Let me propose a video analogy.

Everyone, especially anyone who witnessed or lived through it, agreed: Hurricane Andrew was a Storm of the Century, the biggest, baddest hurricane in the weather service record books.  The problem was how to communicate that on video.

All the conventional images for a “hurricane,” palm trees bending, street signs shuddering, traffic lights swinging like pendulums in the wind, even windows shattered, while shutters dangled from their hinges, or roofs torn off homes, flying like corrugated razor blades, were already “used up,” offered countless times on TV as images of lesser storms.  The only way to show the scale that put Andrew off the conventional charts would have been a long, sustained aerial shot of house after house, block after block after block of roofless homes, and no one in conventional TV news (and what is more conventional than TV news?) had the patience, or the confidence in the audience’s patience or attention span to show that.

So audiences had to “take our word for it,” that Andrew was like no hurricane we’d ever seen for size and violence.  Many may have acceded, but few felt it in their guts.

Communicating scale is video’s greatest weakness.

And this weakness cuts both ways.  So, for President Obama’s apparent plan for something less than war on Syria, -- once the video pictures of the first, second or third cruise missile landing, the first or second house imploding, neighborhood cowering, hospital receiving room spilling over with blood and terrified humanity hit the cellphone, tablet, computer and TV screens of the world  -- it is not going to look “restrained.”  It will not feel to billions of viewers like “war lite;” it will look like war. It will look like the US inflicting “punishing” violence on some other country, both because it can and because the America wants to show that it can.

If the President thinks this will win over hearts and minds through its "restraint," I fear he is kidding us, and worst of all, kidding himself.

The deadly “secret” of war is out, everywhere: the principal consequence of war far is destruction.  Period.

Blood red ink all around.

 

 

  

 

THIS IS YOUR LIFE – MY WAY

I’ve always been queasy about fictionalizations of history, especially fictionalizations of biography.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with using history as background, and even, although now we’re getting to trickier territory, using “real” characters to interact with the major players in historical fiction.  Serious writers from Tolstoy to Doctorow have made that work to everyone’s advantage.

But where the writer simply appropriates a real person and characterizes him or her as he or she chooses, the chance for abuse – of history, of the named people, or the careless reader or viewer – is dangerously high.  Think of Oliver Stone’s JFK, in which real names are simply hooks from which the writer-director dangles is own, usually shallow and melodramatic ideas.

All of which is to say, NBC’s not-quite-a-plan for a Hillary Clinton biopic series sounds like a very bad idea.  Licensing any writer/director team to dream up a fictional version of a real character who may or may not be planning to run for President, while that run is impending is asking for a mess.

On the other hand, (and why is this distinction not being made?), CNN’s plan to let the distinguished journalist Charles Ferguson do a documentary about Ms. Clinton, even as she considers her own Presidential possibilities may be a very good idea.  I mean what is a “newschannel” for, if not giving serious, in-depth, documentary-length evaluations of potential candidates.  My guess is that Ms. Clinton may have more to fear from this project than the GOP.

Will Ferguson be making judgments about HRC?  I’m sure he will, as an inevitable part of his journalistic process.  Thus, those judgments will be based on facts, and backed up by evidence on video drawn from real news coverage.  That is very different from a dramatic series, “based on a real story,” with made up dialogue, and character-defining impersonations (even if from a distinguished actress like Diane Lane).

As for Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus’ threats to cut NBC News out of any 2016 GOP Presidential Candidate Debates in retribution, this is just silly, and given the quality and audience size of 2012’s endless series of “thundering herd of elephants” debates, amounts to tossing the Peacock squad into B’rer Rabbit’s briar patch.  Deny a network a chance at an hour or two of the next campaign’s version of Herman Cain vs. Rick Perry vs. Rick Santorum et al?  Hit me again, Reince!  Please!!!

So, Steve Burke, turn away from this golden opportunity to be excluded from that un-funny clown show, by doing the really right thing: kill the Hillary project and leave covering the realities of politics to your professionals at NBC News who put reality first.

I guess NBC could come up with a compromise: do the biopic, but run it on MSNBC, where reality has no role and rhetoric (fawning or abusive) already defines the brand.

 

 

 

A MOTTO FOR JOURNALISTS IN THE NEW AGE OF OBAMA AND SUCCESSORS

They know a lot about us, but we know more about the world they live in. And we can make the people trust us more.

SURVEILLANCE: AN EXCHANGE

My good friend and fellow worshipper of the horsehide spheroid, Doug Hellinger, raised a serious challenge to my first blog on privacy and secrecy.  I quote from his email:

I would have a very hard time giving in to what you seem to be considering the inevitability of a loss of privacy that greatly increases the vulnerability of movements of resistance (to a corrupt, criminal, repressive or unjust state, or to corporate dominance) to being undermined or of individuals to persecution for, say, their lifestyle choices. To quote a wise man who understands the need for social inclusion, what are we going to say to African Americans and women who are being spied on (as in the good-old Hoover days) as they resist the loss of their economic, social and legal rights? Fuck ‘em?

To which I replied…

"Acceptance."

Yes, we must accept that today's technologies which intercept and record virtually everything we do exist and that maximizing their use to defend the security of the nation is a foregone conclusion.

What we cannot accept is deferring to government all the decisions about what "maximum use" means. Whose recorded data is selected for analysis, by whose authority, to what end?

What triggers data selection beyond collection? What limits it?

When is a data selection operation ended? What happens to the selected materials and the judgments made of them?

Who gets to ask these questions? What are their powers to restrain abuse of the data collection system? How much of the process described above is made available to the public? And what options does the public have to impose modifications on surveillance theory and practice?

Not to mention, what are the threats to national security and how appropriate and how productive are the policies and actions taken to defend it?

Good answers to these questions are what we should be fighting for.

Fortunately, even as governments accrue more and better machinery to log all our communications, and through drone-supported cameras, our every movement, people are gaining new powers of their own.

Even as the Internet is targeted by a frighteningly narrow and self-interested oligarchy of brand name product manufacturers and global media producers, most bent on "winning" by killing off their competitors, it is itself producing a generation of independent recorders of events, and providers of interpretations and opinions.

This now multibillion computer, tablet, cellphone camera-carrying populace cannot only, like the government, record almost everything; it can communicate it instantly and globally. More people understood Edward Snowden in seconds than understood Daniel Ellsberg in decades.

The question, of course, is credibility, whose recordings will most people accept as true? The government's, the mainstream media's or "amateur video?"

With so many video recording devices in so many hands, the products of multiple "amateur" sources should allow the best mainstream media to deduce a best, most comprehensive approximation of reality ever available, simply by wisely selecting from them. Many of them are better and more believable than the best manipulations of propagandists for commercial as well as government interests. Some of them are fakes, cruel manipulations, which is why journalism -- more than ever -- must provide independent, professional witnesses on the ground as well as informed editors and commentators at the home office. If the institutional "mainstream" media continue to fail to do so, if they continue to save money on reporting and continue to scant facts, context and serious analysis, if they continue to simply pass on what government and conventional thinking call reality, the amateurs on YouTube will eat their lunch, and win credit and credibility from the people and force change and restraint on them and government as the price of giving to either of them even a small share of admiration and belief.

Communication, like almost everything else these days, has become battleground for the respective, all too often opposed, interests of the 1% and the 99%.

But to return to the word, yes, accept technology, but learn how to limit it, use it, control it, in support of rule of law, freedom, and lives of decency, dignity and opportunity for all.

I thank “the Duke” for accepting my appropriation of his private communication for my, and hopefully the reader’s benefit.