| Number 271 | October 1, 2004 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Nothing about the presidential debates this week. Sorry! What I do have this week is an article about authorship of stories in the media. The reason we have bylines in the first place is so that readers know whose voice they are hearing. After all, there are good reporters and bad reporters, and good wire services and bad wire services (what is “good” and what is “bad,” and which are which is up to you to decide, of course). Newspaper stories don’t always have bylines, but when there is a byline – that is, when we know who wrote a story – there is some accountability. We can, in theory, hold the author responsible for all of the choices about the emphasis and tone of their story, as well as the basic facts. Unfortunately, that’s not always easy to do in our local paper and, I suspect, with other regional papers in the U.S., and I give an example of why in a small case study this week. See what you think. I haven’t done a lot of promoting of political actions lately, because I assume that most readers have their own sources of information about what to do and where to do it. (If I’m wrong, readers, please write and tell me. As Jimmy Durante used to say, “I got a million of ‘em!”) Anyhow, the four items I’m publishing this week would be good for you to support in any way you can. At minimum, just reading about them might boost your spirits. I’m glad so many of you found last week’s Social Security information useful! Thanks for all the nice comments, and welcome to the new readers of the Notes! Until next week, Nygaard |
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Here are the first two paragraphs from a story that appeared on page 22 of the New York Times of September 24:
On the bright side, here are some words from an editorial in The Charleston Gazette of West Virginia, discussing the above letters:
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This is an election season and, as usual, some voices are being largely excluded from the public discussions. The problem includes literal disenfranchisement, but it’s deeper than that, and amounts to a more general political marginalization of certain political “undesirables.” Here, then, are four opportunities to support grassroots empowerment of poor folks, people of color, working people, and people who have been caught up in the criminal “justice” system. 1. POOR FOLKS “In this election year, the People's Pilgrimage to Overcome Poverty urges people of faith across Minnesota to stand together in support of those living in poverty.” That’s the call from a large interfaith coalition that will hold a rally on the Capitol steps in St. Paul this coming Wednesday, October 6. There will be a prayer service near Snelling and Summit Avenues at 8:30 a.m., a march from there to the capitol from 9:00 to noon, and a rally at the Capitol from noon to 1:00 p.m. This effort will not stop on November 2. The coalition promises that “Following this year's elections, we will maintain a commitment to expanding our network of committed Minnesotans and continuing conversations with officials in order to produce lasting social and political change” in the effort to eliminate poverty. The list of sponsors is long, and includes – so far – all sorts of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews. Anyone – and especially those of you who are active in faith communities – can sign a pledge of support for their efforts by going to their website at http://www.peoplespilgrimage.org/. While you’re there, you’ll also learn more about what you can do to eliminate poverty in Minnesota. If you’re not in Minnesota, you should know that the effort is acting in conjunction with a national “faith-based effort to overcome poverty,” called the Call to Renewal, which you can connect with by visiting their website, http://www.calltorenewal.org. 2. PEOPLE OF COLOR The group “2004 Racism Watch” is gearing up for “Vote for Racial Justice Week,” and here’s what they say about it: “During the week of October 18-24, 2004, we call for groups and coalitions around the country to organize local actions and campaigns in support of racial justice. Once again, just like other elections, we're hearing almost nothing about these issues from the major Presidential candidates and many other candidates seeking office, so we need to make our presence felt! As Frederick Douglass said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.’” The Week has been endorsed by all sorts of notable groups, like the Black Radical Congress, Black Voices for Peace, Green Party of the United States, Independent Progressive Politics Network, Institute for Southern Studies, League of Pissed Off Voters, National Coalition Building Institute, National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, Project South, Solidarity, Southern Anti-Racism Network, and the Student Environmental Action Coalition. At the 2004 Racism Watch website, you can print flyers to hand out, learn about the candidates’ positions on racially-relevant issues (all issues are racially-relevant, actually, but this is about focus), and you can find out how you or your organization can support the effort to make undoing racism a priority issue in the U.S. political process. Wouldn’t that be something?! Find out more at http://www.racismwatch.org/ 3. WORKING PEOPLE Since the AFL-CIO seems to have put most of its effort into supporting John Kerry for president, many people might conclude that support for that candidate is the position of “organized labor.” It’s not that simple, as we shall see on October 17th, when the Million Worker March (MWM) takes place in Washington DC. You should go! As one of the organizing groups puts it, “This fall in Washington, D.C., you will have a timely and historic opportunity to unite the anti-war movement with an unprecedented and vitally necessary mass march of working people speaking for themselves. This is a rare opportunity that serious anti-war activists can't afford to pass up.” The Million Worker March is an independent mobilization forwarding a progressive worker-centered agenda around a range of crucial issues, including:
The march was scheduled to take place before this year's election to put the next president, Congress, and corporations on notice that working people have their own interests that must be respected. On the national scene, over one hundred labor and community organizations have endorsed the march, including: The National Education Association (NEA); Teamsters Black Caucus; Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC); American Postal Workers Union (APWU); Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Another progressive group points out that those who participate in the MWM “will have helped to forge a critical alliance between the grass roots of the labor movement and the anti-war movement that would represent a whole new level of unity, potential and power.” I think they’re right. Minnesota has a strong organizing group that has been working for months to get a strong representation of our state to DC for the March. To guarantee yourself a seat on the bus make your reservation on-line at www.Mnmillionworkermarch.org or by calling 612-724-3888. Buses will leave the Twin Cities on Saturday morning, October 16, and return on Monday evening, October 18. Roundtrip bus fare from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Washington, D.C. is $125. Buses are leaving from all over the country, of course. Find out how you can get there – and see a full listing of endorsers and of specific issues and demands – by going on the web to www.millionworkermarch.org. 4. DISENFRANCHISED FOLKS The scandal of the disenfranchisement of people who at some point in their lives have been convicted of a felony is well-known by now. (I hope. If you need more information, check out this website, for starters: http://www.sentencingproject.org/pubs_05.cfm. That’s the Sentencing Project’s site on felony disenfranchisement.) The good news is that some activists in Minnesota are taking concrete action to get ex-felons re-integrated into the political process. Here is a summary of an email I recently got that some of you may not have seen:
Three gatherings on this subject have been scheduled in the Twin Cities area for ex-felons, community members, service providers, politicians and all other interested parties. Here are the details: The first one already happened. The second one is Friday, October 8th, from 4-6 p.m. at Pilot City Neighborhood Services, 1315 Penn Ave. North in Minneapolis, 612-348-4783. The last one is Saturday, October 9th, from 12-2 p.m. at the Division of Indian Work, 1001 East Lake Street in Minneapolis, 612-722-8722 |
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What makes a newspaper a “local” newspaper? Is it important when reading the newspaper to know who it was that actually wrote the story you are reading? I think it is, but it’s not clear that the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) agrees. Many of the news stories in the Star Trib come from what are called “news services,” which are organizations that produce news stories and sell them to other organizations, which then make them available to the public. Some news services are familiar to the average reader, like the Associated Press, the New York Times News Service, Reuters, and United Press International. There are dozens and dozens of others. Smaller newspapers are largely dependent on the news services for the non-local news they publish (and sometimes for local news, as well). For example, in a two-day period earlier this week, the Star Trib had a total of 29 news stories in their front-page section, and only 7 of them were written by Star Trib reporters. Of the other 22, 16 of them came from the Associated Press, 3 from the NY Times, and 3 from the WP. [Editor’s note: I actually looked at a lot more than two days’ worth, and these two are representative of the pattern.] In contrast, the same 2-day period in the NYT saw 62 stories – more than twice as many – 55 of which were written by Times reporters. Of the other 7, 4 came from the AP, and 3 came from the British news service Reuters. This is mostly a function of money and power. The Big Boys have lots – lots of money, and lots of power, that is. They have a lot of access to sources, for one thing, far more than most local and regional newspapers and electronic media do. They used to have a lot more reporters and lot more bureaus than they do now, too, but those things have been cut back to maintain profitability. They still have a lot more than the smaller players like the Star Tribune. The result is that the big national media have enormous power in shaping the understanding of the world that those of us in the smaller cities end up with. If we read only the local press, we may think we are getting the “home-town” perspective, but in fact the actual stories are mostly written elsewhere, by a relatively small number of reporters, and edited by an even smaller number of editors. In many cases we don’t know who any of these people are. For example, in the two-day period I looked at, six of the AP stories that appeared in the Star Trib had no name on them at all, simply crediting the stories to “Associated Press.” And on September 17th the Star Trib ran a story on page 3, headlined “Coalition Partners Defend Iraq War,” with a byline that said simply “From News Services.” For your friendly neighborhood media critic, this raises problems in terms of accountability. Back in the days when the Star Trib had a “reader’s representative,” I used to call once in a while to challenge the facts or the emphasis in a story. Often the reader’s rep did not know – and could not know – who actually wrote the story. “How do we hold anyone accountable when we don’t know who they are?” I would ask. The response was typically along the lines of “These are reputable news organizations, so you don’t need to worry about it.” I have written on many occasions of the variety of reasons why we do need to worry about it. One reason is that, since the media amount to the largest adult education system in the world, it seems important to know who the teachers are. But that’s not how it works in the modern age of centrally-collected and distributed information, as the following story illustrates. |
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How important is an editor? We can get a hint about that – as well as a hint of the extent to which the specific origins of our news stories are often obscured – by looking in a little depth at one specific story. The one I have in mind appeared in the Star Tribune on September 14th. It was about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and it bore the headline: “U.S. Targets Reported Militant Meeting In Fallujah; The Military Says Militants Were Killed. Hospitals Reported Women and Children Dead.” (I talked about a different aspect of this very story a couple of weeks ago, in the article: “What It Is: Naming A Lie.”) The byline on the story read, “By Fadel Badran; Reuters.” But at the end of the story we see the footnote, “The Associated Press, New York Times, and Washington Post contributed to this report.” Hmm... Does Mr. Badran know that? And what, I wondered, did all these sources “contribute?” I decided to look, which I can do because I have access – access which the average reader does not have – to full-text databases of the global English-language media. The story was supposed to be “by Reuters” but, of a total of 21 paragraphs, only nine were from the Reuters story – a few at the beginning, a couple in the middle, and a couple near the end. Almost as many paragraphs in the article were drawn from the Associated Press (seven), with the Post and the Times contributing one apiece. Here’s the odd part: three paragraphs were from none of these sources. I call them the “mystery paragraphs.” And they were pretty important. For example, one of the AP paragraphs reported that “Witnesses said one explosion went off in a market as sellers were setting up their stalls, wounding several people and shattering windows. An ambulance was struck while rushing from the area, killing the paramedic driver and five wounded patients....” This story was repeated in essentially all of the many news reports I looked at. The mystery paragraphs, on the other hand, quote U.S. press officer Sharon Walker as saying “The U.S. military is confirming that we did not hit an ambulance and we did not hit a marketplace.” Walker added, according to this source, that the 25 deaths were “of al-Zarqawi operatives or anti-Iraqi forces.” That’s an illuminating couple of quotations, and they weren’t found in any of the sources listed by the Star Trib. This is important. Although many press reports that day (and there were many, although almost all were buried in the inside pages of the nation’s newspapers) reported that “the U.S. military said” no civilians were killed, only one source – the Star Trib’s mystery source – named the specific spokesperson who stood in front of reporters and lied. It’s this sort of detail that makes a story compelling, in my mind. Such lying might even be a scandal, I suppose, and could get Ms. Walker in trouble, if such lying had not become so routine among U.S. officials. Looking Closely, Reading Closely Another telling editing choice by the Star Trib could be found deep in the article. Paragraph 12 in the Star Trib version was pulled straight from the AP story, and read: “The hospital was overwhelmed with the wounded, its white sheets soiled with blood.” The following paragraph was also pulled from the AP story, and in the Star Trib it read: “One woman there wept and pulled at her hair. ‘I lost my son,’ she screamed. ‘I wish it were me.’” The original AP version read: “One woman who went to the hospital hysterically pulled at her hair. ‘I lost my son,’ she screamed between sobs. ‘I wish it were me.’” There’s a difference in tone between “she wept and pulled at her hair,” and she “hysterically pulled at her hair.” These sorts of differences in tone are what make a story a “Reuters story” or an “AP story” or, for that matter, a “Star Tribune story.” Now, while I’m at it, here’s a deeper layer of meaning: The Star Trib’s choice to soften the AP version of what was going on at the hospital in the wake of the U.S. attacks was not the only choice they made about this paragraph. Rather than the altered AP paragraph, they could have used here the paragraph from the mystery source (it was the Cox News Service, I discovered), which included a powerful quotation. Here’s what the Star Trib decided not to use: “‘The conditions here are miserable – an ambulance was bombed, three houses [were] destroyed and men and women killed,’ the hospital's director, Rafayi Hayad al-Esawi, told Al-Jazeera television by telephone in a report posted on the Arab satellite station's Web site. ‘The American army has no morals.’” The reason I give all of these tiny details is to illustrate how important is the job of an editor. I would argue that, in this case, the editing is extensive enough that it approaches the point of making the – unnamed – editor essentially the author of the article. And that raises the question of accountability. When an important story from a news service is run in our regional newspaper of record, and more than 50 percent of the article comes from other sources – including one “mystery source” – and those sources are freely mixed, matched, and altered by someone whose identity is also a mystery, then who is responsible for the story? In this case, it almost seems as though the story was not a “Reuters” story at all, but a Star Tribune story. And keep in mind that this is not just a report on a local car accident or something; this is a major foreign policy story that, in essence, accuses the U.S. government of bald-faced lying. So, whose story is it? The Star Tribune’s readers – and the readers of any newspaper – deserve to know. |