This Week: Update on the Secret Air Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

"Quote" of the Week

Shameless Self Promotion: River City Buttons

The State of the News Media 2008: "Reporting Resources Have Shrunk"

Covering the World: Where's the Good News?

 

Greetings,

This issue is a historic one for Nygaard Notes, as it contains what may well be my first-ever "commercial." Well, it's not really a commercial, but it looks like one to me. Maybe it is one, you be the judge. The article is called "Shameless Self Promotion," but I guess it's not really shameless, or I wouldn't be explaining it here, would I?

I have mentioned several times recently that I have been "busy," that I have a new job, etc. I've been wanting to wait until I had it all together to spring the news to all you Nygaardians, but I'm going to tell y'all now even though it's not all together. Here it is: I bought a new business a few months ago. The Shameless Self Promotion article tells the story.

This new business—really, my inexperience at running it—is the reason why Nygaard Notes has been coming out a little less frequently lately. Learning the ropes takes time! But this issue should mark a return to more frequent publication. I aim for every 10 days or so, and more often if I can. All I know is that I have got a lot more things on my agenda than I have time to cover in only two issues a month!

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"Although most portrayals of poverty in the media and elsewhere reflect the experience of only a few, a significant portion of families in America have experienced economic hardship, even if it is not life-long. Americans need new ways of thinking about poverty that allow us to understand the full range of economic hardship and insecurity in our country. In addition to the millions of families who struggle daily to make ends meet, millions of others who are getting by are merely one crisis—a health emergency, divorce, or job loss—away from financial devastation. In recent years, more and more families have become vulnerable to economic hardship."

Those words are part of the answer to the question "How accurate are commonly held stereotypes about poverty?" that appears on a page called "Child Poverty and Family Economic Hardship: 10 Important Questions" on the website of the National Center for Children in Poverty. See it here.

Shameless Self Promotion: River City Buttons

I mention in the Editor's Note this week that I have bought a new business. It's true. It's a little part-time business that I bought from a friend, and what I do is I make buttons. It's called River City Buttons.

Buttons, y'know. The kind you pin on your lapel, or on your backpack, or on your tee shirt, or on whatever. I make buttons for political groups, arts groups, labor unions, birthdays, special occasions, and who-knows-what else.

The best ways to support the Nygaard Notes project are to make a pledge of support and/or to tell people about the Notes and give them subscriptions. Now you can also support Nygaard Notes, indirectly, by making sure to come to River City Buttons if you or your group need any high-quality, low-cost, good-looking buttons.

Not to worry. This new job will not replace Nygaard Notes! Although buttons have gotten in the way of the Notes a bit recently, that should be temporary. My intention is to have this small, part-time business function as my "day job" to support my "real job," which is Nygaard Notes and the related teaching, speaking, and so forth that makes up the Nygaard Notes project.

River City Buttons is a union shop—a member of The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, Local 880—so you can have the union bug on your button if you want to. I hope you do.

So, if you want buttons, or want to know more about what I'm up to, go to the website for River City Buttons: http://www.rivercitybuttons.com . The website is still under construction (while I learn to make websites) so it doesn't look like much, but you should get all the information you need there, and you can call me if you need more.

OK, that's the end of the "commercial." The first and, hopefully, the last in these pages.

The State of the News Media 2008: "Reporting Resources Have Shrunk"

The Project for Excellence in Journalism [PEJ] at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism publishes a study every year called "The State of the News Media." Back in 2004 and 2006 I published bunches of excerpts from the studies from those years. I'm always wary of becoming too nerdy about the "inside world" of journalism, so this year I have just a couple of highlights to pass on from the 2008 edition.

Of the six "Major Trends" in journalism that PEJ lists this year, the one worth mentioning is this one: "The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden..." This contradicts the popular belief that the Internet and all of the news sources that are associated with it have broadened the public discussion. They have not. PEJ explains that "2007 became a year notable for the narrowness of the news agenda, defined almost as much by what wasn't covered as what was." (As you read the following excerpt, remember that the term "newshole" refers to the part of the newspaper that is left over after the top priority—the ads—have been placed. After the ads are there, what remains is a "hole," which is where the news goes. Weird, but true.) Anyway, PEJ elaborates as follows:

"A comprehensive audit of coverage shows that in 2007, two overriding stories—the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential campaign—filled more than a quarter of the newshole and seemed to consume much of the media's energy and resources. And what wasn't covered was in many ways as notable as what was. Other than Iraq—and to a lesser degree Pakistan and Iran—there was minimal coverage of events overseas, some of which directly involved U.S. interests, blood and treasure. At the same time, consider the list of the domestic issues that each filled less than a single percent of the newshole: education, race, religion, transportation, the legal system, housing, drug trafficking, gun control, welfare, Social Security, aging, labor, abortion and more."

(Some may notice that the above list of "domestic issues" fails to mention either environmental issues or health care. Bizarrely, neither the word "environment" nor the phrase "health care" appear anywhere in the report.)

In addition to completely ignoring many important stories, PEJ goes on to say that "A related trait is a tendency to move on from stories quickly. On breaking news events—the Virginia Tech massacre or the Minneapolis bridge collapse were among the biggest—the media flooded the zone but then quickly dropped underlying story lines about school safety and infrastructure. And newer media seem to have an even narrower peripheral vision than older media. Cable news, talk radio (and also blogs) tend to seize on top stories (often polarizing ones) and amplify them. The Internet offers the promise of aggregating ever more sources, but its value still depends on what those originating sources are providing. Even as the media world has fragmented into more outlets and options, reporting resources have shrunk."

"Reporting resources have shrunk," they say. We hear this all the time, and we are told it is because profits are falling and thus there is no money to pay for journalism. Yet, in the "ECONOMICS" section of the State of the News Media we read this about profits—which in the corporate world are called "earnings":

"Earnings before taxes were down again, this time to the high teens, from last year. [The historic profit rate is 20 percent or more]. That profit margin, though, is still almost double most other U.S. industries."

Just to be clear, I'll offer a paraphrase of what they are saying here: There is still plenty of money in the media industry to take care of the top priority, which is the making of a hefty profit for the owners. But there is not enough money for secondary things like paying for "reporting resources."

There is a related, but separate, point to be made about this narrow news agenda, and I'll make it in the following article. If you're the kind of person who likes to know what journalists are saying about journalism these days, you can find the whole State of the News Media report on the Web at http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/

Covering the World: Where's the Good News?

Years ago I referred in these pages to U.S. press coverage of news from Latin America as "3-D News." That is, it tends to focus on Drugs, Dictators, and Disasters. (Nygaard Notes # 188: "News of Latin America: How and Why Our Media Fails Us.") But it's not just a hemispheric thing; the U.S. media treats the whole (non-U.S.) world in a similar way. There's a reason for that, and a little excerpt from The State of the News Media 2008 report will help to illustrate.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism says of their report, "For 2007, [the Project] offers a more in-depth, comprehensive analysis of news coverage than ever before. It examines coverage every weekday for the entire year in 48 media outlets and five media sectors, as well as Sunday newspapers. More than 70,000 stories were examined." Among the "key findings" is this one:

"In a strict sense, the American media did not in 2007 cover the world. Rather it would be more accurate to say it covered some U.S. interests abroad. Beyond Iraq, only two countries in 2007 received notable coverage, both closely related to the war—Iran and Pakistan. Among the arguably newsworthy places that received scant attention were Afghanistan, North Korea, Darfur, Russia, China and Lebanon."

When you examine the list above, what do you notice? What I notice is that the places that are "arguably newsworthy" in PEJ's eyes are all largely portrayed in the media either as A) threats to the U.S., B) competitors to the U.S., or C) sites of great human suffering. Afghanistan hosts al-Qaeda; North Korea has nukes; China's economy soon will rival the U.S.; Darfur is the scene of an ongoing crisis, and so forth. Why are these places—according to that bastion of corporate journalism, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism—considered "arguably newsworthy," while other places where tremendously important things are happening are not listed?

Readers of the corporate media may be forgiven for being ignorant of the fact that there are many places in the world—places that are not the United States!—where there are exciting, positive events taking place. Events, that is, from which people in the United States might actually learn something. Events that might illuminate some alternatives to the "American" way of doing things. Events that might even invite people to question some of the myths that we are taught from childhood about the nature of the nation in which we live.

Where are such events taking place? How about "arguably newsworthy places" like Brazil, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Ecuador, and elsewhere where participatory budgeting is being practiced on a significant scale? (http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/ )

How about places like the sites of the most effective mass transit systems in the world? Not that I know where those places are (Tokyo? Hong Kong? Paris?), but that's my point: We never hear about these successes.

How about places like Venezuela, where there are serious efforts underway to re-tool the economy away from the competitive capitalist model and toward a cooperative socialist model? Venezuela is more than the "anti-American" Hugo Chavez, although one would never know it from reading the U.S. media. (See Nygaard Notes # 398, "Further Reading on Venezuela Today."

There are other places in the world with important lessons to teach us about health care, social security, environmentalism, the role of the state, democracy, and much more. Why don't such places make the "arguably newsworthy" list for a place like the Columbia U J-School (as journalists like to call it)?

The answer has to do with a deep-seated ethnocentrism that permeates U.S. culture, including the media and the schools that train our journalists. Actually, to be "ethnocentric" is to "regard one's own race or ethnic group as of supreme importance" (Oxford English Dictionary), so it might be more accurate to use a word like "Americocentrism," or "Americentrism." Those words are already in use here and there, and they refer to a worldview that regards the United States—or, perhaps, the mythology that has come to represent the United States—as "of supreme importance."

The terms themselves reflect the problem, as there are many other "American" countries in what is known as "the Americas" (that is, the Western Hemisphere), yet most people seem to feel perfectly comfortable referring to the United States as "America," as if we were the only one. For more on this terminology, see Nygaard Notes Number 152 from April 5, 2002: "Announcing a New and Needed (and Ungraceful) Phrase." But, for now, let's use the term Americocentrism.

Learning from the World

One of the central features of Americocentrism is the (often unconscious) idea that we "have it" and they don't. The "it" is a cluster of things like wealth, intelligence, good luck, exemplary political and economic systems, and so forth. The "they" refers to anyone who is not fortunate enough to live in the U.S., or who is not intelligent enough to want to.

The question I am raising here is: What makes a "foreign" story newsworthy? In the eyes of the Americocentric corporate media, it is rarely anything other than the existence of a perceived (or manufactured) threat to "American interests," or a huge catastrophe to the victims of which U.S. citizens may wish to donate relief.

Seen through other eyes, eyes that don't see the U.S. as the center of everything, the world is much more interesting, and it is filled with people doing important—sometimes revolutionary—things from which we in the U.S. have a lot to learn. And we could learn a lot, if only we could build a media system in which the "good news" being constantly generated by people outside of the U.S.—and inside!—were considered to be "newsworthy."

Such a media system is already under construction. In fact, you're reading a part of it right now. It's connected to an increasingly vehement rejection of the Global War on Terror as an organizing principle, which is in turn a part of a growing movement toward the building of a life-affirming civilization. I'll have more to say about this in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.