Photojournalism: Why do it?

One of the more succinct articles I've seen on why news journalists do what they do comes from Scout Tufankjian, a photographer for the Polaris agency who is based in New York City but does a lot of her work in Gaza. Writing in Slate.com about the latest round of violence there, she summed up what it's like to report on a war zone where people's lives are broken daily by random brutality:

I asked one of my best friends, a local AP photographer, how he was doing and he said, "Work is good. The situation is kharra (shit)." That pretty much sums up life here. It's the essential contradiction of what I do. If my kid were killed, I wouldn't want some grimy little snapper sticking her lens in my face, but I do that to people every day. I don't beat myself up for it, either. I'm here to work, not to watch or to hold their hand and experience their pain. And it's my job to show that the shelling leaves real people, crying real tears, over their really dead sons and daughters.

That probably sounds cold, but there's a context to it. And a reason for doing it.

It comes out slowly in Tufankjian's piece. And it comes out not so much from anything she actually says as it does from her matter-of-fact description of the daily life of a photojournalist in a war zone. She begins with a classic understatement:

GAZA, July 19, 2006—I love being a photographer. I doubt that I could possibly love it more. When I'm trying to compose an artful image out of the tattered remains of someone's son, however, I start to wonder if maybe my job is a little strange.

I've had this thought a lot during the last few weeks here in Gaza, where I've been working for various magazines and newspapers. While it may seem odd to commute between Gaza and New York, I've been working here off and on for almost three years, and the situation now is as bad as I have seen it. ...

There is a world of difference between Tufankjian's job and my experience covering courts and cops for daily newspapers in the U.S., but what she says I can relate to. Cover the news, and at some level you're trafficking in human misery. It's unavoidable.

Tufankjian is most effective when she tells about her day. In Gaza, with the Israeli Defense Forces pounding the area in response to provocation from Palestinian militants, it's impossible to plan much in advance. She says:

Most days here in Gaza begin in the morgue. My driver and fixer, Mahdi, picks me up at my occasionally air-conditioned hotel in the morning and we head to whatever hospital is closest to wherever the Israelis are currently. The Israelis have been moving around a lot—a few days here, a few days there. The militants tend to operate only in their own neighborhoods, so the press corps has been speculating that the Israelis are trying to attract the most intense militants in each area to the tanks and then kill them all. Whatever the plan is, that has certainly become one of the results. The problem, of course, is that these clashes are taking place in and around residential neighborhoods, so every time a tank shell misses the militants, there's a good chance it'll hit someone's home or someone's kid.

No matter where we are heading, we listen to Radio Shebab along the way to find out what's going on. Radio Shebab -— which is run by [the Palestinian opposition political party] Fatah -— is a mixed bag. Their local reporting is good and generally tells you what you need to know about where the clashes are, who's been killed, and where people are bringing the wounded. Unfortunately, the station also plays really horrible homegrown songs about the various factions, most of which would not sound out of place in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, if Gilbert had written lyrics like "The death! The death! The death of Israel!"

In other words, they drive around looking for action.

The nature of news being what it is and Gaza being what it is, Tufankjian and her Arabic-speaking "fixer" (the local journalist overseas correspondents rely on to get them around) wind up at a hospital. She writes:

The news this morning is that there will be no funerals today. Israeli tanks are still in the area, so it's unlikely that Hamas will be able to hold a service for its gunmen that doesn't end in a massacre. I wander back to the hospital, where the normally quiet lobby has become a triage center. There are only six beds in the ER, and around 60 people have been wounded this morning, so the hospital has thrown a bunch of cots on the ground, and doctors are rushing around trying to stabilize people. Young militants toting Kalashnikovs keep getting in the way, tugging on the doctors' arms, trying to get them to treat a brother, a friend. Small kids from the neighborhood have also sneaked in and are looking around like it's a carnival. Meanwhile, the lights keep blowing out, so a janitor is on a ladder, changing the fluorescent tubes.

Since funerals in Gaza often turn into street demonstrations, as in so many of the world's trouble spots, they're good copy. They're where the news is. So are hospitals, though. Another reason for going to the hospital is that it's safer today than working the streets:

I've spent a lot of time in working in hospitals during the last few weeks. You get unfettered access here (Wanna see us try to save a guy missing his entire lower body? Come on in!). But the streets are also becoming more dangerous. The current Israeli incursion is a little bit outside town, where there are no side streets I can use to approach the action safely. Plus, the Israeli tanks are backed up by helicopter gunships, which scare the crap out of me. At least with tanks, you know what direction they'll be shooting in. Over the last few weeks, two journalists have been shot, and a lot more have been shot at, so unless you have an armored car, it makes more sense to cover this incursion from the hospital. Still, the thought of missing good pictures eats at me, so I'm relieved to see all of the local journalists sitting in front of the hospital smoking cigarettes.

Tufankjian says it's quieter in Gaza at the moment than it was before fighting broke out in Lebanon and most correspondents flocked to Beirut, but "the violence here continues unabated." Poignantly, I think, she adds:

... the Gazans generally treat me with warmth and courtesy. They see the foreign press as a lifeline—a chance to tell the world their story. Almost everybody believes that the world will listen.

I have my doubts. Polaris, my agency, sends me plenty of e-mails reassuring me that my pictures are not being sent out into a void, but the outside world doesn't seem all that interested in making the shelling stop. My politics are pretty simple. Killing people is bad. Killing civilians is worse. Killing children is an obscenity—whether it's the Katyusha rockets that killed two kids playing in their yard in Nazareth or the 6-year-old girl killed in her house in Shajiya. But no one in charge of this conflict has much to gain by stopping it. With each new atrocity, the extremists on both sides gain greater strength. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has never been more popular in Israel, and Palestinians are hunkering down behind [the militantly anti-Israeli governing party] Hamas.

Which leads Tufankjian back around to her friend's observation that life in Gaza is kharra, it's shit. But someone has to tell the world that's what it is. Someone has to be a witness.

Of blogs, politics and filing cabinets

Of the reaction I've seen (admittedly not much) to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's nationwide telephone survey of bloggers, I think inhouse media critic Jack Shafer's in the online magazine Slate.com is one of the more incisive. But maybe it's just because I agree with his overall take on blogging -- the people who say it's a revolutionary new thing in the world of journalism are doing something age-old instead, they're just hyping the story.

First, the Pew report's conclusions. Here's the summary on their webpage:

A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

That squares with what I've seen in the academic literature: Most blogging is personal, not political.

Shafer's piece on the Pew report notes that Technorati's "A List" of influential, heavily trafficked blogs consists of only 100 websites. I started to say "100 people," but "websites" is a better word because some of the big ones are corporate, collective enterprises. Think Wonkette, who is actually a couple of guys with a cute, feminine logo now that Ana Marie Cox has moved on to bigger (and more traditional) things. But, as Shafer notes, the Pew report is "stalking the larger universe of 12 million adult Americans who blog," and the picture is quite different. Says Shafer:

The Pew report, written briskly and ably by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox, delivers an array of provocative findings about bloggers. The most immediately startling for me was the repetition of the phrases "about half " or "nearly half" to describe various blogger attributes. About half of all American bloggers are men, says Pew. About half are under the age of 30. About half use a pseudonym. About half say creative self-expression or documenting personal experiences is a major reason for blogging. About half think their audience is folks they already know. Half say changing people's minds is not a major reason behind their blog, and about half had never published before starting their blog. (The margin of error for the telephone survey was plus or minus 7 percentage points.)

Pew's blogging masses couldn't be more different than the American A-listers. Most A-listers are men over 30; have published before; are in it primarily to change public opinions and not to share their experiences; know only a fraction of their readers; and don't conceal their identities.

Yet the newspaper reports on blogging focus almost exclusively on the Daily Kos, Instapundit and journalists like Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic who also blog. A-listers, in other words.

Here's Shafer again:

I'm not disparaging bloggers, so please don't treat me to a high-tech lynching. But this study shows that at this early point in the blog era, the great mass of bloggers aren't set on replacing reporters. The top 100 or top 1,000 may consider themselves "citizen journalists" of one sort or another, but the survey finds that 65 percent of bloggers don't consider their output journalism at all. They're just expressing themselves in a leisurely fashion, inspired by a personal experience (78 percent, says the survey), and their blogs are a "hobby" or "something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on" (84 percent).

Again, I'm not disparaging hobbies or navel-gazing: I have hobbies I can bore you with, and I navel-gaze. But the Pew report indicates that only a tiny fraction of current bloggers have any ambition to fulfill the blogs über alles designs some media theorists plotted for them.

Does Shafer sound a little defensive there? He might, because he's made much the same point before and got pummeled around the blogosphere for it. But I'm not about to join his lynching party. I blog, and I have no intention whatsoever of "replacing reporters" or reinventing myself as a "citizen journalist." Been there, done that. Worked for newspapers the better part of 15 years, got out of the business. Fell much better now, thank you. Whatever it is I do when I blog, it's not covering the news and influencing public opinion (although my opinions do sneak in from time to time, especially when the politicians stray onto my turf with simplistic notions about standardized testing). I'm not even sure I'd want to call it journalism, although I still think of myself as a journalist and my published writing tends to be journalistic rather than scholarly in style.

The Pew report hardly mentions academic blogs, probably because there aren't enough of us out there to show up in a random telephone survey. But the ones I'm familiar with, including mine, don't quite fit the reported categories.

For one thing, they're both personal and political. Like the bloggers in the Pew survey I follow the online news sites closely, and sometimes I wax political. But I don't like to do it too much. (For one thing, nobody's reading my blog. That part of the Pew report does ring a bell! So I'm not going to influence public policy with it.) I have three blogs, this one for journalism classes, a teaching blog and one on music that I also use in my humanities classes. While I can't resist the temptation for a little self-expression, I like to use them mostly as research and teaching tools.

When I'm doing research I post material I find, mostly but not always on the internet, to the appropriate blog(s) so I can easily retrieve it later with a keyword search. I'll also use the blogs to try out ideas I might use later, essentially as a writer's journal. They wind up sounding a lot like the op ed columns I used to write, so I guess I'm satisfying some kind of creative itch to get words down on paper at the same time.

During the spring semester I used the blogs as a teaching tool. I'd post information to the blog, assign my students to read it and base class discussions on their reading. Sometimes I had them write to a separate message board linked to my faculty webpage. It kept things fresh and timely, especially in my newswriting class but also in Native American cultural studies and, to a lesser degree, in my advertising survey course.

And finally, as I've suggested in comments on my other blogs lately, I use the blogs as a filing cabinet. That started at the beginning of the summer, when I embarked on a massive office-cleaning project preparatory to moving to a new building. Scraps of paper would come to the surface, random information like a quote from St. Angela Merici or a set of instructions for "lining out" 19th-century hymns. Most of it I'd forgotten I had. So I started posting it to my blogs. If the system resembles a filing cabinet, and I do think it does, it's a sprawling, disorderly filing cabinet with lots of folders marked "miscellaneous." But it's better than hanging onto scraps of paper that won't resurface till the next time I move offices.

'Who was that lady ...?'

Does President Bush have a future as a stand-up comic? Or, more accurately, as a straight man? Russia's president Vladimir Putin has never struck me as a wild and crazy guy, but at this weekend's G-8 conference in St. Petersburg, Bush set him up for the perfect one-liner.

Bush's golden moment - or Putin's - came in a news conference after the two had a one-on-one talk Saturday. The gag line came down just like the old vaudeville saw:

Q. Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
A.That was no lady, it was my wife!
Aud.Yuk yuk yuk!

So instead of Abbott and Costello, we get Bush and Putin. Here's how they set up the gag, as reported by The Observer, a Sunday paper affiliated with Britain's The Guardian and posted to the Guardian's website:

Bush said that, during two hours of discussions, 'I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion. I told [Putin] a lot of people in our country ... would hope that Russia would do the same thing. I fully understand, however, that there will be a Russian style of democracy.'

Putin replied, smiling: 'I'll be honest with you: we, of course, would not want to have a democracy like in Iraq.' Bush interrupted to say 'Just wait' - a reference to Iraq's democracy being in its infancy - before Putin continued: 'Nobody knows better than us how we can strengthen our own nation. But we know for sure that we cannot strengthen our nation without developing democratic institutions. And this is the path that we'll certainly take; but certainly we will do this by ourselves.'

I wouldn't presume to guess whether Bush's set-up was intentional or not, but it was a classic.

Snake oil and 'Texas-style accountability'

I'm cross-posting this item to my blogs on newspapering and education, for reasons that should be obvious as we go along.

Are we seeing the beginning of an orchestrated effort to discredit American colleges and universities? After months of being mostly ignored by the news media, Charles Miller, the chairman of a blue-ribbon federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education gives an interview to his home-town paper. He blasts higher ed, and he blasts the members of his commission who dispute his rhetoric. Staff writer Ralph K.M. Haurwitz of The Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman reports in Friday's paper:

Charles Miller expected a fight from higher education administrators when he agreed to head a national panel for his old friend, Margaret Spellings, the U.S. secretary of education. He's getting one.

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued a draft report this week recommending academic and fiscal reforms. Some higher education leaders, including a few on the commission, have criticized the draft as overly harsh in tone and too quick to condemn academia.

Miller, speaking from Houston on Thursday, a day after the commission met to review the draft, didn't sound like someone interested in backing down on substance and perhaps not too much on tone.

"I've been advised to say things in moderate terms, to not criticize the academy," Miller said, declining to say who offered such advice. "It's almost like being censored. Some of the language ... could be toned down, but the real issue is putting responsibility on the higher education system for things it's not doing well. It has some really bad flaws."

The headline catches the tone of Miller's remarks: "Chairman defends panel's call for reforms in higher education." But his proposed reforms - which are not yet the commission's because they haven't been adopted yet - have been roundly questioned in The New York Times and a few papers like The Boston Globe in major metro areas where the commission has conducted hearings. (The Harvard Crimson, a student paper with an understandable ax to grind, has followed the commission more faithfully than any of the dailies.) So why does Miller answer his critics in a paper down in Texas and not The Times, The Globe, The Harvard Crimson or the papers that have covered the commission's debate? And why, for that matter, does The American-Statesman write up Miller's defense without interviewing his critics?

Now I'm going to assume The American-Statesman down in Austin got the story on its own. Miller is a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, and he might have mentioned it back home. Word might have gotten around town, and the paper might have decided to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes that's the way we got stories when I was on the courthouse beat. Of course Miller could have leaked it to a friendly paper, too, but I have no way of knowing that. So I won't speculate.

Miller's friend Margaret Spellings was in the news last week, too. At an international conference in Athens, Greece, she spoke on "higher education and the benefits of partnering with the private sector to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century." And by golly, she just happened to mention the Miller commission:

In launching this Higher Education Commission, we recognized that to remain a quality system we had to ask the tough questions and anticipate necessary changes that can and must be made if we are to have a robust system 50 years from now – especially as needs for all become greater.

As a nation, we spend more than $300 billion dollars a year on higher education – a third of which comes from the federal government. Yet, we have very little information on what we are getting in return for that investment. And what we do know is cause for action.

I can't find any evidence on the internet that the media picked up the story, but Secretary Spellings' remarks were helpfully posted on the U.S. Education Department website.

Miller noted the same statistical factoid in his interview. Here's how The American-Statesman reported his remark and put it in context:

The federal government covers a third of the nation's higher education spending but less than 10 percent of the K-12 investment. Yet the federal government exercises more control over primary and secondary education — through Texas-style accountability that Bush parlayed into a national policy — than it does over colleges and universities.

Miller, former head of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, said Thursday that he regards significant change as not only urgently needed but inevitable.

"If you have a very inefficient and very expensive enterprise, which higher education is now, and huge changes in technology and a cultural change in how people use this technology, that's almost a guarantee that some entity somewhere is going to develop a very effective way to deliver these skills at a much cheaper price," he said. "It could be in a country where they don't have a set of institutions to be angry about change.

"It'll have such demand that you'll have explosive growth that could sweep the higher education system like a tsunami. Supply creates a demand sometimes, not the other way around," Miller said, citing as an example the advent of personal computers and software to run them.

Miller said he knew from the start of the commission's work last year that some in higher education circles would be highly skeptical of his leanings. "I was from Texas and a businessman and worked on accountability and a Bush friend," he said. "I was in about the worst category you could be in."

On that note, the paper segued to Miller's recommendations: Streamling and increasing financial aid, better record keeping," encouraging "colleges and universities to develop new and better methods of controlling costs and improving productivity," and encouraging "states to require public colleges to measure student learning using tests, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that examine critical thinking, reading, math and other skills."

All of this bears watching, but Miller's last points bear especially careful scrutiny. The membership of his commission is weighted toward industry and people with a vested interest in test prep and for-profit educational venures rather than academicians, and consistently he has touted one specific standardized testing product every time he mentions the subject of testing.

What it is that makes this old courthouse reporter think if Miller and his friends from Texas are peddling snake oil, and if they have their way, somebody, somewhere is going to make a big ole Texas-size pile of money as we move into the future of higher education?