Bloggers on Mumbai terror attacks

From a blog called Remix Concepts in India, apparently in Mumbai, a wrap-up on "the Power of Web and Citizen Reports" including blogs, twitter feeds and Wikipedia as terrorists struck Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) this week. Said the anonymous (epinonymous?) blogger RC:

Anyone who doubts the power of the social web need only take a look at the activity on Twitter last night, the micro-blogging service that has more than six million members worldwide.

Mere moments after the first shots were fired, Twitter users in India, and especially in Mumbai, were providing instant eyewitness accounts of the unfolding drama.

Fascinating quotes and links, from Twitter, from other blogs in Mumbai, the rapidly evolving Wikipedia page on the fighting and a resident who took more than a hundred pictures with his cellphone and posted them to Flickr. "RC," who usually provides other fare on the blog, added some thoughts on the role of social networking sites as fighting flared up in the city:

New media analyst Cherian George said events such as the Mumbai attacks have highlighted the emergence of citizen journalism and user-generated content.

“If the event is highly dispersed and affects very large numbers of people, it would be physically impossible for a very large news organisation to keep track of every development,” Mr George told Reuters. “Those kind of events show the great potential for all these user accounts to be valuable to the mainstream media."

Indeed, many mainstream media outlets, including CNN, used video footage and photos sent in from people on the ground in Mumbai to illustrate their reports, and many television stations, radio stations and newspapers were also keeping a close eye on Twitter and the blogosphere in the hope of finding out more information.

Despite the obvious value and immediacy of these eyewitness accounts, there are signs that the blogosphere is struggling to know what to do for the best when these sort of incidents occur.

In more normal times, Remix Concepts is "the Archieve of Everything in this world," adding: "Mainly we concentrate upon Sports, Girls, Entertainment, Fun, Educational (Science), Technology and Gadgets, and any other Remix Concepts."

Doc Ellertsen's final exam schedule (copied from email message)

Hi everybody --

If you're getting this message, it's because: (1) you're registered for COMM 393, the senior portfolio, this semester; (2) you're registered for COMM 297, the internship, this semester; (3) you're registered for both; and/or (4) you've been trying to track me down regarding the paperwork for spring semester internships.

Anyway, here's when I have final exams:

-- Monday, Dec. 1, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., in Dawson 220 (COMM 386).
-- Tuesday, Dec. 2, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., D220 (COMM 207).
-- Wednesday, Dec. 3, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., D220 (COMM 337).
-- Thursday, Dec. 4, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., D220 (HUM 223).

I think everybody's seen the syllabuses for COMM 297 and COMM 393. But just in case you haven't, they're linked to my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/faculty/ellertsen/facultypage.html ... they'll answer basic questions, and you can email me for details on the others.

You can also keep up with me by checking my journalism blog at http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/ ... I'll post updates and messages on my whereabouts there.

-- Doc

COMM 386: It's not too late to read this ...

... and it takes up a point we talked about in our last class meeting -- about government and politics ... and I'll add five points to the final exam grade of anyone who quotes and cites the article.

It's an article by Elizabeth Drew in The New York Review of Books on President-elect Obama that crystalizes how Obama's campaign led right into his governing (even two months before he takes office). It's very perceptive. Should be. Drew has been around for years, written several books, including "Fear and Loathing in George W. Bush's Washington" (2004), and is considered one of the most knowledgeable journalists in the business. She says:

Obama understood the point -— which eludes some presidential candidates -— that running is about governing, that there should be a seamless connection between the two. The best way to judge presidential candidates -— aside from whether one basically agrees with their values—is to try to envision them governing. Will they inspire people to follow them? What kind of people do they have around them? How do they run their campaign? The wise candidate, the one who sees long, will run the campaign as a preparation for the presidency. In Obama's case, from what we have been able to observe up to this point, there will be a straight line from his campaigning to his governing. At their convention, Republicans mocked Obama for having been a community organizer (apparently thinking this was some sort of airy-fairy occupation, not real work); they were defeated by the community organizer -— and they will discover that the country is being governed by one. Obama's understanding that change comes from building a popular mandate from the ground up made his the best-organized campaign, the most methodical in marshaling support, attracting volunteers, and establishing field offices in the various states. It ran rings around both the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

I can't help thinking how much Obama is influenced by Chicago politics here -- not the stereotype of aldermen and Streets and San. officials taking bribes but Chicago politics as it really is ...

Remember in class yesterday when I was quoting Mayor Richard J. Daley (the current Mayor Daley's father), "Good politics is good government." Also, a community organizer named Saul Alinksy, a U of C graduate who started the Back of the Yards Council in the 1930s and has influenced generations of organizers and politicians since that time.

COMM 337- Final Exam -- Fall 2008

Self-reflective essay (100 points). Write an essay of at least 1,250 words (five typed pages) in response to the questions below. Please feel free (or compelled) to quote freely, and attribute your quotes. Write as if you were submitting your essay for publication. Strive for a conversational tone. The essay is due Dec. 3, at 1:30 p.m., at the regularly scheduled time for our final.

What have you learned in Communications 337 that surprised you the most? How, specifically, did it surprise you? Here are some questions to get you started thinking about your writing. Try to focus your essay on this issue of surprise and work in your thoughts on the questions below. Don’t try to answer them all (but you will, of course, want to convince me of the depth and breadth of your reading in our texts as well as the articles we’ve posted to The Mackerel Wrapper)!

How did you see yourself as a writer before you took the course, and how would you see yourself now you have taken it? Has your writing changed as a result of the course? What worked when you wrote your feature story? What didn’t work? Which of the articles we read for class helped you as a writer, i.e. suggested techniques you might try in your own writing? Which suggested things you want to avoid at all costs! What did you learn from Donald Murray’s “Writing to Deadline” (the little green book that wouldn’t go away) and “The Writer's Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing?” What was beneficial? What wasn’t? How beneficial was the material on free-lance writing and selling your work to paying markets? Did you get any useful tips? More importantly, did it help change the way you think of yourself as an aspiring professional writer?

Here are some questions, adapted from an English course at the University of Colorado-Denver, to help you think about your development as a writer:

• How has your writing changed during this semester?
  
• What do you see as your greatest strengths as a writer?
  
• What areas of your writing are you still working on?
  
• What do you think of as “good writing?” How do you evaluate your own writing and that of others?

In grading this essay, as always, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make. Be specific.

COMM 386: Final Exam -- Fall 2008

Essay question (100 points). Write an essay of at least 1,250 words (five typed pages) in response to the question below. Please feel free to quote freely from the articles you discuss and attribute your quotes. Due Mon., Dec. 1, at 1:30 p.m., the regularly scheduled time for our final.

In “The Elements of Journalism,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee of Concerned Journalists say:

Journalism provides something unique to a culture -- independent, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information that citizens require to be free … At stake is whether, as citizens, we have access to independent information that makes it possible for us to take part in governing ourselves.

And like others including the late Neil Postman of New York University, they suggest in America, “News [is] “becoming entertainment and entertainment news.”

Certainly much of this year’s presidential campaign coverage was oriented more to entertainment than issues of governance. Even Paris Hilton got into the act, spoofing Republican John McCain’s ad attacking Democrat Barack Obama as the “world’s biggest celebrity” and prominently featuring a picture of Hilton. Yet in the end most observers say the election was driven by public policy issues, especially economic. And the electorate seems to have swung toward the candidate whose personality and character voters most trusted to look out for their interest after the nation’s financial markets imploded in September and October. The mass media covered it all.

Your assignment: To our class blog, The Mackerel Wrapper, I have linked a column by Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post, headlined “The Pulse of the Pol” (Oct. 22, linked below). It features his profile of Obama, whom he had interviewed recently, and quotes from other articles about topics including Obama’s character to accusations by the McCain campaign of bias in the media, rumbling noises in the right-wing blogosphere, both sympathetic and decidedly unsympathetic, of GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Using Kurtz’ column as a focal point, evaluate the news coverage of the 2008 presidential election. How representative are the stories Kurtz linked to Oct. 22? Was the coverage biased? If so, to whom? And on what issues? How well do you believe the media served the interest, in Kovach’s and Rosenstiel‘s words, of giving us “access to independent information that makes it possible for us to take part in governing ourselves?”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/22/AR2008102200764_pf.html

COMM 386: Some thoughts about a final exam question ...

Notice how maddeningly vague that is?

No questions yet. Just thoughts:

• We'll have class Monday. (This is for those of you who are also in COMM 337.) I'll have questions by then.
  
• Not sure of the format. Maybe just one big essay question, with the "Q2a" stuff, the self-reflective stuff, posted to your blogs. Or mine. Whatever.
  
• For the 50-point question, I'm thinking of framing it with the excerpt from the Peggy Noonan book about the terrorism scare at President Reagan's funeral and her observation that we ought to work together better because things are getting bad and we're going to need each other. (The exact quote is buried under a stack of books and newspapers and candy wrappers on my desk.) Then the question: Using coverage of the presidential campaign as evidence, do you think the tone of media coverage is going to allow us to do that?

We can talk about that in class today (Friday).

COMM 337: Last class, final exam hints

Since there is a free food day scheduled Monday at Mueller Hall, I'm proposing to let today be our last class session and to hand out final exam papers in dead-tree format at the free food day.

One of our own will be recognized at the event. If you've been checking your SCI email account, no doubt you saw this announcement from Arts and Letters Division Chair Amy Lakin:

On Monday November 24, the Division of Arts and Letters will recognize three students for Outstanding Composition during the 2007-2008 school year. Michael Reese, Brenda Stretch, and Nikkie Prosperini will be honored at 12:15 in Mueller Hall during Free Food Day. Please congratulate these students on their excellent work.

And if you haven't been checking your SCI account, now you've seen it too. Congratulations, Nikkie!

Your final exam in COMM 337 will consist of one essay. It'll be a self-reflective essay. I haven't made it out yet, but it'll be a more elaborate version of "Question 2a" on every exam you've written for me. Here, as an example, is the one from COMM 387, the Journ./Lit. course I taught last spring:

2a. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned in Communications 387 that surprised you the most? How, specifically, did it surprise you? What was your overall impression of the journalistic writing -- as writing -- before you took the course? How has that changed as a result of your reading, class discussion and research for the course? Consider it in the context of what you knew at the beginning of the semester and what you know now. In grading this essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make. Be specific.

Since COMM 337 is a writing course (which academics classify as a "skills" course), this squib from an old handout linked to my faculty page may be helpful:

Writing (skills) courses. A skills course is one where you learn, or practice, a skill like writing. If you're taking freshman English or journalism, you'll be thinking -- reflecting -- about how you've grown as a writer. What was your writing like when you began the course? Is it better now? Are you more confident? Do you know where to look stuff up? Are you mastering the inverted pyramid format? (Basic newswriting is both a skills course and a content course, by the way, so if you're taking COM 209 look at my tips for content courses as well.) Consult the goals and objectives in our syllabus, or the "competencies" in the Illinois Articulation Iniative guidelines for the course. They'll suggest what you're supposed to learn. Be specific. What specific strategies, techniques or skills have you learned? It never hurts to be specific.

Here are a couple of links to other discussions of how to write a self-reflective essay about your writing. I will attempt to translate academese terms into English:

• A "writing prompt" or assignment sheet in an English comp class at the University of Colorado Denver. It gives you some good questions to ask yourself to get started.
  
• A set of "Sample Self-Evaluation Prompts" from colleges in the University of Washington system.

In the finals you write for me, I'll be asking you to reflect on your growth as a professional writer. You will, of course, want to impress me with your familiarity with Donald Murray's "Writing to Deadline" (the little green book that never went away). But you already knew that. Right?

Headline writer gives Congress the bird

In the New York Times today ...

COMM 337: OK, now *that's* out of the way, let's go negative ...

In class today, I didn't have time to find it. But there was an article in Politico.com in September about negative ads that nobody paid (very much) for but still got coverage. And, more than we realize, they help drive the media message.

In a story that ran Sept. 17, Jonathan Martin interviewed Evan Tracey, head of the ad-tracking Campaign Media Analysis Group, who said:

Not on the air Sunday, however, were the very ads that have been shaping much of the recent campaign coverage.

That retro ad from [Barack] Obama featuring the Zack Morris-sized cell phone, primitive computer and Rubik’s cube aimed at framing [John] McCain as old and out of touch?

Didn’t air once, according to Tracey.

Those two ads meant to garner sympathy for [Sarah] Palin as a victim of sexist attacks, the first featuring a pack of wolves and the other noting Joe Biden had called her “good-looking?”

Never ran on tv, said Tracey.

“These ads are basically for the press’s consumption,” he observed. “They’re lobbing discussion items into the echo chamber with the goal of getting them to debate the most negative caricature they can come up with.”

Martin said both campaigns aired different ads developing other messages, both postitive and negatives. Obama, who was then behind or just breaking even in the polls, had 310 positive and 1,146 negative ads. McCain, still enjoying his post-convention bounce, aired 745 positive ads and 544 negative ads.

(By the way, Martin didn't raise this issue in his story, but I will: What do those numbers tell you about who airs negative ads? And why?)

Martin added, "With all the competing demands on voters’ time and the many mediums from which they now get information, the campaigns are open to any avenue that get their preferred narrative across."

The unpaid ads seem to work best, he suggested, with under-the-radar negative messages that news media are likely to pick up -- as sort of a trial balloon.

"If the narrative holds and voters are seen as susceptible to believing the line of attack, a real ad campaign could follow along these lines," he added.

COMM 386: Oh, let's get this postmodernism stuff out of the way now ...

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of ... revolutionary avant-gardism. -- Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism" (1985).

I like the postmodernism quote by Terry Eagleton that I posted to this blog a couple of days ago. You see, Eagleton is considered a postmodernist. And he's an avant-garde literary critic. (You probably already know this but "avant-garde" is French for an advance guard, i.e. pickets or soldiers who went out ahead of the main body of troops. Now it means something more like "artsy-fartsy" or "trendy.") So he's being self-referential when he talks that way, and he's acknowledging that maybe, just maybe this stuff he writes about is no more than a sick joke.

One way of looking at postmodernism is to understand it's an offshoot of a French philosophy called post-structuralism, and it got to be popular at a time when thinkers in the West were deeply pessimistic about society. (And still are.) Is it possible to know the truth when so many institutions we used to look up to (including government, the academy, the publishing industry and, yes, the media) have shown themselves to be deeply flawed? Just asking a question like that implies an answer.

But there's also been a lot of pretentious nonsense written in the name of postmodernism.

A conservative international relations expert named Philip Gold wrote a good story about postmodernist journalism that explains the phenomenon pretty well for those who aren't already familiar with it. And for those who've heard quite enough about postmodernism already, thank you, Gold has a delightfully irreverent attitude about it.

"In essence," says Gold, "postmodernism is a shtick -- a fine old Yiddish word with several meanings. When it first entered English, shtick meant an entertainer's routine. ... More broadly, it can describe any human activity that, although possessing some nuggets of truth and authenticity, also partakes Of the antic, the phony and the scam."

"The postmodernist shtick," he adds, "has four elements." They are:

• First, it denies the existence of objective reality, as opposed to saying that reality's out there but we never can get fully at it. To the postmodernist, everything in the universe, from comic books to galaxies, is "text" to be "interpreted" by the "self-referent," that is, people whose only frame of reference ... is themselves."
  
• Second, postmodernism denies the existence of firm boundaries. Everything flows into, affects and becomes everything else. ("The personal is political"; "The planetary is personal"; "Insanity is just another lifestyle"; etc.)
  
• Third, postmodernism denies the validity of standards -- of truth, morality, excellence, competence. All are arbitrary at best and tyrannical at worst.
  
• Finally, postmodernism views all human relationships as power struggles. Words are weapons, not carriers of truth or meaning.

There's no such thing as truth, in other words, and everybody gets to decide for himself. So everything's up for grabs, including the canons of jouralism.

"Now, let's talk shtick in the newsroom," Gold continues. "Three sets of forces drive the media, especially the so-called prestige media, into de facto acceptance of much of postmodernism."

Have I told you about numbered lists? They do tend to come up on finals. But the postmodernists would say they're bogus. Right? So what if the postmodernists are right?

Gold doesn't think they're right.

"In the end, our civilization will junk postmodernism," he concludes. "Neither truth, boundaries nor standards can be denied forever, and life is more than power games. ... So, in the short term, perhaps the interesting question is not 'How will journalism escape from postmodernism?' but, 'How will it cover the demise?'"

So why bother with this stuff? One: You hear a lot about it. And. Two: There's a grain of truth, I think, underlying it in spite of all the airy-fairy literary theory and French poststructuralist philosophizing.

A couple of examples that aren't too terribly pretentious:

Nikkie posted a link to the website for a book by Andrew Boyd. It's called "Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip" (deconstruction is one of the techniques used by some especially pretentious, artsy postmodernist literary critics, which I think is all you need to know about it). It's cute, and you'll learn something about postmodernism from it.

Here's something else, and I honestly don't know if it's a hoax or not. The Onion, the satirical newspaper, has an election blog that purports to be by postmodern novelist Don De Lillio. A sample:

Marketing men in sharp, crisp ties gaze impotently from their offices at spectacular Midtown Views. There is nothing at this point left for them to do. The Day has come. This is the Day itself.

Feet set, purposeful and resolute, on the lime-green tiles. In the toneless acoustics of the school gymnasiums and school cafeterias and dual-use school gymnasium/cafeterias the low steady roar of raw electoral mass forms a background of white noise. Mathematics steadily accumulate around them.

Gibberish? De Lillio? A sendup on De Lillio? A hoax? No one seems to know. Postmodernist? Or something else? Well, it sure doesn't make any sense.

Now let's move onto the next question. A lot of the election coverage didn't seem to make any particular sense, either. Take some of the coverage of our favorite moose-hunting Wasilla hillbilly in her $150,000 outfits from Nieman-Marcus, for example. Postmodernist, or something else? You betcha, as your average moose-hunter might say. But what is it?

COMM 337: Notes on freelancing -- wisdom from the Internet, from you guys

Thanks to Claire, Megan, Nikkie and Becky (so far, at 10 in the morning) for posting links. These last few days I want to focus on what you can do to get some articles in print, start getting clips that will land you jobs and/or freelance gigs. We'll look at some of their webpages, and I'll post some notes below ... in no particular order of importance.

1. IT'S ALL ABOUT CLIPS. Portfolio pieces. "Clips" are clippings. Today they're often electronic, but you need 'em so you can show editors what you've done.

2. Don't forget your friendly, local, neighborhood Bulldog right on campus. They need stories. You need clips. Does that help you connect the dots?

3. Research online opportunities.

4. Keep trying. Collect rejection slips. Glory in them! Develop a thick hide. It's not about you. It's about working the numbers, the odds.

5. When to work for free, when not to. If you're doing stuff for small publications, little not-for-profits, people you'd volunteer for in other ways (e.g. painting the cat loft at APL or designing a flier for a parish craft fair or youth recreation program), I think it's OK.

About.com has a very good article on breaking into the business ... getting those first clips ... by a freelancer named Allena Tapia. Link here: http://freelancewrite.about.com/od/breakingintofreelancing/a/startwrite.htm

Tapia suggests:

• Volunteer for a writing project with a local non-profit.
  
• Write up your most perfect, flawless article on a subject that interests you (and then turn it into a nicely presented PDF).
  
• Scrounge up a (short) paper from college, and make sure it's perfect.
  
• Use a piece that you've written for past employment. [Including internships!]
  
• Write a letter to the editor of your local paper or magazine that is passionate and informative.
  
• Start a blog.

Since you're in college, use a college paper. Or a three-fold brochure, creative brief, etc., from one of the "green-eyeshade" courses. Since one of your college teachers has been insisting you keep a blog on a commercial hosting service, post something to it.

Here's one that was linked to the About.com article ... it has some tips about querying by email:
http://aboutfreelancewriting.com/articles/howtosample/emailquery.htm
Including these: "Send your e-query to yourself first to get a reasonably good idea of how it will look. ... Avoid any special formatting like bold — you simply don’t know what it will look like on the other end. ... Never, ever use html. ..." Set your email program for plain text -- don't mess around with HTML, enhanced text, formatted text or whatever they call it. It looks as amateurish as little yellow blinking smiley faces.

COMM 337: Blog assignment for last week of semester

Do a "how-to" story on your blog:

1. Find articles on the World Wide Web about how to:

• get published as a freelance writer
•  "   started as a freelance writer
•  "   clips as a freelance writer

"Clips," of course, are clippings of your published work.

2. Put the story, with links and quotes, up on your blog.

COMM 386: Is Howard Kurtz the Grinch who stole the election?

Howard Kurtz in today's Washington Post wonders if the media are going a little overboard with the puff pieces on President-elect Obama.

No real nut graf that I could find, but this comes close:

Are the media capable of merchandizing the moment, packaging a president-elect for profit? Yes, they can.

What's troubling here goes beyond the clanging of cash registers. Media outlets have always tried to make a few bucks off the next big thing. The endless campaign is over, and there's nothing wrong with the country pulling together, however briefly, behind its new leader. But we seem to have crossed a cultural line into myth-making.

"The Obamas' New Life!" blares People's cover, with a shot of the family. "New home, new friends, new puppy!" Us Weekly goes with a Barack quote: "I Think I'm a Pretty Cool Dad." The Chicago Tribune trumpets that Michelle "is poised to be the new Oprah and the next Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis -- combined!" for the fashion world.

This is an important story. Not so much for what Kurtz says. This kind of stuff goes on after every election, as he acknowledges, but it's a good summary review of what a lot of people are saying.

And Kurtz quotes a nice mixture of solemn public policy analysis and ga-ga celebrity worship, both past and present.

COMM 386: Quality journalism in The New Yorker / PLEASE READ

Must reading while it's still up on the internet -- the Nov. 17 issue of The New Yorker. In fact, it's worth buying in dead-tree format (in other words, print). It only costs $4.50, and I think it's worth keeping. Here's why:

• David Remnick has a story called "The Joshua Generation" on the role that race played in President-elect Obama's campaign. Included is the most lucid explanation I've seen yet (and practically the only one in a majority-white publication) of why so many blacks weren't especially bothered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's, uh, jeremiads.
  
• George Packer has an article headed "The New Liberalism" that's as good as or better than the Time story I linked to the other day. The cartoon of Barack Obama as FDR, complete with top hat and cigarette holder, is worth the price of the magazine alone.
  
• Ryan Lizza has a detailed inside look at Obama's campaign. [Link below.]
  
• And David Grann has one for McCain's.

All four are seasoned reporters and first-class writers who have been in The New Yorker repeatedly. In my judgment, they're going to be worth re-reading as long as Obama is in office. They're that complete and incisive.

This is a reminder of something I've been meaning to say in class -- there's a lot of quality journalism out there, if you go beyond the cable TV networks and even the New York Times and the Washington Post. And the stuff in the New Yorker is as good as it gets. So if you read these stories in this week's New Yorker and quote them in your term paper (analytical article) and/or final, I will find ways to reward you for that effort. Do I make my meaning sufficiently clear?

@#$%! it! Since I posted this, they've gone up with the Nov. 24 issue. But you can still link to Lizza's "How Obama Won" piece, and the links to the other two stories still work. (Hint: SCI's Becker Library carries The New Yorker, and it has a photocopying machine.) And if you like Texas barbecue, Calvin Trillin has an story on the " best Texas BBQ in the world" in this week's issue. Trillin, a gifted essayis, grew up in Kansas City and is a fanatic about barbecue. So it's a nice consolation prize for missing the McCain article.

COMM 386: Postmodernism / N O T E S

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of ... revolutionary avant-gardism. -- Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism" (1985).

D R A F T>

(and notes for class 11-17-08)
link here for quote above

Source: Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), British critic. repr. In Against The Grain (1986). “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,” Chapter 9 (1985).

Excerpts from Gold article I hand out:

Shtick

"In essence," says Gold, "postmodernism is a shtick -- a fine old Yiddish word with several meanings. When it first entered English, shtick meant an entertainer's routine. ... More broadly, it can describe any human activity that, although possessing some nuggets of truth and authenticity, also partakes Of the antic, the phony and the scam."

"The postmodernist shtick," he adds, "has four elements." They are:

• First, it denies the existence of objective reality, as opposed to saying that reality's out there but we never can get fully at it. To the postmodernist, everything in the universe, from comic books to galaxies, is "text" to be "interpreted" by the "self-referent," that is, people whose only frame of reference ... is themselves."
  
• Second, postmodernism denies the existence of firm boundaries. Everything flows into, affects and becomes everything else. ("The personal is political"; "The planetary is personal"; "Insanity is just another lifestyle"; etc.)
  
• Third, postmodernism denies the validity of standards -- of truth, morality, excellence, competence. All are arbitrary at best and tyrannical at worst.
  
• Finally, postmodernism views all human relationships as power struggles. Words are weapons, not carriers of truth or meaning.

There's no such thing as truth, in other words, and everybody gets to decide for himself. So everything's up for grabs, including the canons of jouralism.

"Now, let's talk shtick in the newsroom," Gold continues. "Three sets of forces drive the media, especially the so-called prestige media, into de facto acceptance of much of postmodernism."

Have I told you about numbered lists? They tend to come up on finals. But the postmodernists would say they're bogus. Right? So what if the postmodernists are right?

Gold doesn't think they're right.

"In the end, our civilization will junk postmodernism," he concludes. "Neither truth, boundaries nor standards can be denied forever, and life is more than power games. ... So, in the short term, perhaps the interesting question is not 'How will journalism escape from postmodernism?' but, 'How will it cover the demise?'"

But in the meantime,

COMM 386: Two reasons to read this story ...

It's this week's cover story in Time magazine by Peter Beinhart on the "death and rebirth of American liberalism." but Beinhart takes a long, historical view of national policy. He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, so he's well equipped to do so.

Beinhart's analysis is hard to sum up in a few words, but he comes close with this:

The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America's last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. And the Obama majority is sturdy for one overriding reason: liberalism, which average Americans once associated with upheaval, now promises stability instead.

In Beinhart's analysis, the Nov. 4 election was decided on issues as fundamental as in the elections of 1932 and 1980.

That's one reason to read the story.

The other reason is that our final exam question kind of assumes the mass media coverage of this year's election has been shallow and gossipy. This story is neither. Which kind of throws a monkey wrench into my assumptions, but in all fairness ought to be recorded.

Later: But then, again, as Chris Cillizza reminds us in Sunday's Washington Post, the media always spin post-election tales of mythic proportions ... and Cillizza, who writes "The Fix" for political junkies, ought to know. Among five myths he spots in this month's coverage, is this one:

3. Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era.

Not likely. At first glance, the numbers do look encouraging for proponents of a new New Deal era in government: Obama claimed at least 364 electoral votes and more than 52.5 percent of the overall popular vote, while Democrats now control at least 57 seats in the Senate and 255 in the House. But look more closely, and you see a heavy influx of moderate to conservative members in the incoming freshman Democratic class, particularly in the House. ...

The fact that roughly a third of the Democratic House majority sits in seats with Republican underpinnings (at least at the presidential level) is almost certain to keep a liberal dream agenda from moving through Congress. The first rule of politics is survival, and if these new arrivals to Washington want to stick around, they are likely to build centrist voting records between now and 2010.

(Besides, look what happened to Illinois Democrats when they got control the governor's office and both houses of the state Legislature.)

It doesn't matter which side of the issue(s) these writers argue. What matters is that they're arguing them at all.

COMM 386 --

Communications 386 - Media and Government
Benedictine University - Springfield

Fall Semester 2008

Analytical article (paper) assignment

Write a 2,000- to 2,500-word analytical piece, in the style of an article in a “quality” print publication like The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker or National Review, evaluating coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign in light of the commonly heard critique that American public affairs journalism treats politics and government in terms more appropriate to the entertainment industry, even celebrity gossip.

This critique has been voiced prominently by the late Neil Postman of New York University, who said in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1986) that:

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Perhaps even more authoritatively, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee of Concerned Journalists reported in “Elements of Journalism” on a meeting at Harvard University in which influential editors, broadcasters and journalism professors complained,

News was becoming entertainment and entertainment news. Journalists' bonuses were increasingly tied to the company's profit margins, not the quality of their work. Finally, Columbia University professor James Carey offered what many recalled as a summation: "The problem is that you see journalism disappearing inside the larger world of communications. What you yearn to do is recover journalism from that larger world."

During the run-up to the Nov. 4 election, we saw both kinds of journalism practiced. And we saw journalists complaining of coverage that seemed to be centered on wisecracks about lipstick, pit bulls and pigs when serious economic issues were more deserving of attention. Yet, most analysts said the “big” issues decided the election. Your assignment: Decide how well the media did in covering the election. There’s evidence they did a pretty good job, and there’s just as much evidence that they wallowed in trivia. So there is no right or wrong answer to my question. But you do want to give your opinion and cite evidence for it; find some articles that seem typical of the trends you see in the coverage, and quote from them. Write well. Don’t be afraid to entertain your readers. In other words, treat this assignment as if you were writing for publication. (If if it’s good enough, in fact, I may ask you for permission to run it in The Sleepy Weasel, our campus magazine.) Due Monday, Nov. 24, the day before Thanksgiving holiday.

COMM 386: Obama and the gatekeepers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/10/AR2008111000590_pf.html

beat-sweetener pieces

Obama faced some of those gatekeepers at his post-election news conference Friday. He drew a mixture of softballs, polite but firm questions about his policies and the query that probably generated the most interest: Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times asking what kind of dog he plans to get.

Will Obama feel the need to hold such sessions regularly, or will they be dismissed as a 20th-century relic? If you can beam your message to millions of computer and cellphone screens, who needs the filter of skeptical reporters?


By Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/10/AR2008111000013.html?hpid=topnews

CHICAGO -- Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly "wired" presidency.

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

Just as John F. Kennedy mastered television as a medium for taking his message to the public, Obama is poised to transform the art of political communication once again, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who first helped integrate the Internet into campaigning four years ago.

COMM 386: Wall Street Journal article on race

The Wall Street Journal today has a nuanced story on race in the aftermath of President-elect Barack Obama's victory at the polls. Not only is the story nuanced, the lede is nuanced:

Barack Obama's election as the first black U.S. president promises to usher in a new era of race relations. But it is likely to be a complex evolution, marked by new issues and tensions.

Short, too, and readable. You don't always get all of those together in a lede.

A nut graf:

One of America's racial paradoxes is that there has been enormous progress in the public sphere: Blacks and whites watch Oprah Winfrey on television, cheer Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters in sports and voted for Mr. Obama. But in their private lives, segregation persists and economic disparities remain wide.

Addressing these deeper problems may be beyond the capacity of any single politician, many blacks and whites agree.

But mostly the article quotes people. It's short on analysis -- and punditry -- but it's short to begin with. And it does show the media taking an interest in a serious issue.

COMM 337, 386: No class Monday; read "Elements of Journalism" for COMM 386 Wednesday (and think about the questions it raises)

In COMM 337, have a draft of the query letter for your feature story ready to bring into class Wednesday.

In COMM 386, skim-read "Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.

In COMM 386 we'll focus in class on the introduction, which just happens to be excerpted in the book's blurb on the Committee of Concerned Journalists' website.

"Elements of Journalism" grew out of a meeting of 25, well, let's call them concerned journalists. That's what they were. They included "editors of several of the nation's top newspapers, as well as some of the most influential names in television and radio, several of the top journalism educators, and some of the country's most prominent authors" at the Harvard Faculty Club in 1997. They were concerned because "they thought something was seriously wrong with their profession."

(I can't choke back the question: If it had been 25 public relations people or advertising creatives, would they have found a catchier name for their committee? Would it matter if they had?)

Said Kovach and Rosenstiel:

... They barely recognized what they considered journalism in much of the work of their colleagues. Instead of serving a larger public interest, they feared, their profession was damaging it.

The public, in turn, increasingly distrusted journalists, even hated them. And it would only get worse. By 1999, just 21% of Americans would think the press cared about people, down from 41% in 1985. Only 58% would respect the press's watchdog role, a drop from 67% in 1985. Less than half, just 45%, would think the press protected democracy. That percentage had been nearly ten points higher in 1985. (Footnotes deleted.)

Discussion that day centered on how bottom-line pressure was diluting news product, which the academics and newsies at the table said contributes to the lack of public esteem for journalism.

What was different that day in Cambridge was that many of the journalists in the room -- and around the country -- were beginning to agree with the public. "In the newsroom we no longer talk about journalism," said Max King, then editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "We are consumed with business pressure and the bottom line," agreed another editor. News was becoming entertainment and entertainment news. Journalists' bonuses were increasingly tied to the company's profit margins, not the quality of their work. Finally, Columbia University professor James Carey offered what many recalled as a summation: "The problem is that you see journalism disappearing inside the larger world of communications. What you yearn to do is recover journalism from that larger world."

Can you see Neil Postman's influence at work here? After all, the taught at New York University, and he was part of the same East Coast academic-Washington-New York nexus that produced the people who gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club.

As we near the end of the semester, these questions can provide us a focus for pulling together some of the strands of election coverage and media theory we've followed: Critics of the media like to say show-biz values have overtaken news values, and our politics and government suffer for it. This year we have a perfect opportunity to test that hypothesis, by looking at the coverage of an unusually issue-oriented national election. In class Wednesday, I want us to discuss this question and focus it a little further so we can evaluate this year's coverage in light of the critique of Postman and the people who gathered around the table at the Harvard Faculty Club and formed the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

COMM 337: PoMo on Wall Street

If you're taking COMM 386, you ought to read this too. It has a clear exposition of how one of the theories of postmodernism we're studying plays out in the world of finance and government.

An article in The New Yorker explains the Wall Street credit crisis from a standpoint of literary theory. Unexpectedly, it makes sense.

The story is by John Lanchester, who is a novelist, a literary critic and a a member of the editorial board of the London Review of Books.

Lanchester compares the derivatives or

The crisis began with defaulting subprime mortgages, and spread throughout the international financial system. Thanks to the new world of derivatives and credit-default swaps, nobody really knows who is at risk from the wonderfully named “toxic debt” at the heart of the trouble. As a result, banks are reluctant to lend to each other, and, since the entire financial system depends on interbank liquidity, the entire financial system is at risk. It is for this reason that Warren Buffett was doubly right to compare the new financial products to “weapons of mass destruction”—first, because they are lethal, and, second, because no one knows how to track them down.

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. Anyone invited to attend a meeting of the G-8 financial ministers would be well advised not to draw their attention to this.

The result of our era of financial deconstruction has been a decades-long free-for-all of deregulation and (for the most part) bull markets, ending in partial nationalization. It’s like a surreal parody of what happened in the former Soviet Union, with decades of socialism ending in the overnight transition to a full market economy. ...

COMM 386: Two stories on race in International Herald Trib

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/america/07race.php "Tolerance over race can spread, studies find"

WASHINGTON: It popped out casually, a throwaway line as Barack Obama talked to reporters about finding the right puppy for his young daughters.

But with just three offhand words in his first news conference as president-elect, Obama reminded everyone how thoroughly different his administration — and inevitably, the United States — will be.

"Mutts like me."

In American English, a mutt is a mixed breed dog.

"Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me," Obama said with a smile [at the news conference]. "So whether we're going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household."

Benedict Carey
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/america/07race.php "Tolerance over race can spread, studies find"

This was supposed to be the election when hidden racism would rear its head. There was much talk of a "Bradley effect," in which white voters would say one thing to pollsters and do another in the privacy of the booth; of a backlash in which the working-class whites whom Senator Barack Obama had labeled "bitter" would take their bitterness out on him.

But lost in all that anguished commentary, experts say, was an important recent finding from the study of prejudice: that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion.

In some new studies, psychologists have been able to establish a close relationship between diverse pairs — black and white, Latino and Asian, black and Latino — in a matter of hours. That relationship immediately reduces conscious and unconscious bias in both people, and also significantly reduces prejudice toward the other group in each individual's close friends.

This extended-contact effect, as it is called, travels like a benign virus through an entire peer group, counteracting subtle or not so subtle mistrust.

Postman

excerpts from the book
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOurselves_Postman.html

p106The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will pass over the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given moment, 70 percent of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of State or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider, instead, the case of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." I don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy event. And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians speak? Or what the word ``Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs? Or the main outlines of their political history? Or knows who the Shah was, and where he came from?
Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us.

* * *

... I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

COMM 386: Conversation on race?

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post hardly ever gives his opinion, but today he he gave his opinion that President-elect Barack Obama's victory means race "is no longer an issue" in presidential politics. Kurtz said:

His election does not eliminate racial prejudice in this country with a single stroke. Nor does it instantly improve the lot of many minorities. But it changes the way America views itself, somewhat to our collective surprise, and that is no small accomplishment.

Obama did not run as a racial candidate, in the manner of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, although occasionally he had to address race. A two-year campaign enabled America to get to know him and to judge him, against the competition, on the content of his character. He was right, though it brought accusations from the McCain campaign, that he does not look like the other presidents on dollar bills. But with a financial crisis looming, it's worth remembering that the color of those bills is green.

In the short term, at least, the country is feeling pretty good about itself ...

Kurtz quotes a number of pundits, who were out in full force today, to more or less the same effect.

A few sour notes were sounded (in my opinion), as when writing for New Republic, Alan Wolfe says, "The single most disturbing aspect of last night's election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the Confederacy." Kurtz takes exception to this pronouncement:

This strikes me as unfair. I'm sure there are good old boys in the southern states who would not vote for a black candidate. But maybe millions of southerners decided John McCain was a more experienced nominee who better reflected their views. How can we just write them off as racists?

I'm just Southern enough to agree with Kurtz on this one.

In yesterday's column, sounded the same chords as he surveyed election night reaction.

But by and large, race hasn't been mentioned very much in this year's campaign coverage ... except as the "elephant in the room" that nobody wants to talk about.

One exception to that is Dawn Turner Trice, who began an interactive blog called "Exploring Race" in the spring after controversy over Obama's former pastor raised racial issues in a big way.

Trice, who is black, weighed in with a brief commentary headlined "Was this race a referendum on race?" Her answer: Not as much as she'd feared.

Trice's style on the blog is to raise questions and let the readers answer them. So the result is something like the national conversation about race that she, and others, hoped would occur when the uproar over the pastor was in the headlines. A lot of the time it reads like the discourse in any other electronic forum -- dogmatic, cranky and ill-thought-out -- but what Trice is attempting here is very interesting. Worth looking at.

I'll pose a question: How well do the media handle racial issues? How well does Trice's blog? Does the election analysis comprise a national conversation on race? (The term was President Bill Clinton's. He tried it in 1997 and didn't get very far with it. Can we have such a conversation now? Should we?

COMM 337: Three deadline articles in The Washington Post

Out of the welter of coverage of last night's election, three articles stand out in my mind. They're not the three best. There's a lot of good stuff out there I've barely had time to look at. (Including an editorial in Springfield's State Journal-Register that notes "we’ve had an especially good seat to the making of this piece of history" and adds, "We hope Obama’s conciliatory demeanor can be a balm for a nation that has spent two years arguing itself into red-faced anger.") These three just happen to be articles I read this morning on The Washington Post's website.

The first was a historical analysis by Kevin Merida, staff writer and author of a biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The headline:

A DAY OF TRANSFORMATION
America's History Gives Way to Its Future

Here's Merida's lede, obviously written on deadline (although I doubt the rest of the story was, and I want us to look at it in class and see where the transition might have come):

After a day of runaway lines that circled blocks, of ladies hobbling on canes and drummers rollicking on street corners, the enormous significance of Barack Obama's election finally began to sink into the landscape. The magnitude of his win suggested that the country itself might be in a gravitational pull toward a rebirth that some were slow to recognize.

Tears flowed, not only for Obama's historic achievement, but because many were happily discovering that perhaps they had underestimated possibility in America.

When the novelist Kim McLarin watched her vote being recorded at her polling station in Milton, Mass., she stood still for a moment with her 8-year-old son, Isaac.

"My heart was full. I could scarcely breathe," she said. "What I've been forced to acknowledge is there has been a shift -- it's not a sea change. But there's been a decided shift in the meaning of race. It's not an ending. It's a beginning."

What kind of beginning it is, Americans were wrestling with late into the night, some popping champagne and others burdened with unease. Would enduring strains of intolerance lose their power or gain rebellious steam? Could new hope be harnessed to create new solutions? Is America ready to pull itself together or resigned to live divided? The campaign that began for Obama 21 months ago had raised in stark terms whether America was ready for a black president. Last night's answer -- a resounding yes -- raises the next question: How much more change will America embrace?

Another story, by metro reporter Bill Turque, details
the celebrations on the streets of Washington as the returns came in.

When history landed, it was with car horns, tears, gunfire and echoes from historic corners of the city.

In a heavy drizzle shortly after midnight, several thousand people filled the barricaded segment of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets in front of the White House dancing and chanting "O-ba-ma!" and "Whose house? Obama's house!" Some sang "America the Beautiful" and "Star Spangled Banner."

At 14th and U streets NW, hundreds of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters chanted, "Yes, we can!" People danced on bus shelters. Strangers hugged.

And Greg Rhett emerged from the Madison Hotel, pumping his fist as tears welled.
"Now the healing begins," said Rhett, 50, a consultant who lives in Ward 7. Now I can tell my 4-year-old you really can be whatever you want to be," he said. "We're going to get it right this time." Behind him, his wife, Candace, screamed at the top of her lungs:

"President Obama!"

The third story was from Obama's ancestral home of Kenya. Stephanie McCrummen, foreign correspondent, reported:

KOGELO, Kenya, Nov. 5 -- The news arrived in this rural village as the sun rose Wednesday, the voice of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer drifting across a gathering of several hundred people who'd hoped for months, prayed for hours and finally stayed up all the cool night watching U.S. presidential election returns projected on a big white sheet.

More details followed, including this:

And in this dirt-road village of farmers where Obama's father grew up, the news left people hugging and dancing, hoisting the white plastic chairs they'd sat on all night. They waved palm branches or sang or just stood there as John Odihiambo did, taking it all in, tears in his eyes.

"It's like a miracle," he said, confessing to a cynicism that seemed to vanish with Obama's victory. "There was that doubt that with black-white relations in America, a black man could not be elected. But he was," said Odihiambo, a government worker who drew a parallel that many here did, between overcoming racism in the U.S. and rising above tribalism, the bane of Kenyan society. "If America can elect a black man, then why can't Kenya shun tribalism and elect anyone, regardless of tribe?"

And this at the end, which gives McCrummen kind of a different "kicker" for her story:

"It's wonderful," said [Bonaventure] Mboya, the textbook salesman, who heard the news on BBC and sent his wife a one-line text message that speaks to how personally people here took Obama's campaign: "We have done it," the message read.

"He's suggesting that the world has finally changed," Mboya said.

As Obama began to invoke the signature line of his campaign -- "yes we can" -- one last time before a sea of supporters in Chicago, a Kenyan on the other side of the world finished the speech for him.
"Twa wenza," Mboya said, offering the phrase in Swahili.

COMM 386: President-elect Obama, the Trib and a sense of history

Within an hour of President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech in Grant Park, the Chicago Tribune was up on its website with an editorial on its historical significance. It was, as Obama said, a "defining moment." And editorials like the Trib's help define moments like this.

(How do papers react so quickly to events? Easy. They write the editorials ahead of time. My guess: The Trib would have had another editorial, equally well argued, all written and ready to put up on the website if Republican John McCain had won.)

Anyway, the Trib has been invoking Abraham Lincoln lately. And I've noticed more historical references in the media lately, from a long piece on President Andrew Jackson's legacy means today in Newsweek to the chorus of media commentators tonight talking about how extraordinary Obama's victory is and how it fulfills what historical figures like Dr. Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass fought for. To give credit where it's due, the media have tried hard lately to rise above the cliches about lipstick on pigs and endless "horserace" coverage. They've tried to put things into perspective, often hard to do on daily and weekly deadlines.

At any rate, the Trib mentioned Lincoln again in the Obama editorial. The lede:

On Feb. 12, Americans will celebrate the birthday of their most important and most beloved president. Abraham Lincoln entered the world on that date in 1809 in a cabin near Hodgenville, Ky.

His bicentennial would be an important occasion under any circumstances. But it will carry even greater symbolic significance because of something scheduled to happen three weeks earlier: the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States.

Obama’s victory is one of those events that reveal how far the nation has traveled. ...

Chicago writer Studs Terkel, who died just last week, used to say American has a national case of Altzheimer's disease. But in the last few days, maybe it's been in remission.

Another issue the Trib touched on was civility, and it saw hope in Obama's refusal to get down in the briar patch with his opponents:

There are other reasons to celebrate the election of this citizen of Chicago—the only one ever elevated to the White House. Obama won by appealing to a deep yearning for national reconciliation and unity that spans partisan divides. From the moment he captured national attention with a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to the last day of this campaign, he reminded us that amid our often-contentious diversity, we are one nation joined in a common mission.

Skeptics often questioned his approach, insisting that it made him look weak and was doomed to fail. But even when he was losing primaries to Hillary Clinton, even when Republicans painted him as an anti-American socialist, Obama retained the composure and intelligence that he has always shown under pressure.

While ably defending himself and pointing out his opponents’ shortcomings, he declined to descend into angry invective. By winning, he raises the hope of a more civil polity. His moderate tone may also ease the pain felt by John McCain’s supporters, who will be waiting to see whether his administration is as inclusive as his rhetoric.

McCain deserves credit for this, too. But the Trib's editorial predicted, I think quite correctly, that "America’s political rancor won’t instantly disappear." The Trib said defusing it will be one of Obama's great challenges:

Pollster Peter Hart recently found that one-third of each candidate’s supporters have come to “detest” McCain or Obama so thoroughly that they couldn’t accept him as president. Hart asked a Wall Street Journal reporter, “How do you knit a nation back together with this kind of animosity?”

That remains a challenge. But Obama could not have dared to run for president if he didn’t believe his fellow citizens could overcome the pitfalls of the past and the present to achieve a better future.

MSNBC widget

Linked to a story on "Where to Watch Election Night Online" in The New Observer ... which looks like an interesting publication in its own right.

COMM 386: Civility

In class this afternoon, somebody mentioned an elementary school kid who voted for Barack Obama in a class election but who had nice things to say about John McCain, too.

I was reminded of that kid tonight when I read Peggy Noonan's endorsement of Obama, which was in The Wall Street Journal last week. "Something new is happening in America," she said. "It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves." She's been leaning this way for several months.

But of McCain, she told a story. Noonan is at her best when she's telling stories. This one went like this:

... It was a night during the Republican Convention in September, and two former U.S. senators, who had served with Mr. McCain for a combined 16 years, were having drinks in a hotel dining room. I told them I collected stories of senators who’d been cursed out by John McCain, and they laughed and told me of times they’d been the target of his wrath on the Senate floor.

The talk turned to presidents they had known, and why they had wanted the job. This one wanted it as the last item on his résumé, that one wanted it out of an inflated sense of personal destiny. Is that why Mr. McCain wants it? “No”, said one, reflectively. “He wants to help the country.” The other added, with almost an air of wonder, “He wants to make America stronger, he really does.” And then they spoke, these two men who’d been bruised by him, of John McCain’s honest patriotism.

It's called civility or civic virtue. Webster's defines it as "civilized conduct; especially courtesy, politeness." And Wikipedia says it "a foundational principle of society and law." We need more of it, and it may not be too much to hope this year's election restores a measure of it to American political life.

COMM 386: Election? What election? We've got a book (and companion website) to read ... but it'll get back to the election, anyway

The website is put up by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and its address is: http://www.concernedjournalists.org/ ... kind of a plain vanilla name, if you ask me (and nobody did), but easy to remember. Concerned journalists dot-org. Kind of sticks in your mind, doesn't it? I hope it does, 'cause we'll be visiting it as the semester dwindles down to our last few precious days together. So let's take a break from the Nov. 4 election, which is at risk of settling into a same-ole same-ole pattern, anyway ...

So let's surf the website, and the top story below the nameplate is by Tom Avila, and it's headlined "What the Campaign is Teaching Me: The Opposite of Hate is Journalism." A staffer for the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, Avila is concerned about "the level of anger and, frankly, outright hatred that we’ve seen" toward candidates in both presidential camps. His concern reflects the hostility so often shown to people of his sexual orientation, but he brings the discussion back to journalism as he says, "the role of the journalist is an incredibly crucial one right now. While I have never wished to be wrong more than I do right now, I think that the ugliness we are seeing is a glimmer of what might come to pass come the early hours of Nov. 5."

So it goes. The next most prominent story on the CCJ website is also about the election. It's headed "Conflict and Conflation of Race and Gender," and it's by author and CCJ trainer Tracy Thompson. She wrote it in March, but it's still timely because she goes deeper than the day's headlines as she writes, "We live in fractured times, ... and this conflict mentality long ago stopped being a useful method of understanding the world -- which, after all, is what journalism is supposed to be about." Her view is nuanced and complex, as she explores the tension between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, black and white feminists and journalists who transition from daily deadlines to free-lancing as their are children and they take on caregiving obligations.

Or Jon Margolis, who covered politics for The Chicago Tribune for years, then went to the "toy department" (sports desk) and now free-lances from his home in Vermont. He has a column on "postmodern" election coverage in which he notes "the campaign and its coverage have been about ... the campaign and its coverage." He explains:

Did Barack Obama call Sarah Palin a pig? Did John McCain say you have to earn $5 million a year to be considered rich? Does Obama really want to teach kindergartners about sex? Are McCain’s campaign ads dishonest?

Forget for a minute that the answers to these questions are: No, No, No and (with Karl Rove’s apparent endorsement) Yes. Instead, just think about their connections to the world outside the campaign. Minimal at best. Not only are the candidates and their talking heads squabbling about events almost entirely unrelated to such mundane matters as war, peace, prosperity, schools, health care and such, but they are squabbling over the coverage of these squabbles, with Obama-ites complaining that the press isn’t forthrightly condemning McCain’s ads and the McCainiacs proclaiming they don’t give a hoot what the “elite media” say.

Margolis says both campaign and coverage are "ironic and absurd [and] ... self-referential," just like postmodernism.

Margolis wrote when the financial crisis upended the presidential race. And given his subject matter, I think we have to allow for the possiblity he's being a little ironic, absurd and self-referential here, at least around the edges. But I think he's onto something important here.

(Disclaimer: My ears perk up when I hear the word "postmodern." So should yours, since I've been known to ask about it on final exams.)

Anyway, let's look at Margois' article, headlined "Post-Modern Campaign Needs Reporters Rooted in the Now." Part of it is about ancient history, Nixon and Vietnam and stuff like that, and part of it can be written off to nostalgia on the part of a reporter who covered the '68 election. But, again, Margolis' column is and I think he's onto something.

And, not to be self-referential, it is the kind of thing that's been known to pop up on my final exams.

Studs Terkel, May 16, 1912-Oct. 31, 2008 / COMM 337 ASSIGNMENT

The death of Louis "Studs" Terkel, Chicago radio host and author of at least a half dozen highly regarded oral histories, led the Chicago news websites this weekend. His primary medium was radio, but he was a fixture on the city's literary and music scenes, especially jazz and gospel, and he fought for equal rights. The coverage of his death is worth reading, not only for their insights into how a skilled interviewer and journalist went about his business but also because some of them are unusually well written themselves.

Your assignment: Follow the links below, and read up on Studs Terkel. Look especially for: (1) quotes from Terkel offering insights you can use in your own writing and/or interview techniques; (2) other wisdom of Terkel's you can use in your career; (3) tricks or techniques in the obits you can copy: and (4) anything else that strikes your fancy. Post your reactions to your blog: What did you learn that you can use from reading about him?

Studs Terkel did so many things, and he did so many of them so well, I'd encourage each of you will find a different focus as you read. (Example: I'm especially interested in his friendship with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and other musicians, since Terkel almost single-handedly brought black gospel music as it was performed on the highly segregated South Side of Chicago to white audiences, but that's only a small part of what Terkel did over the years.) With the links below, I've tried to pull out quotes from different writers that try to give a balanced, overall assessment of the guy. As you read the stories I've linked to, I think you'll find a lot more than that. So follow your own interests.

First we'll listen to a little bit of Terkel and -- if the link is still active -- watch a 2:44min. video clip. National Public Radio has a an obit and sound clips including two-minute clips "On Finding Stories And Storytellers" and " On 'Journalism Against the Grain." And The Chicago Tribune has several videos linked to the front page of its website (or did over the weekend -- we'll have to see if they still work by class time Monday). But mostly, we'll read about Terkel.

Terkel's obituary on the Chicago Sun-Times' website Friday, by columnist Neil Steinberg, tries to sum up his career in the lede:

Studs Terkel turned the voice of average Americans into a font of history.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning author, television pioneer, theatrical actor, long-time radio host, unrepentant leftie and friend of the little man, died peacefully at his home on the North Side of Chicago this afternoon.

He was 96.

"He had a very full, eventful and sometimes tempestuous life ," said his son Dan. "It was very satisfactory"

Studs — calling him "Mr. Terkel" always seemed overly formal — was a character. He liked to wear a red-checked shirt, a rumpled suit and had a stogie jammed in the side of his thick-lipped mouth. He enjoyed a martini well into his 90s.

Though his dozen books were national best-sellers — Division Street America, and Working and The Good War — Studs was best known to many Chicagoans as an interviewer who hosted a talk show on radio station WFMT from 1952 to 1997.

Steinberg comes close, but Studs Terkel did so many things, and did them so well, you can't really sum up his career in a few grafs.

At the end of Friday's obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Rick Kogan also comes close:

... he said with zest that when he "checked out"--as a "hotel kid" he rarely used the word "dying," preferring the euphemism "checking out" and its variants--he wanted to be cremated. He wanted his ashes mixed with those of his wife, which sat in an urn in the living room of his house, near the bed in which he slept and dreamed.

"My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'." he said.

He then said that he wanted his and Ida's ashes to be scattered in Bughouse Square, that patch of green park that so informed his first years in his adopted city.

"Scatter us there," he said, a gleeful grin on his face. "It's against the law. Let 'em sue us."

Terkel is survived by his son. A memorial service is planned.

An appreciation by Patrick Reardon, senior reporter for the Trib:

It would be wrong to say Terkel was colorblind. He was deeply curious, deeply intrigued, about all the colors of the rainbow, whether in skin tones or political stripes or philosophical shadings. His only bias was on behalf of the powerless, the oppressed and the unheard.

And those on the margins responded in kind.

Also in the Trib, metro lifestyle columnist Mary Schmich notes some irony: "I'm told that Studs' absentee ballot arrived in the mail the same day he died, and he didn't get to vote. But his work, his hope, are among the reasons that 96 years after he was born it's possible that by Wednesday we'll have elected our first black president."

One of the best is in the lede to Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert's reminiscence. He says:

So there wasn't a World Series in Chicago, and Studs missed the 2008 Presidential election. Other than that, Louis (Studs) Terkel did everything possible in 96 years.

Was he the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. For me, he represented the joyous, scrappy, liberal, generous, wise-cracking heart of this city. If you met him, he was your friend. That happened to the hundreds and hundreds of people he interviewed for his radio show and 20 best-selling books. He wrote down the oral histories of those of his time who did not have a voice. In conversation he could draw up every single one of their names.

Ebert also links to a birthday tribute in May headlined "How Studs helps me lead my life."

By Saturday, editorials were going up on the Web. The Trib's was headlined simply "Studs" ... it ended with something I never would have expected. But maybe it summed him up best of all:

It is inconceivable that such a long and creative life would have passed without someone asking Terkel the signature question of all ages, "What is your work all about?"

That happened a few years ago. Terkel's answer was simple, revealing, profound. All those books, he said, were about redemption.

"Anybody can be redeemed," he said.

"I've seen it."