'I've gotta get my elephant tusks back'

Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them

Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian



The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005

In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.



It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."

And so on.

A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.

Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.

"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'

"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"

His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.

That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.

Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.

Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".

He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.

I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.

"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."

His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"

Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.

"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)

Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.

"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."

He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.

As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.

I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.

Here are a few more thoughts from Hunter. He was not always right....but then he was only seldom wrong:
Hunter S Thompson on work ..."Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." "Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times." "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me." "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f**king, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.... on drugs ...You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG! I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts... lifestyle advice ...Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a crime-in-progress is not a happy prospect. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Anytime there's a big sporting event, go to either the winning or losing town; there'll be riots in both of them. Riots are fun. Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything. Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife. Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles - a Porsche and a green Cadillac - so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward. Call on God, but row away from the rocks. ... and finally ...The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. A word to the wise is infuriating. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

ADS EMBEDDED IN NEWS STORIES RAISE CONCERNS
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)

Bill Berkowitz writes that the Center for Media and Democracy's
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300

The Gonzo has died. We watched part of the film Fear and Loathing in Los Vagas last term - which is part of the story of a man who changed journalism in our times.
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:

Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'

Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created

Ripples spread far from writer's work

Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control

By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005

I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.

I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.

What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.

What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.

The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.

It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.

In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.

Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.

Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.

If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.

We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.

For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.

My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.

He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.

Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.

 Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts

ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.

In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.

Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.

The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.

Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.

He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.

But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.

In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.

A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).

Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.

He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.

He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).

He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.

He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.

Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).

Have you read your electronic news today?
NEWSPAPERS TO CYBERJOURNALISTS: SHALL WE DANCE?
CNet editor Jeff Pelline says when he quit a steady newspaper job
nine years ago to launch CNet's News.com site, his friends and coworkers
thought he was nuts, but it turns out he was just ahead of the curve. "Now
the print media giants are changing their tune -- albeit more from a
defensive than offensive posture. Stuck with stagnant growth and under
pressure from Wall Street, these companies are taking their biggest plunge
yet into the Internet pool," says Pelline. He cites Thursday's announcement
by the New York Times that it's acquiring information portal About.com for
$410 million from Primedia and the Washington Post's December deal to
purchase online magazine Slate from Microsoft as harbingers of a new
détente between old and new media. "This year will no doubt go down as a
time when Internet and print media companies danced like never before,"
says Pelline. "For star-struck Internet companies, it may be a reality
check to have to dance with old timers. But the old timers sure don't mind:
It puts more dance in their step than a new pair of wingtip shoes." (CNet
News.com 18 Feb 2005)

What the mouth says and the body does are often different and a journalist should remind her readers of this fact.
NOT WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cameroon14feb14,0,2420523.story?coll=la-home-headlines
When Paul Biya, "the strongman who has ruled the West African
country of Cameroon for more than 20 years swept to another election
victory last fall, a number of observers quickly questioned the
process." But not the U.S. Association of Former Members of
Congress, who said, "This is what democracy is about." Their
delegation was organized by "a lobbyist for Biya's government," who
"served as the mission's chief staffer and billed Cameroon for his
work. Biya's government also picked up the $80,000 tab for the
Americans' visit. And a month after the group left, one of the six
observers signed his own lobbying contract with Cameroon."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3276

New Radio for everyone?
HERE COME THE PODCASTERS
It's called "podcasting," and it has the potential of changing the
dynamics of broadcasting the same way blogs have changed the dynamics of
print and TV journalism. Podcasting allows anyone with a PC to become a
broadcaster -- at virtually no cost. Programs distributed with this
technology can be received anywhere, anytime (without requiring the listener
to be near a PC), and they can be paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The
number of regular podcasts is now more than 800, with many focusing on
gadgets, technology, new bands and music, or developments in politics,
movies and sports. One podcaster says, "It would be great if I made a
fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could possibly happen. I'm not
really trying for it, either. I'm hoping to meet some interesting people and
establish some good communications with people on weird topics." (AP/USA
Today 7 Feb 2005)

Here are to articles, one on a challenge to the definition of what is it to be a journalist and the second about manipulated photos:WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT JOURNALISM IS?
A California court will soon decide whether bloggers have the same
legal protections as journalists under "shield" laws that protect reporters
from revealing their sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt
Opsahl, who represents two bloggers targeted by Apple for leaking
information about new company products, maintains that if the bloggers are
forced to give up their sources "the public will lose out on a vital outlet
for independent news, analysis, and commentary." An opposing view is offered
by University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson, who says that simply
expressing opinions to a tiny audience isn't journalism -- because if it
were "then I'm a journalist when I write a letter to my mother reporting on
what I'm doing. I don't think the free-press clause [of the U.S.
Constitution] was intended to extend its protections to letters to mothers
from sons." (USA Today 2 Feb 2005)


YOUR LYING EYES IN THE PHOTOSHOP AGE
Have the ethics of photojournalism been changed in some way by such
software as Adobe Photoshop, which allows easy manipulation of digital
photos? The National Press Photographers Association says it's wrong to
alter the content of a photograph "in any way that deceives the public," and
the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times director of photography
says, "If our readers can't count on honesty from us, I don't know what we
have left." Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid is working to
solve the problem of dishonest photographs by developing computer algorithms
that can detect when an image has been altered. But Farid says, "It's a bit
of an arms race. It's tamper and tamper protection, and we can already
predict who's going to win. We simply make it harder" for the average person
with the average amount of skill to get away with photographic deceptions.
(CSM/USA Today 2 Feb 2005)

What kind of life and sacrifice does a journalist have to make? What mistakes can she make and still keep her job? What mistakes can she make and still be a normal person? What kind of mistakes can she make and still be human? Well evey story is different but here is one of them:
14 Years Later, My Hollywood Ending
By BERNARD WEINRAUB

Published: January 30, 2005
LOS ANGELES

I CAME to Hollywood in 1991 thinking I knew quite a lot about the world and its ways. As a young reporter, I had been to Vietnam. Later, I covered Northern Ireland, several political campaigns and the White House under President Ronald Reagan and the elder President George Bush. On arriving, I was fresh from a sudden assignment in India after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But only in my 14 years here - most of it spent covering the movie industry, the rest covering television and music - did I come face to face with some of the more startling, and not always pleasant, truths about human behavior, my own included

On retiring (officially, this is my final week at The Times), it seems best to sort through this Hollywood tour. It began in a string of modest, even shabby, apartments - one of them, on Martel Avenue in West Hollywood, best remembered for the cluster of police cars, drug dealers and prostitutes on the corner. Along the way I married a studio chief, Amy Pascal, now chairwoman of Sony Pictures. For both of us, the liaison opened a rare two-way window on the inner workings of two worlds, moviedom and the press, that have long been locked in a messy but symbiotic struggle. But our marriage also changed the game. I won't speak for my wife and her own way of coping with career complications born of an alliance with a reporter, but I can say that our wedding, in August 1997, brought to the fore some of my own shortcomings. Clearly, I stayed too long on my beat, clinging to a notion that I could sidestep conflicts of interest by avoiding direct coverage of Sony, and learning too late why wiser heads counsel against even the appearance of conflict. But my marriage, and some of the events that tumbled out of it, also taught me something about the ferocity of a culture in which the players can be best friends one day and savage you the next.

When I finally asked to be taken off the movie beat in 2000, I laughed and said I felt like the Duke of Windsor. But I quickly caught a lesson in how chilly life as a former movie correspondent could be. In the past, I'd written about Jeffrey Katzenberg, then president of the Walt Disney Company. He returned every call quickly and often phoned me; he dished over pasta at Locanda Veneta about all the studios in town and became such a pal that I once showed him off-the-record comments made about him by Michael Eisner. That was wrong and foolish, and years later I still regret it. As soon as I stopped covering movies, Mr. Katzenberg stopped responding to phone calls. I was surprised but shouldn't have been.

Not every Hollywood moment involved operators like Mr. Katzenberg, nor were they all somehow tied up with my marriage. Fellow journalists contributed their share. In one remarkable episode about two years ago, Robert J. Dowling, the publisher and editor in chief of The Hollywood Reporter, threatened to punch me during a charity event. He was upset by an article I had written about two years earlier dealing with staff resignations after his newspaper failed to print an article about an inquiry by the Screen Actors Guild into whether the Reporter columnist George Christy had received pension and health benefits to which he was not entitled. Mr. Christy's column was soon suspended. (Peter Bart, the editor of Variety and a former Times Hollywood correspondent, went beyond Mr. Dowling: he sought to get me removed from the job because of an article I wrote saying that The Hollywood Reporter was catching up with Variety.)

The Hollywood Reporter scandal was, in fairness, pathetic and hardly on the level of Watergate or Iran-contra. And it wasn't akin to the unfortunate way even more serious journalists are co-opted by the overtures of a Michael Ovitz or the charm of a Joe Roth. Mr. Roth, a top Hollywood player, seems available at any time and is willing to schmooze with eager reporters as if he had all the time in the world.

Mr. Ovitz went a step or two further. Shortly after I arrived in Hollywood and met him, when he was at his zenith as chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, he offered to help if my children needed to attend private school or if I needed to find a hospital. I never took him up on the offers.

MY first day here, as I recall it, was in early September 1991. Having just come back from India, I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of money, and the crazy economic gap between journalists and the people they covered. It was like dropping into Marie Antoinette's France. In Washington, reporters often lived next door to the people they covered. Whatever the income gap between a reporter and a lawyer or lobbyist - and it's considerable - your lives intersected. In the neighborhood. On the subway. At private schools. At parties.
Scott Gries/Getty Images
The press stands behind its velvet rope.

Journalists in Washington do not feel diminished by their lower salaries. In Hollywood, many do. I did. Waiting for a valet at the Bel-Air Hotel to bring my company-leased Ford, I once stood beside a journalist turned producer who said, "I used to drive a car like that." Though I'm ashamed to say it, I was soon hunting for parking spots near Orso or the Peninsula Hotel to avoid the discomfort of having a valet drive up my leased two-year-old Buick in front of some luncheon companion with a Mercedes.

For many of us on the press side, the money gap leads to resentment and envy, compounded by a conviction that studio executives and producers are no better or smarter than the journalists who cover them. Initially, I was simply amazed. My first real Hollywood acquaintance was Dawn Steel, a producer and onetime studio chief, and one of the more dynamic figures in town. (Ms. Steel died of a malignant brain tumor in 1997 at the age of 51). Before leaving New York, I was in the office of Warren Hoge, then the editor of the Times Magazine, who said Ms. Steel would open the gates of the movie world for me. He called her on her car cellphone, which was still uncommon enough that I was dazzled. She insisted that I see her as soon as I arrived. I did so. Her house off Coldwater Canyon, behind gates and atop a winding road, was a sprawling, ranch-style home with panoramic views of the city on a huge plot of land. I had never seen a home like this.

What made it strange was that Ms. Steel was a girl from Long Island - smart, funny, neurotic. She had no airs. She and so many others in Hollywood seemed like people I knew. I grew up with them. And yet they earned bizarre amounts of money that lifted them into a different universe.

My first reaction was to write about that difference. Early on, for instance, I wrote about movie stars and executives trooping into a specially designed soundstage at Sony for the Hollywood Hunger project to benefit Oxfam America. Instead of simply writing checks, the celebrities sought what the caterer, Ruth Hedges, told me was "the actual experience of being poor and hungry."

So the likes of Danny Glover, Jackson Browne, Daryl Hannah, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, David Byrne and Graham Nash drew lots: 15 percent represented high-income countries and dined at fancy tables on stuffed breast of chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and radicchio, and salad with shrimp; 25 percent represented middle-income countries and sat on benches at wooden tables to eat rice and beans and tortillas off paper plates; and the majority, sat on the floor on a mat and had rice and water, as many people in the world do.

Almost as shocking (at least for me) were the gala events to raise money for ecological causes in the early 1990's. At one such event, 700 of the town's elite (Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Ted Danson, Jane Fonda) showed up at a soundstage in Mercedeses, BMW's, stretch limos and other gas guzzlers to celebrate Hollywood's commitment to the environment. The invitations said, "In the spirit of the event, we urge you to car-pool." It didn't appear that anyone did.

Detachment from the real, I soon learned, was closely bound up in the culture of stardom, and star behavior, alas, has a way of rubbing off on those of us who come in contact. At first, as I now hate to admit, I was fascinated by the idea of meeting movie stars. (After meeting a few, the fascination ended.) Maureen Dowd in Washington made me promise I'd interview Michelle Pfeiffer soon after arriving. As it turned out, she was my first star interview. She was promoting the film "Frankie and Johnny," in which, bizarrely, she was playing a frumpy waitress.

I met Ms. Pfeiffer at her office in Century City. I was tongue-tied. She talked about her character's loneliness and how she identified with the waitress. I nodded at whatever Ms. Pfeiffer said. She told me it was a fantasy that beautiful people couldn't look unattractive or weren't lonely or hurt. "It doesn't matter what you look like or how old you are," she said. "That's not relevant." Right. For a moment, I believed it.

At another point, at the Toronto Film Festival, I rushed through an interview with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton about their film "A Simple Plan." It was important for the two actors to promote their offbeat film and get an article in The Times. I cut short the interview and said, "Look, I've got to interview Cameron Diaz." The pair were dumbfounded. She was prettier and a rising star. She was more important. The fact that I had hurt the actors and embarrassed myself still rankles. Not a high point but perhaps the beginning of real understanding about a world that obsessively chases what's young, what's new, what has heat.

My most embarrassing moment in Hollywood was an interview with Jim Carrey that at least absolved me of star fever. The comedian, in a suite at Ma Maison Sofitel, was promoting his film "The Mask." I had taken medicine for a bad cold. The interview began. I was settled into an easy chair, facing Mr. Carrey with my feet crossed in front of me. As he began answering questions, I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, I was feeling somebody kick the bottom of my shoe with his foot. I woke up, mortified. Years later, I met his manager Jimmy Miller. I told Mr. Miller I had a confession: that I fell asleep while interviewing Mr. Carrey. Mr. Miller exclaimed: "So you're the guy! He talks all the time about a reporter who once fell asleep on him."

IN 1996, I met Amy Pascal for a business breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. She had just been named president of Turner Pictures, a new company founded by Ted Turner.

Not even 18 months later, the company was folded into Time Warner.

As we began dating, I rationalized that I could avoid any hint of a conflict of interest by avoiding any coverage of Turner Pictures. By the time we were married, the next year, my wife had been appointed chairman of Columbia Pictures. I should have left the movie beat right then, if not sooner.

But with the agreement of my editors, who were confident I could deal with the issue, I felt I could continue covering the movie business, avoiding coverage of Columbia and its parent company, Sony, and leaving that to a colleague. It was a delicate balancing act that seemed to work for a while. But I underestimated how closely I would be watched, or how quickly Hollywood would jump on my marriage as way to get an edge in coverage by The New York Times.


Warner Brothers, once a high-flying studio, was at that time beset by a string of expensive movie flops and its parent company's music operation had a weak track record. With a colleague, Geraldine Fabrikant, I covered the failures at Warner, whose co-chairmen were Robert A. Daly and Terry S. Semel. The two eventually resigned.

Mr. Daly was furious and told friends and others that I should not write such articles because of my marriage, a view I came to share, though I remain convinced that the coverage was accurate and fair. Soon enough, an article appeared in Brill's Content, a magazine covering the news media, by Lorne Manly (now a reporter for The Times). It said that "two Hollywood sources" said Warner had offered my wife a production deal instead of "the high-ranking job she sought," and that "instead she headed to Sony." As I read it, the implication was that The Times's articles were written because I was personally peeved at Warner and not because the studio was experiencing failures like "The Postman" and "Sphere."

I wrote to Bill Kovach, the ombudsman for Brill's Content and a former Times Washington bureau chief for whom I had once worked, to complain about what I called the cheap and inept journalism at his magazine, which was itself financed by Barry Diller, George Soros and others. Would the magazine ever write about Mr. Diller or Mr. Soros? I asked in an angry note. Mr. Kovach responded with equal anger. In retrospect, the nastiness of journalists toward The New York Times - and me - should have been a warning that this was a losing battle.

Mr. Ovitz, who began complaining to The Times about my coverage shortly after I arrived, was soon trying to use my marriage as a lever to oust me. He visited The Times after I had written about his troubled management company, which he formed after his dismissal from the Walt Disney Company. At the time Mr. Ovitz was also facing problems because of a failed Broadway investment and a vain effort to start a football franchise.

"What does The New York Times have against me? Mr. Ovitz asked Joseph Lelyveld, then the executive editor, according to New York magazine. "Your football writer hates me, your theater writer hates me and Bernie Weinraub just killed me."

Mr. Lelyveld said: "What are you talking about? If I got all three writers in a room they wouldn't even know each other."

True.

In a later phone conversation, Mr. Ovitz urged The Times to dismiss me and finally shrieked at Mr. Lelyveld: "You don't know anything about our business! I can't talk to you!"

In mid-1999, Mr. Lelyveld came to Los Angeles. I began our lunch by saying that I wanted off the movie beat. Not because I was tired of it, but because it was being used as an excuse to attack me and the newspaper I loved. Mr. Lelyveld was visibly relieved. I had saved him from saying it was getting difficult for the newspaper. I asked about covering television and other entertainment. He agreed.

IN December 2001, less than three years later, I received a call from Julia Phillips, the once-hot producer of films like "Taxi Driver" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," who had drifted from center stage in Hollywood long before she wrote her classic tell-all, "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." To my regret, I asked her to hold on one minute while I finished on another line. As soon as I returned, Ms. Phillips said: "I'm dying. And I want an obituary in The New York Times."

Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, I had met Ms. Phillips late one chilly afternoon at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I wanted to write about her as the author of a slash-and-burn chronicle that detailed the selfishness, duplicity, nastiness and greed of the Hollywood stars and executives she knew in the 1970's and 1980's. The book also revealed her own plunge into cocaine addiction.

Ms. Phillips said she was a pariah in town. "I saw these people for what they were," she said. In the years that followed I became friendly with her: she would call me periodically to either congratulate me on an article or criticize me, saying I was naïve or had been duped. At dinner at Orso, her favorite restaurant, she was brutally honest about herself and about the Hollywood crowd. "Don't trust these people," she warned me numerous times. "Don't trust anyone here."

I laughed and didn't really believe her. But with time I came to realize that she, more than Dawn Steel, had become my most reliable guide to the ways of what insiders still like to call "the town."

Responding to her call, I immediately drove to see her in her apartment looking out onto West Hollywood and, on a clear day, downtown. I said I wanted to tape-record some interviews for an obituary. And I asked if she wanted anything else. Ms. Phillips said she adored George Clooney and would love to see his latest film, "Ocean's Eleven." (Warner Brothers, which had tapes of the film, sent her a copy the next day.) I spent several days visiting and interviewing her.

Because of her book, Ms. Phillips was an outcast among Hollywood's elite. "At first it bothered me because I really didn't expect that kind of reaction," she said. "I thought people had a sense of humor. I really did.

"Understand, I wasn't a pariah because I was a drug-addicted, alcoholic, rotten person and not a good mother," she said. "I was a pariah because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered them as contemptible as they really are."

Ms. Phillips died of cancer in the early days of 2002. I went to her funeral service on the rooftop of her apartment building and thought of what she said while dying. Was it an overstatement? I wonder. I'm part of the Hollywood world now. I can't deny it. I drive a Range Rover. I live in Brentwood. Not everyone is contemptible. Perhaps Julia Phillips was wrong. I hope she is.

The dilemma of death-reporters are now targeted in war zones.
. A TRYING-NOT-TO-BE-CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-fg-reporting23jan23.story
"Most Western reporters have determined that their only option is to
turn to the U.S. and British embassies for transportation help,"
writes the Los Angeles Times' Alissa Rubin from Iraq. "The
embassies, with the power to commandeer military helicopters, armed
with gunners and personal security details, allow journalists to
leapfrog the ring of danger around Baghdad and visit the rest of the
country. ... But with the mobility come some hindrances. Western
government officials exert control over the journalists'
itineraries, set up interviews, and decide who and what will be
seen." The Independent's Robert Fisk recently decried "hotel
journalism," writing, "Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by
reporters in so distant and restricted a way."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3206

You should check this out:
Memo to Media Establishment: Ignore Blogs at Your Peril
The mainstream media continues to face the reality that bloggers have loosened the stranglehold on the news.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/ap/ap_012405.asp?trk=nl

Hey how do you like this for a good idea?: Experience three months in a newsroom with some of Canada's finest journalists. The CBC News: Canada Now internship program is open to BC students enrolled in, or recently graduated from, a journalism program. The program aims to strengthen BC-based talent and to open doors for a diversity of voices.

This is a story worth watching!:
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline

Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.

straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005

Well I hope some of you are still checking this out as the following is and will continue to be a very good story to watch and it is one that concerns Japan as well as everyone else with concerns about the welfare of the planet:

4.
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline

Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.

straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005

Well I hope some of you are still checking this out as the following is and will continue to be a very good story to watch and it is one that concerns Japan as well as everyone else with concerns about the welfare of the planet:

4.
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline

Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.

straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005

Two items which give a very negative view of the 'press'. What do you think about these:
FLASH CARD
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel
myself infinitely the happier for it." (Thomas Jefferson)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WHAT HAPPENED AT THE TIMES?
In a book highly critical of the way the New York Times has evolved in
recent years, attorney Bob Kohn examines the issue of opinion and bias in
news reporting:
"Today, it seems, newspapers are in the business of identifying
solutions to society's problems and influencing public opinion to agree with
those solutions. News gathering and reporting are no longer the ends of the
newspaper; they have become merely a means to an end.
"Over the course of the past fifty years, the line between the
editorial opinion and the news article has become increasingly blurred.
Today, the two are nearly indistinguishable. Though maintaining some
stylistic differences, the editorial opinion and the news article have the
same purpose and often work in tandem to maximize the newspaper publisher's
influence over public opinion.
"The profession has become very open about these changes. In 1975, when
the American Society of Newspaper Editors assembled to rewrite the code of
ethics that served them for nearly fifty years, they took their original
canon -- 'News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind' --
and turned it on its ear with the following: 'Distinguish between advocacy
and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not
misrepresent fact or context.'
"No longer did the society stress that news be free from opinion or
bias of any kind. The focus shifted away from how news reports should be
written to how 'analysis and commentary' should be labeled. The
straightforward canon established in the 1920s was replaced with the rather
vague, 'Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.'
"Those in the profession -- whose day-to-day tools of trade are words
and their meaning -- fully understood the future they were forging. The
message they sent to their fellow editors and reporters was now clear:
straight news articles need no longer be 'free from opinion or bias of any
kind.' And while the new ethics code elsewhere demands that the deliberate
distortion of facts is 'never permissible,' it merely recommends that
analysis and commentary 'should be labeled.'"
***
[To purchase a copy of Bob Kohn's "Journalistic Fraud: How The New YorkTimes
Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted," go to <
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0785261044/newsscancom/ref=nos
im>

Well it's not just the Japanese government that keeps secrets that it shouldn't:. LET THE SUN SHINE IN
http://prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=231598&site=3
The American Society of Newspaper Editors and other media
organizations are organizing "Sunshine Week" in mid-March, to
encourage print, broadcast and online media outlets "to address the
issue of a more open government through news coverage, editorials,
commentaries, and editorial cartoons." The organizations are
"alarmed by a trend toward secrecy at all levels of government." A
similar effort, OpenTheGovernment.org, has been launched by dozens
of organizations "to advance the public's right to know and to
reduce secrecy in the government." The managing director of the PR
Consulting Group, which is promoting OpenTheGovernment.org, said,
"As Americans concerned about the erosion of our constitutionally
protected freedoms, this is a very important client for us."
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd.), January 3, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3165

Here is another good one from the Colubia School of Journalism:

State of the Beat
Blinded By Science
How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality

By Chris Mooney

On May 22, 2003, the Los Angeles Times printed a front-page story by Scott Gold, its respected Houston bureau chief, about the passage of a law in Texas requiring abortion doctors to warn women that the procedure might cause breast cancer. Virtually no mainstream scientist believes that the so-called ABC link actually exists — only anti-abortion activists do. Accordingly, Gold’s article noted right off the bat that the American Cancer Society discounts the “alleged link” and that anti-abortionists have pushed for “so-called counseling” laws only after failing in their attempts to have abortion banned. Gold also reported that the National Cancer Institute had convened “more than a hundred of the world’s experts” to assess the ABC theory, which they rejected. In comparison to these scientists, Gold noted, the author of the Texas counseling bill — who called the ABC issue “still disputed” — had “a professional background in property management.”

Gold’s piece was hard-hitting but accurate. The scientific consensus is quite firm that abortion does not cause breast cancer. If reporters want to take science and its conclusions seriously, their reporting should reflect this reality — no matter what anti-abortionists say.

But what happened next illustrates one reason journalists have such a hard time calling it like they see it on science issues. In an internal memo exposed by the Web site LAobserved.com, the Times’s editor, John Carroll, singled out Gold’s story for harsh criticism, claiming it vindicated critics who accuse the paper of liberal bias. Carroll specifically criticized Gold’s “so-called counseling” line (“a phrase that is loaded with derision”) and his “professional background in property management” quip (“seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this”). “The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discounted among researchers,” Carroll wrote, “but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it . . . . Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don’t need to waste our readers’ time with it.”

Gold declined to comment specifically on Carroll’s memo, except to say that it prompted “a sound and good discussion of the standards that we all take very seriously.” For his part, Carroll — now editing his third newspaper — is hardly so naïve as to think journalistic “balance” is synonymous with accuracy. In an interview, he nevertheless defended the memo, observing that “reporters have to make judgments about the validity of ideas” but that “a reporter has to be broad-minded in being open to ideas that aren’t necessarily shared by the crowd he or she happens to be hanging around with.” Carroll adds that in his view, Gold needed to find a credible scientist to defend the ABC claim, rather than merely quoting a legislator and then exposing that individual’s lack of scientific background. “You have an obligation to find a scientist, and if the scientist has something to say, then you can subject the scientist’s views to rigorous examination,” Carroll says.

The trouble is, the leading proponent of the idea that abortions cause breast cancer, Dr. Joel Brind of Baruch College at the City University of New York, underwent a pro-life religious conversion that left him feeling “compelled to use science for its noblest, life-saving purpose,” as he put it in Physician, a magazine published by a conservative religious group called Focus on the Family. Brind’s dedication to the ABC theory has flown in the face of repeated negative critiques of that theory by his scientific peers. When the National Cancer Institute convened the world’s experts to assess the question in February 2003, Brind was the only dissenter from the group’s conclusions.

Nevertheless, a later article by Gold suggests he may have taken Carroll’s lesson to heart (though Gold says the piece “certainly wasn’t a direct response, or an attempt to change anything or compensate” following Carroll’s memo). On November 6, 2003, Gold reported on a push in Texas to revise the way biology textbooks teach the scientific theory of evolution, which some religious conservatives don’t accept. Gold opened with a glowing profile of one William Dembski, described as a “scientist by trade” but “an evangelical Christian at heart who is convinced that some biological mechanisms are too complex to have been created without divine guidance.” But according to his Web site, Dembski is a philosopher and mathematician, not a biologist. Moreover, he’s a leader of the new “intelligent design” crusade against Darwin’s theory, an updated form of creationism that evolutionary biologists have broadly denounced. (He recently took a job running the Center for Science and Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.) The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society and publisher of Science, the highest-circulation general scientific journal, has firmly stated that proponents have “failed to offer credible scientific evidence to support their claim” that the intelligent design theory “undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of evolution.”

Scott Gold had it exactly right on abortion and breast cancer. Then he produced an article on “intelligent design” so artificially “balanced” it was downright inaccurate and misleading.

The basic notion that journalists should go beyond mere “balance” in search of the actual truth hardly represents a novel insight. This magazine, along with its political Web site, Campaign Desk, has been part of a rising chorus against a prevalent but lazy form of journalism that makes no attempt to dig beneath competing claims. But for journalists raised on objectivity and tempered by accusations of bias, knowing that phony balance can create distortion is one thing and taking steps to fix the reporting is another.

Political reporting hardly presents the only challenge for journalists seeking to go beyond he said/she said accounts, or even the most difficult one. Instead, that distinction may be reserved for media coverage of contested scientific issues, many of them with major policy ramifications, such as global climate change. After all, the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science. On the contrary, scientific theories and interpretations survive or perish depending upon whether they’re published in highly competitive journals that practice strict quality control, whether the results upon which they’re based can be replicated by other scientists, and ultimately whether they win over scientific peers. When consensus builds, it is based on repeated testing and retesting of an idea.

Journalists face a number of pressures that can prevent them from accurately depicting competing scientific claims in terms of their credibility within the scientific community as a whole. First, reporters must often deal with editors who reflexively cry out for “balance.” Meanwhile, determining how much weight to give different sides in a scientific debate requires considerable expertise on the issue at hand. Few journalists have real scientific knowledge, and even beat reporters who know a great deal about certain scientific issues may know little about other ones they’re suddenly asked to cover.

Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere “balance” in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented, extremely robust mainstream conclusion. Journalists have thus had to decide whether to report on a he said/she said battle between scientists and the White House — which has had very few scientific defenders — or get to the bottom of each case of alleged distortion and report on who’s actually right.

No wonder scientists have often denounced the press for giving credibility to fringe scientific viewpoints. And without a doubt, the topic on which scientists have most vehemently decried both the media and the Bush administration is global warming. While some scientific uncertainty remains in the climate field, the most rigorous peer-reviewed assessments — produced roughly every five years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — have cemented a consensus view that human greenhouse gas emissions are probably (i.e., the conclusion has a fairly high degree of scientific certainty) helping to fuel the greenhouse effect and explain the observed planetary warming of the past fifty years. Yet the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine this position by hyping lingering uncertainties and seeking to revise government scientific reports. It has also relied upon energy interests and a small cadre of dissenting scientists (some of whom are funded, in part, by industry) in formulating climate policy.

The centrality of the climate change issue to the scientific critique of the press does not arise by accident. Climate change has mind-bogglingly massive ramifications, not only for the future of our carbon-based economy but for the planet itself. Energy interests wishing to stave off action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have a documented history of supporting the small group of scientists who question the human role in causing climate change — as well as consciously strategizing about how to sow confusion on the issue and sway journalists.

In 1998, for instance, John H. Cushman, Jr., of The New York Times exposed an internal American Petroleum Institute memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” Perhaps most startling, the memo cited a need to “recruit and train” scientists “who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate” to participate in media outreach and counter the mainstream scientific view. This seems to signal an awareness that after a while, journalists catch on to the connections between contrarian scientists and industry. But in the meantime, a window of opportunity apparently exists when reporters can be duped by fresh faces.

"There’s a very small set of people” who question the consensus, says Science’s executive editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy. “And there are a great many thoughtful reporters in the media who believe that in order to produce a balanced story, you’ve got to pick one commentator from side A and one commentator from side B. I call it the two-card Rolodex problem.”

The Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider echoes this concern. A scientist whose interactions with the media on the subject of climate change span decades, Schneider has reflected at length on the subject, especially in his 1989 book Global Warming. Schneider’s climate-change Web site also devotes a section to what he calls “Mediarology,” where he notes that in science debates “there are rarely just two polar opposite sides, but rather a spectrum of potential outcomes, oftentimes accompanied by a considerable history of scientific assessment of the relative credibility of these many possibilities. A climate scientist faced with a reporter locked into the ‘get both sides’ mindset risks getting his or her views stuffed into one of two boxed storylines: ‘we’re worried’ or ‘it will all be okay.’ And sometimes, these two ‘boxes’ are misrepresentative; a mainstream, well-established consensus may be ‘balanced’ against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.”

Academics have studied media coverage of climate change, and the results confirm climate scientists’ longstanding complaints. In a recent paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the scholars Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff analyzed coverage of the issue in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times between 1988 and 2002. During this fourteen-year period, climate scientists successfully forged a powerful consensus on human-caused climate change. But reporting in these four major papers did not at all reflect this consensus.

The Boykoffs analyzed a random sample of 636 articles. They found that a majority — 52.7 percent — gave “roughly equal attention” to the scientific consensus view that humans contribute to climate change and to the energy-industry-supported view that natural fluctuations suffice to explain the observed warming. By comparison, just 35.3 percent of articles emphasized the scientific consensus view while still presenting the other side in a subordinate fashion. Finally, 6.2 percent emphasized the industry-supported view, and a mere 5.9 percent focused on the consensus view without bothering to provide the industry/skeptic counterpoint.

Most intriguing, the Boykoffs’ study found a shift in coverage between 1988 — when climate change first garnered wide media coverage — and 1990. During that period, journalists broadly moved from focusing on scientists’ views of climate change to providing “balanced” accounts. During this same period, the Boykoffs noted, climate change became highly politicized and a “small group of influential spokespeople and scientists emerged in the news” to question the mainstream view that industrial emissions are warming the planet. The authors conclude that the U.S. “prestige-press” has produced “informationally biased coverage of global warming . . . hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance.”

In a rich irony, a UPI report on August 30, 2004, about the Boykoffs’ study covered it in — that’s right — a thoroughly “balanced” fashion. The article gave considerable space to the viewpoint of Frank Maisano, a former spokesman for the industry-sponsored Global Climate Coalition and a professional media consultant, who called the Boykoffs’ contentions “absolutely outrageous” and proceeded to reiterate many of the dubious criticisms of mainstream climate science for which the “skeptic” camp is so notorious. In the process, the UPI piece epitomized all the pathologies of U.S. coverage of climate change — pathologies that aren’t generally recapitulated abroad. Media research suggests that U.S. journalists cover climate change very differently from their European counterparts, often lending much more credence to the viewpoints of “skeptics” like Maisano.

In an interview, Maxwell Boykoff — an environmental studies Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Santa Cruz — noted that if there’s one American journalist who cuts against the grain in covering the climate issue, it’s Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times. That’s revealing, because Revkin happens to be the only reporter at any of the major newspapers studied who covers “global environmental change” as his exclusive beat, which Revkin says means writing about climate change “close to half” of the time. Revkin has also been covering global warming since 1988 and has written a book on the topic. (This fall he began teaching environmental reporting as an adjunct at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.)

Revkin agrees with the basic thrust of the Boykoff study, but he also notes that the analysis focuses only on the quantitative aspect of climate-change coverage, rather than more subtle qualitative questions such as how reporters “characterize the voices” of the people they quote.

After all, the issue isn’t just how many column inches journalists give to the perspective of climate-change “skeptics” versus the mainstream view. It’s also how they identify these contrarian figures, many of whom have industry ties. Take a January 8, 2004, article by The Washington Post’s Guy Gugliotta, reporting on a study in the journal Nature finding that global warming could “drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.” Gugliotta’s story hardly suffered from phony balance. But when it did include a “skeptic” perspective — in a thoroughly subordinate fashion in the ninth paragraph — the skeptic’s industry ties went unmentioned:
One skeptic, William O’Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research ‘ignored species’ ability to adapt to higher temperatures’ and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.

What Gugliotta didn’t say is this: the Marshall Institute receives substantial support from oil giant ExxonMobil, a leading funder of think tanks, frequently conservative in orientation, that question the scientific consensus on climate change. Moreover, O’Keefe himself has chaired the anti-Kyoto Protocol Global Climate Coalition, and served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Petroleum Institute. Senate documents from 2001 through 2003 also list him as a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil. (To be fair, when I discussed this matter with O’Keefe while working on a previous article, he said that he registers as a lobbyist “out of an abundance of caution” and keeps his ExxonMobil and Marshall Institute work “separate.”)

Asked about all of this, Gugliotta said he simply didn’t know of O’Keefe’s industry connections at the time. He said he considered O’Keefe a “reasoned skeptic” who provided a measured perspective from the other side of the issue. Fair enough. His industry ties don’t necessarily detract from that, but readers still should know about them. The point isn’t to single out Gugliotta — any number of other examples could be found. And such omissions don’t merely occur on the news pages. Some major op-ed pages also appear to think that to fulfill their duty of providing a range of views, they should publish dubious contrarian opinion pieces on climate change even when those pieces are written by nonscientists. For instance, on July 7, 2003, The Washington Post published a revisionist op-ed on climate science by James Schlesinger, a former secretary of both energy and defense, and a former director of Central Intelligence. “In recent years the inclination has been to attribute the warming we have lately experienced to a single dominant cause — the increase in greenhouse gases,” wrote Schlesinger. “Yet climate has always been changing — and sometimes the swings have been rapid.” The clear implication was that scientists don’t know enough about the causes of climate change to justify strong pollution controls.

That’s not how most climatologists feel, but then Schlesinger is an economist by training, not a climatologist. Moreover, his Washington Post byline failed to note that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, and has since 2001. Peabody has resisted the push for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions, such as those that would be required by the Kyoto Protocol. In a 2001 speech, the Peabody executive John Wootten argued that “there remains great uncertainty in the scientific understanding of climate,” and that “imposition of immediate constraints on emissions from fossil-fuel use is not warranted.” Funny, that’s pretty much what Schlesinger argued.

For another group of scientists, the grievances with the press have emerged more recently, but arguably with far greater force. That’s because on an issue of great concern to these scientists — the various uses and abuses of somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning — journalists have swallowed the claims of the scientific fringe hook, line, and sinker.

Consider the great 2002 cloning hoax. In the media lull following Christmas, one Brigitte Boisselier — the “scientific director” of Clonaid, a company linked to the UFO-obsessed Raelian sect, and already a semi-celebrity who had been profiled in The New York Times Magazine — announced the birth of the world’s first cloned baby. At her press conference, covered live by CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, Boisselier could not even produce a picture of the alleged child — “Eve” — much less independent scientific verification of her claims. She instead promised proof within eight or nine days. Needless to say, the whole affair should have made the press wary.

Nevertheless, a media frenzy ensued, with journalists occasionally mocking and questioning the Raelians while allowing their claims to drive the coverage. CNN’s medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, provided a case in point. When he interviewed Boisselier following her press conference, Gupta called Clonaid a group with “the capacity to clone” and told Boisselier, credulously, “We are certainly going to be anxiously awaiting to see some of the proof from these independent scientists next week.”

Perhaps most outspoken in criticizing the press during the Clonaid fiasco was Arthur Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania biomedical ethicist. As one of the nation’s most quoted bioethicists, Caplan had the advantage of actual access to the media during the feeding frenzy. Yet that familiarity made little difference. As Caplan complained in an MSNBC.com column following the Raelians’ announcement, no one wanted to listen to his skepticism because that would have required dropping the story: “As soon as I heard about the Raelians’ cloning claim, I knew it was nonsense,” wrote Caplan. “The media have shown themselves incapable of covering the key social and intellectual phenomena of the 21st century, namely the revolution in genetics and biology.”

Caplan observed that Clonaid had no scientific peer-reviewed publications to prove its techniques were up to snuff, and that cloning had barely worked in live animal species, and then only after countless initial failures. Nevertheless, Clonaid had implausibly claimed a stunning success rate — five pregnancies in ten attempts — in its experiments.

The Clonaid fiasco shows the media at their absolute worst in covering scientific issues. Reviewing the coverage two years later is a painful exercise. As even Gupta later admitted, “I think if we had known . . . that there was going to be no proof at this press conference, I think that we probably would have pulled the plug.” Later on, even the Raelians themselves reportedly laughed at how easy it was to get free publicity.

But this wasn’t just fun and games. The political consequences of the press’s cloning coverage were considerable. Widespread fear of human cloning inevitably lends strength to sweeping legislation that would ban all forms of cloning, despite the fact that many scientists think the cloning of embryos for research purposes holds significant medical promise; it would allow for the creation of embryonic-stem-cell lines genetically matched to individual patients. Thus, on an issue where one side of the debate thrives on fear, the media delivered exactly what these cloning-ban advocates desired. Where the press’s unjustifiable addiction to “balance” on climate change produces a political stalemate on a pressing issue of global consequence, its addiction to cloning cranks provided a potent political weapon to the enemies of crucial research.

None of those examples of poorly “balanced” science reporting arise from precisely the same set of journalistic shortcomings. In Scott Gold’s case at the Los Angeles Times, he appears to have known the scientific issues perfectly well. That gave his writing an authority that set off warning bells in an editor wary of bias. That’s very different from the Clonaid example, where sheer credulousness among members of the media — combined with sensationalism and a slow news period — were the problem. And that’s different still from the problem of false balance in the media coverage of climate change in the U.S., which has been chronic for more than a decade.

Yet in each case, the basic journalistic remedy would probably be the same. As a general rule, journalists should treat fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism, and find out what major peer-reviewed papers or assessments have to say about them. Moreover, they should adhere to the principle that the more outlandish or dramatic the claim, the more skepticism it warrants. The Los Angeles Times’s Carroll observes that “every good journalist has a bit of a contrarian in his soul,” but it is precisely this impulse that can lead reporters astray. The fact is, nonscientist journalists can all too easily fall for scientific-sounding claims that they can’t adequately evaluate on their own.

That doesn’t mean that scientific consensus is right in every instance. There are famous examples, in fact, of when it was proved wrong: Galileo comes to mind, as does a lowly patent clerk named Einstein. In the vast majority of modern cases, however, scientific consensus can be expected to hold up under scrutiny precisely because it was reached through a lengthy and rigorous process of professional skepticism and criticism. At the very least, journalists covering science-based policy debates should familiarize themselves with this professional proving ground, learn what it says about the relative merits of competing claims, and “balance” their reports accordingly.

Someone out there might be interested in this:
students interested in applying for this scholarship for
3rd year students to study in Canada, a scholarship that includes free
tuition, accommodation, air fare and a stipend, please direct them as
follows:

The Canadian Embassy in Japan is pleased to announce that Queen's
University (located in Kingston, Ontario, CANADA) is accepting
applications for the 2005-2006 Prince Takamado Visiting Student
Scholarship. The Scholarship, created in Honour of His Imperial Highness
Prince Takamado, is open to a second or third year undergraduate student in
any discipline, who is presently enrolled at a Japanese university. The
Scholarship is comprehensive covering tuition, room and board and round
trip economy airfare from Japan.

[...] Interested students should apply directly to Queen s University by
March 15, 2005. [...]

All inquiries about the Scholarship can be made to Queen's University at:
mailto:awards@post.queensu.ca

The application form is available here:
http://www.queensu.ca/registrar/awards/Japan.html

Obviously China is the place to watch for news as this one that follows shows:

CHINATECH ON THE RISE
Journalist Evan Ramstad notes that China's 250 million users (about
one-fifth of the country's total population) far surpass those of any other
country and that China's technological rise is happening faster than it did
elsewhere in Asia: "China passed the U.S. in unit consumption of TV sets two
years ago as household penetration of TVs passed 90%, closing in on the near
ubiquity of TVs in developed countries. If population trends hold, China is
unlikely to be challenged as the world's largest market for TVs until the
middle of the century, when India is expected to become the most populous
country. And when final figures emerge shortly, we're likely to learn that
China passed the U.S. this year as the world's top PC maker, another change
unlikely to be challenged for years to come." (Wall Street Journal 20 Dec
2004)

A new media slant from Apple:



The Incredible Edible iPod

By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, December 20, 2004; 10:11 AM

2004 is turning out to be the year of the iPod. Last week retailers reported that they're running short on the popular digital music players. This week brings news of novel ways that people are putting their iPods to work.

No. 1: Homemade broadcasts. The Boston Globe today wrote about "podcasting," a digital twist on the ham radio world: "Richie Carey has heard the future of radio. It's on an iPod music player. Carey, a 38-year-old website developer and marketing consultant from Sandwich, is among an early wave of fans for a new broadcast medium dubbed 'podcasting' -- audio content that listeners download from websites to iPods or similar digital music player devices. ... Carey is not just a daily consumer of podcasted talk shows about technology and politics but a fledgling podcaster himself. He has a regular audience of about 50 people who download his 'definitely not polished' spoken musings about life, personal electronics, and even the importance of getting your brakes checked -- a 'podcast' he made and instantly posted from his cellphone while sitting outside the Sears repair shop one day recently. 'This is technology that gives me a voice I never had a month ago,' Carey said. 'It's amazing how someone can now make a cellphone call that can be heard all around the world.' If Internet-based weblogs turned everyone into a potential newspaper columnist, and digital cameras let them become photojournalists, podcasting is promising to let everyone with a microphone and a computer become a radio commentator."
• The Boston Globe: Computer, Microphone, IPod Make Broadcasting Personal

Thought you might be interested:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELT News/eigoTown Xmas Party -- Wednesday, December 22nd in Yurakucho
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The ELT News/eigoTown International Xmas Party will be held in Yurakucho at
the prestigious Foreign Correspondents Club (20th Floor with stunning views
of Tokyo) this Wednesday, December 22nd. (Thursday is a national holiday.)

The party runs from 6:30 to 9:00 and includes food and drink for 4,000 yen.
Don't miss out! Reserve your place now:

http://www.eltnews.com/party/index.shtml#register

We already have over 300 people pre-registered -- this is going to be the
best party yet!

The FCC is at the top of the Yurakucho Denki Building which is just across
the street from Yurakucho JR station and directly above Hibiya subway
station.

More information in English (and a map) here:
http://www.eltnews.com/party/

More information in Japanese (and a map) here
http://www.eigotown.com/party/party.shtml

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELT News/eigoTown Xmas Party -- Wednesday, December 22nd in Yurakucho

Frank Dies! I have watch many wonderful magazines launch and sink. This is another good one down the drain.

TORONTO - Frank, the satirical magazine that delighted in afflicting the comfortable, has ceased publication.

Famous for its gleeful mix of gossip and lowbrow humour, the magazine printed its final edition last week.




Frank's demise confirms the rumours, which had been circulating for months, that new publisher Fabrice Taylor was having difficulty turning the magazine around.

When Taylor – a former Globe and Mail columnist – took over from founding editor Michael Bate last year, circulation was 8,500, down from a high of roughly 16,000 during the 1980s.

Taylor had promised to relaunch Frank with a new focus on Bay Street gossip

Never embraced by the mainstream, the biweekly publication prided itself on reporting stories no other news organization would touch.

One of the main audiences for Frank was journalists, who eagerly devoured the Remedial Media section in the hopes of finding out what was really going on in the nation's newsrooms.

To be "Franked" came in some circles to mean that one had been the subject of an unflattering story in the magazine's newsprint pages.

CTV correspondent Mike Duffy was among the people who sued Frank for libel.

In an e-mail interview with the Canadian Press, Bate said that because of his business agreement with Taylor, the Frank trademark now reverts back to him.

"I believe there's still value in the name and I'm going to spend the next couple of months trying to figure out where the future lies," he said.

Bate also hinted that Frank may come back as a web-only publication, saying that "these are good times to be in the satire business."

The magazine was the subject of a 2001 documentary, The Frank Truth.

The much tamer Atlantic Canada Frank, Frank's former sister publication, is not affected by the demise of the national edition and will continue to publish as normal.

Written by CBC News Online staff

What is the difference between Journalism and History? Conventionally it was distance from the event. A time to consider more carefully and perhaps collect a more deverse set of sources so as to fit the event properly into its place. Take a look at this great article from the Columbia Review of Journalism:

Issue 5: September/October





IDEAS AND REVIEWS
ESSAY
Whose Turf is the Past?

BY ANDIE TUCHER

Journalists have been making history. In big, fat volumes.

It’s getting harder and harder these days to tell the difference between books of history and books of journalism. Dozens of current or former journalists — like David Halberstam, Anne Applebaum, David Maraniss, Melissa Fay Greene, Richard Kluger, Stanley Karnow, and Robert Caro — have been writing meaty books about events they may not have witnessed, set in times that are well past, and often involving people no longer available for interview. Neither first nor rough nor drafts, these books have the heft of history.

Historians, meanwhile, no longer waiting until the passions have cooled, are incorporating interviews and on-the-spot research into their writing about current or recent events, and more of them are aiming for audiences beyond academia. Oral historians may be best known for collecting the reminiscences of elderly Holocaust survivors and retired cabinet secretaries, but interviewers from Columbia’s Oral History Research Office were out on the streets just days after the reporters were to ask people about their experiences on September 11, 2001.

The boundaries between historians and journalists are crashing. Does it really matter that much? In some ways, perhaps not. “Both are basically telling a story,” said Barbie Zelizer, a former reporter who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “And anybody who can should be tackling events that are unsolved or traumatic; it’s not reserved territory. It’s only the historians and journalists who are traumatized if there’s no demarcation.”

That demarcation, like so many others, began its long goodbye during the intellectual and social tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. Rejecting as elitist and deficient the traditional emphasis on politics, diplomacy, and the acts of great men, historians focused instead on ordinary and even marginalized people — women, children, peasants, slaves — who have rarely left much of a paper trail in the libraries and archives. Their lives required different research methods to reach and different techniques to narrate.

Weird things began happening to academic conventions of style, method, objectivity, even the historian’s relationship to fact. In a striking reversal, Natalie Zemon Davis’s book followed the movie version. After serving as a consultant on the popular 1982 film The Return of Martin Guerre, a mysterious true-life tale about an abandoned wife and a dramatic imposture in sixteenth-century France, the Princeton professor went back to the archives to reexamine the events with a more analytical eye. She wrote a book with the same title, ruefully acknowledging that sometimes even the most scrupulous historian can’t be any more certain about events and motives than a movie. In his 1991 book Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations), Simon Schama, then at Harvard, tackled the problem of historical uncertainty with more glee than rue, tickling some colleagues and appalling others with his freewheeling reimaginings — complete with interior monologues and multiple points of view — of a heroic battlefield death in the eighteenth century and a sordid campus murder in the nineteenth.

In the news business, insurgent New Journalists, dismissing traditional reporting as boring, stagnant, and inadequate, were shattering just about every convention there was: the “5 Ws” style, the 750-word article, objectivity, permissible subjects, the use of the exclamation mark, and the old-fashioned dictum that reporters should never be part of the story. The result was long articles about baton twirling and whole books about oranges, and reporters who had been covering the era’s biggest stories, especially the civil rights movement and Vietnam, took those long stories to more permanent homes between hard covers.

A generation’s worth of changes in the way historians and journalists do their jobs has brought them so close together that the differences between their books sometimes seem notional, even anecdotal, to be summed up in a few generalizations — some of them, clearly, gross. Historians tend to have more endnotes, journalists more acknowledgements. Historians are the hedgehogs who know one big thing, journalists the foxes who know many things. Historians locate themselves within and draw upon (or argue with) a community of scholarship; journalists parachute in and take everyone out to lunch. Historians are freer from the pressures of the marketplace; journalists are freer to make the bestseller list. The darkest temptation of the historian is plagiarism; of the journalist, fabrication. The historians are the ones most skittish about using the first-person singular. The journalists are the ones most sunburned on the nose.

But both journalists and historians do see one consequential difference — and both see it as a strength. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, is working on a book that won’t include a single interview with any witness or participant in the events he describes. It’s about a battle over voting rights in the Reconstruction South that foreordained the election crisis of 1876, and everybody involved is dead. But besides historical significance, it has what most journalists are trained to look for and, says Lemann, what professional historians are less adept at handling: a “hell of a story.”

“Historians try to pose a really interesting problem or contribute to the debate in a field,” says Lemann. “But it’s striking how little professional historians know about how to tell a popular story. They think ‘popular’ means ‘picking a good topic.’ They don’t see that storytelling is a learned skill; they don’t see that’s what the nonprofessionals are doing.”

That’s also why, Lemann continues, it’s the journalists — the Robert Caros and David McCulloughs — not the academic historians these days who are doing most of the “big-canvas books about big guys doing big things,” those sweeping accounts of war or the lives of presidents. Those are news stories.

Diane McWhorter, who spent nearly twenty years researching and writing her Pulitzer prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, did get to interview people, including her own father, whose lives intersected with the lethal 1963 church bombing that lies at the heart of her book. But as a journalist venturing into history, she was, she says, “doubly obsessive; I had to be thorough, to dot all the i’s.”

And that wasn’t all. “I came to a point where I thought I understood it all,” she says, “but as a journalist bent on telling a story I also felt like I had twice the work. I had to understand the issues, but I also had to figure out how it all fit into some character’s story. I was used to having to figure out what the conflict was.”

Yet historians say they’re not immune to the appeal of a good yarn; they just use it differently. The Princeton professor Robert Darnton has noted a surge of academic interest in what he calls “incident analysis,” in which the historian starts with the sort of dramatic event any journalist would grab in a minute — a crime, a disaster, a dramatic imposture, or, as Darnton himself once did, the “great cat massacre” by roistering apprentices in eighteenth-century Paris — and “uses the narrative material to argue a case, one where an interpretive problem is at stake,” he said in an e-mail. The emphasis is on developing the thesis and sustaining the argument with adequate documentation. Indeed “narrative skill takes second place, if it figures at all.”

But the journalist’s professional conditioning to look for the good story, says Darnton, raises its own questions. Journalistic storytelling has a “stylized quality, which can be a disadvantage as well as an advantage. By that I mean a tendency to look for a lead instead of an argument, to hype things, overuse colorful quotes, and exaggerate the importance of personal quirks.”

People have always used stories — carefully told or not — to make sense of the world, to explain its big mysteries (“Why are there bad guys?”) and its small ones (“Why did he kill her?”). And it’s first and foremost through journalism, especially the busy organism of daily mass journalism, that a society builds the stories it needs most urgently. Journalists and the public together construct stories to order the chaotic buzz of breaking events into a satisfying narrative that reconfirms what’s both important and familiar in the world.

Because of its urgency, daily journalism is more prone to oversimplifying those narratives. Mary Marshall Clark, who as director of Columbia’s Oral History Office organized the 9/11 interview project, saw that temptation in full bloom in much of the journalistic coverage of that day. While the goal of oral-history interviewers is to gather and interpret people’s testimony about their experiences — “to witness the process of witnessing,” says Clark — and allow the account to unfold in its own way, many journalists were doing exactly the opposite, fitting the tragic events of the day into “a highly nationalistic frame that emphasized the heroism of the dead.”

The oral historians, on the other hand, says Clark, “picked up aspects of the whole experience — the immigrants afraid their ‘alien’ looks might bring violence down on them, or the firefighters who were uncomfortable being portrayed as heroes because they knew they’d made mistakes.” People like them were much less likely to make it into the mainstream media coverage at the time because they didn’t advance the narrative that both the public and the press seemed to prefer.

But there’s another problem, less deep perhaps but no less frustrating, with many of the events we call stories that make up the daily budget of the news media. Often they’re not really stories at all, simply piquant episodes, dramatic or telling or cautionary slices of life served up in dizzying succession, and when their “newsworthiness” fades they’re gone from the front page and the public eye. Gary Condit may once have been our constant companion at the breakfast table, but nowadays he never calls and he never writes. Or what seems to be a story proceeding steadily to its appointed end may suddenly veer into a completely new and unexpected direction — remember that “Mission Accomplished” banner? And without a visible ending it’s not “a hell of a story” yet, or even a story — it’s a Power Point presentation.

Which suggests that the distinction most worth exploring between history and daily journalism is neither professional nor temporal but teleological. History can have endings, and most journalism does not. Even though we know in our hearts that history is never really finished, that each new generation reinterprets the past in ways that make sense for its own particular present, narratives of the past can offer what daily journalism almost always cannot: the illusion, at least, of completion. Even though there’s no odometer that clicks over from “now” to “then,” the lengthening distance between event and interpreter can bring a certain clarity of vision, as can new evidence, a shifted perspective, or someday, perhaps, even a cooler look at that dusty old archive of oral histories about 9/11. Even though the arc of any historical narrative is arbitrary — stopping with V-J Day makes a vastly different story than stopping with the Berlin airlift — writers of history have a luxury denied the daily journalist: the hindsight to choose an endpoint rather than just waiting for it to come along.

And that promise of tidy resolution may be why, as important as journalism is to the continuing conversation of society, we all ask so much of History, with a capital H. You have only to run a Lexis/Nexis search for “history” within five words of “judge” to see how widespread and irresistible is the idea that there exists some final reckoning, some great arbiter that will coolly render the verdict of the ages, Olympian and infallible, and, no doubt, enshrined within a nice strong binding with gilt lettering on the spine. Even if we don’t like any of the history we’ve got now, we never seem to lose hope in the history of the future.

During the three and a half hours of interviews Bob Woodward conducted with George W. Bush for Plan of Attack, his almost instant book on the invasion of Iraq, the journalist asked the president how history would judge his war. “Bush smiled,” Woodward writes. “‘History,’ he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. ‘We won’t know. We’ll all be dead.’”

He shouldn’t count on it. We all want to be around for that history.

Also look at these three:
ATTACK OF THE APPALLED EMBEDS
http://poynter.org/forum/?id=32365
In Kuwait, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked why soldiers "had to
dig through landfills to find scrap metal to up-armor vehicles." The
soldier who asked the question discussed it beforehand with an
embedded reporter. In an email to colleagues at the Chattanooga
Times Free Press, reporter Lee Pitts explained, "I was told
yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions so I brought two of
them along with me. ... Before hand we worked on questions to ask
Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor." Pitts wrote, "This is
what this job is all about - people need to know. The soldier who
asked the question said he felt good." The paper signaled its
support, writing that the soldier "chose to ask the question," while
Pitts "used the tools available to him."
SOURCE: Poynter Online Forum, December 10, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3108
===========================How ARE THESE TWO CONNECTED?
QORVIS GOT SERVED, WITH SUBPOENAS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49849-2004Dec8.html
The FBI searched three offices of the PR firm Qorvis Communications
and delivered subpoenas to a fourth office. Officials confirmed the
raids but refused further comment, saying there was an "ongoing
investigation." Saudi Arabia is a major Qorvis client; the firm
called the investigation a "compliance inquiry" under the Foreign
Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department found that "the
Saudi Arabian Embassy paid Qorvis $14.6 million for a six-month
period," for such services as distributing material highlighting
Saudi Arabia's "commitment in the war against terrorism and to peace
in the Middle East." Qorvis also did media outreach, lobbied
congressional staff members and Bush administration officials.
SOURCE: Washington Post, December 9, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3103
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LOBBY, LOBBY, LOBBY, GET YOUR INFLUENCE HERE
http://thehill.com/news/120804/lobby.aspx
What were the largest lobbying contracts on Washington DC's power
corridor, K Street, in 2004? According to The Hill, top honors go to
the Asbestos Study Group, who paid $5.5 million for six months of
"lobbying and substantive expertise." The Asbestos Study Group is "a
group of large companies that have been defendants in asbestos
lawsuits," including Halliburton and Viacom. The "Patient Safety/
Pharmaceutical Systems Group," which includes Pfizer, Wyeth, Johnson
& Johnson and other drug companies, paid $1.4 million for lobbying
on "general patient safety and related pharmaceutical issues." Other
major lobbiers include the Business Roundtable, Microsoft, United
Airlines and Hewlett Packard.
SOURCE: The Hill, December 8, 2004
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3100