Iran election story demands attention even on vacation

Rosemary Church, CNN anchor, with Rosemary Armao, CNN viewer

I was one of many viewers this weekend watching the surprising and unfolding story of violence over possible voter fraud in Iran. Aside from the story itself involving bravery, death, defiance and politics the way the story was getting out is important to journalism. The country kicked out most professional journalists it had let in for the elections once trouble began but people were telling the news through Twitter and You-Tube. People around the world are turning over their computers to serve as proxies for Iranians thwarting their own government. Not the first time these tools have been used -- but this is the biggest story to death. My friend Barbara says, "I feel like journalism changed overnight." She's not the only one.

Found in translation

The possibility of the tip he got turning into an actual story, one of our reporters wrote me today, was a long fatch.

   I love that. A long fatch. As in, a far-fetched long-shot.

   A lot of times people who learn English after they already know their own language, use it more colorfully than us.

 Here's a lead our new editor John found challenging: 

On August 5, 2007 Bulgarian world figure skating champion Maxim Staviski drove his jeep hammer after drinking a lot of alcohol.

 

Minutes later he caused a severe accident on the road Burgas-Primorsko. The hammer left behind incorrectly a car, hitting another car frontally.  

So true! Journalist readers, please see this.

A Shield Law for The World

By Miklós Haraszti
Wednesday, June 4, 2008; A19 Washington Post

VIENNA -- The United States owes a federal shield law not only to American journalists but to journalists around the world. Passage of such a law is urgently needed. By finally allowing the media to protect the anonymity of confidential sources, Congress would do more than close a fissure in U.S. press freedoms: It would also help curtail the destructive behavior that current U.S. prosecutorial habits are inspiring globally.
Under the past several attorneys general, the unimaginable has happened in the United States despite the protections of the First Amendment: American journalists have been jailed for sticking to the basic ethics of their profession. In high- and low-profile cases, prosecutors have coerced journalists into breaking promises of confidentiality they had given to their sources -- or have gotten them jailed for being in "contempt of court."
This backpedaling in press freedom has allowed foreign governments to claim a double standard in the U.S. approach -- and then engage in such behavior themselves. They noticed how prosecutors exploit the lack of a federal-level shield law in a nation where all states but one have already granted confidentiality protection to journalists through laws or court decisions. And they spotted the gap between the way press freedom is treated at home, by the Justice Department, and promoted abroad, by the State Department.
More is at stake than a shield for the United States from finger-pointing by unfriendly governments. Some of the finger-pointers don't hesitate to justify their own repressive actions against journalists by citing the U.S. prosecutorial practice.
Worse, these federal practices have encouraged the globalization of a new leak-plugging franchise: the pressing of journalists for whistle-blowers' names.
A survey I conducted last year of journalists' investigative rights in the 56 nations of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented dozens of cases in recent years in which prosecutors on the hunt for unauthorized disclosures decided to squeeze journalists as their first move.
It was in Western Europe that we registered the most attempts at abusing official subpoena powers to use journalists as tools. In Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, we found temporary detentions of journalists, raids on editorial premises, and seizures of documents and computer hard-drives of members of the media.
But courts in Western Europe, unlike in the United States, regularly rebuffed overzealous prosecutors. In the vast area covered by OSCE, from Vancouver, Canada, to Vladivostok, Russia, it was only in the United States that journalists were punished and even jailed for not revealing sources.
Belgium passed a comprehensive source protection law in 2005; Germany's Federal Constitutional Court settled the issue in 2007; and France's Senate is expected to cast a final vote soon on renewed confidentiality guarantees for reporters; France's National Assembly passed such measures last month.
In the Central European democracies that emerged after 1989, the pattern of dealing with leaks at the expense of the media has taken a different route. For more than a decade, prosecutors in Hungary, Lithuania, Macedonia and Romania respected press freedoms, but in recent years they have started to indict reporters by invoking communist-era provisions about breaching official secrets. Those laws allow prosecutors to chase journalists to nail down leaks without even trying to identify the officials who failed to safeguard secrets.
Interestingly, there is almost no prosecution of journalists on allegations of violating official secrets in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, where prosecutors otherwise don't shrink from criminalizing journalism as "extremist," "insulting" or "defamatory." It is possible that investigative journalists in those countries are too intimidated to produce stories that must be reckoned with.
The U.S. Justice Department, of course, cannot be blamed for the imprisonment of foreign journalists by their governments. But American behavior is a model. The fact that U.S. reporters are incarcerated, and that the interests of national security are cited by the administration as its reason to resist a federal shield law, give undeserved moral cover to the criminalization of journalism worldwide.
The proposed U.S. federal shield law is officially called the Free Flow of Information Act, in reference to the renowned commitments of the Helsinki Accords more than 30 years ago -- human rights promises that still invigorate today's OSCE. Passing the Free Flow of Information Act would send a clear message that prosecuting journalists is not in vogue anymore and would signal solidarity with nations that crave more press freedom.
The writer is the representative on freedom of the media at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Newspaper readership

Journalists here say that 80 percent of people get news from TV and only 30 percent from newspapers, less than 10 percent from Internet. In one of the central city's parks, a row of racks holds spread out pages of all the local papers for a free and easy read.

CIN pride

Danger on your Plate -- the series we did last summer on bacteria-laced food and lack of inspections -- has won the top award from The Online News Association based at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC. This follows on the heels of CIN winning the Global Shining Light award for investigative reporting on energy traders. Local media have given this big play coming in for interviews and being very flattering. So the staff is a little giddy with pride.

The reception area of the office is resplendent with the plaque and now the fancy statue from the ONA. Editor Svjetlana Celic, International Advisor Drew Sullivan, me and reporter Renata Radic struck various poses of triumph with the statue the other day.

I have always thought that prizes were not the point of investigative reporting and still think that. But they are fun.


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The art of asking

It's a cliche in American journalism that there's no such thing as a stupid question.

My Algerian colleagues do not seem to agree.

The other day I responded Of course! when a reporter asked for help coming up with questions for an upcoming interview with Sami Yucef, a Muslim from UK in Algiers for a concert.

Ask him if he’s fasting, I said immediately.

Oh no, I can’t, the reporter responded. He is a straight Muslim. It would be an insult to ask that.
Ask him why tickets to his concert are so expensive when he says he sings for common people, I tried.

No, he doesn't have anything to do with setting prices, she told me.

Normally, coming up with interview questions is like a brainstorming session where you throw out lots of ideas and suggestions trying to generate queries that will provoke original thought and pithy quotes. But journalists, here, I've found treat interview something like quizzes in which they are graded for the quality of their questions. Their interview queries are crafted and stiff and usually way too long, like mini lectures. They are guarded. Reporters present their question and record an answer and followups-- even something like "What do you mean by that?" are rare. The idea of asking a question to which you already know the answer to hear what your subject might just say in his own words is very foreign. So is the idea that a reporter can ask anything, not rudely, not insistently, but still, nothing is out of bounds. Here every question is weighed for propriety and possible offense.

As it turned out, some 60 reporters came to interview Sami. 60! Each was limited to three questions each. My colleague asked her three favorite questions and no follow ups and is writing a story based on that. Rules here allow you to write stories based on questions other reporters pose to which you hear the answers, but she regards that as unethical.

A herd of journalists -- a gaggle?

All of a sudden I'm hearing the expression "a scrum of reporters." As in, the suspect faced a scrum of reporters outside the courthouse.

I thought it might be a Brit expression or something European, but no. Check it out in Google. Lots of references.

What is a scrum? How did we get corralled into a scrum rather than a flock or a pod?

Which is worse?

I am sending this Opus cartoon to Muslim friends in Bosnia and Algeria asking if it offends them. A number of American newspapers including the Washington Post are refusing to run Lola Granola's transformation into Radical Islamist Farima Struggle complete with Hawaiian shirt pattern veil and medieval ideas about sex relations. They worry that the cartoon might offend Muslims and women.
Nice that American editors worry about such things.
In Algeria every day editorial cartoons run that make you gasp they are so sexist, or racy, or racist and anti-Semitic. Israelis are always shown with side curls and dollar signs and women are busty and dumb.
But really, it's hard to pick which is worse -- that kind of unedited insensitivity or mindless blandness that keeps anything close to controversy out of cartoons.

You judge: http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/8650/opus82607su2.jpg

Extreme views

One of the Algiers tabloids ran a picture of a bloody fetus as it Page 1 photo today. This was a new low even among the shredded babies and eviscerated teens the papers have run recently.

Islam is more pro-procreation than Catholicism. Abortion is a sin --and in this Muslim state also a crime for those who perform the operation. Muslims like Catholics also are supposed to abstain from birth control -- except through abstinence.

Extreme and passionate views on abortion is something Algeria and America have in common.
Cruising the Internet casually I came across the following pro and con views of the issue.

Caution: they are raw.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=825697737


http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=15234893

Now this is a dog story!

The Society editor brought me her section to look over today 8/8 and I was not happy to see that the leading piece of art on the main story was a cute puppy on a patterned floor. Society is about people not animals, I began my usual rant against dog stories. How is this puppy NEWS?

It's a good story, the editor insisted. It seems that cancer patients around the city of Bejara are wild to get puppies. For guide dogs when they are weakened or bed-ridden? I asked. No, for food.

What?

You eat puppy meat over the course of a week and you will get better, she said. They talked to a doctor who agreed that weird as it seemed, yes, he'd seen the proof.

Oh, get out, I said. No, "We are becoming Chinese," she said.

And so if you have cancer you cut up a puppy like this and eat it? That is really happening? I asked.

Well, she admitted, cancer-prescription puppies have to be newborns, hairless, closed-eyed little babies who have not yet sampled their mother's microbe-laced milk. The dog in the picture was a fluffy pet beyond its cancer-curing days.

I worry that this article will be the Algerian dog-world equivalent of Herod's decree against little boys.

Gotcha

The journalist sometimes tease me about being Arab. They do this when I get passionate or angry about what they are doing. It's so frustrating.

We've been trying to emphasize the the front page picture must ALWAYS be a fresh, locally shot picture, not something taken, as photos in Algerian newspapers too often are, from the Internet or the archives. So the other day I was hanging out by the photo editor asking, "What does it look like we'll have for today?" We have been pushing them to offer the managing editor a choice of several photos of the best stories of the day, but they are stuck on the idea that the photo, good or bad or even non-existent," must go with whatever the top national story of the day is. This was one of those days, so I was beginning to take off on how this was not good enough.. blah blah. And the editor next to the photo editor goes, "You know we do have a picture for tomorrow. Do you know what it is?"

"What?" I asked.

"It's an American expert..." and I let him get no further before I began moaning, "Oh no, please don't tell me you are planning THAT for the front page, a foreign expert????"

"Yes," he goes,"she is here trying to push freedom of the press..." and again I interrupted with, "That is sooooo boring. We can't keep putting officials on this page. Why would Algerians care about that?"

"And" he goes, "her name is Rose..." I broke in again and then stopped.

"Oh," I said. " I think you got me."

We all had a good laugh and it broke up the tension. But the picture they put on the front page was still lousy.

Men and boys

Algiers streets at night are something between a fraternity row at an all-boys school and a crime scene. Girls and women stay home at night leaving the streets testosterone-soaked, loud, vaguely threatening. Boys in groups and rows lean against buildings, sit on curbs. They punch each other in good humor, smoke, laugh, talk into cell phones, spit, just hang out.


Gender-separation is simply not healthy I'm beginning to think.


The male reporters at our newspaper are inordinately obsessed with stories about prostitutes and pornography.

In the past few weeks there have been stories about country girls who enter the university only to succomb to rich men willing to pay for their young charms and about teen-agers crowding the city's internet cafes to watch porn sites underwritten by Israelis out to undermind Islam (Ok, I managed to get them to take out the part about the Israelis because they couldn't show me any proof that a. the sites are owned by Israelis or b. any proof that the pornographers' motive, regardless of nationality, was blasphemy rather than greed).


One of our reporters -- and this was part of the story he wrote -- went to prayer to gird himself, then visited a street in the city where residents have complained to police about a brothel. He was approached by a woman with dyed blonde hair in pants and a tank top who gave him directions to this brothel. A picture of that encounter ran in the newspaper along with the lurid story. The photographer had gotten other shots but they were so racy the photo editor, who is a woman, had to send them by email to the managing editor to look at. She could not handle them herself.


The woman in the picture came to the newspaper the day after the article, in a veil and accompanied by her veiled grandmother and neighbors. She wasn't a prostitute, she said. She was married and employed in a government office. She'd thought the photographer and reporter were just more men bothering her house instead of the brothel next door and so had come out, inappropriately dressed notwithstanding, and done nothing more than send them to the right place. Crying, cursing, screaming she demanded an apology from the newspaper for an article that had caused her big problems with her mother-in-law and husband.


Was she lying or not? Hard to say. But what wasn't hard to say is that the reporter/photographer assumed the woman was a prostitute on little more evidence than the fact that she wore a sleeveless shirt and had talked to male strangers.

The reporter told them he would run a statement saying they were unrelated to the activity described in his article. Only, amazingly, he didn't.

The women came back a second day.




I've said before it's hard not to scream at the disregard for women in our workplace. When they do a good job it is pnly what is expected and so goes unremarked upon. There is little thought to giving them more authority or supervisory concern.



I thought this was neglect until I remembered all those boys on the streets at night

Interviewing the minister of transportation

We did an impromptu demonstration of western-style journalism interviewing for our reporters recently. It seems that our way of talking is more direct, far less deferential. And it elicits more information from government officials.


Our local consultant posed as the Minister of Transportation and one by one we had reporters take a crack at quizzing him about the delayed road construction that has snarled traffic in Algiers. Our consultant is a graduate of Ena, a highly prestigious college for administrators set up here by the French colonizers. This is where, he told us, he learned the phrases and mannerisms of a proper minister. His performance was applause-worthy and made us all laugh.


Rocking back in his chair, his legs crossed, his hands steepled in front of his unsmiling face, he listened impassively to questions designed to get from him any information about embarrassing construction delays. He listened to these questions impassively, then paused and told the reporters in proper minister-speak:

"Thank you for coming to my office. I am one of the readers of your newspaper and I respect the work of the journalist. What is your name? " or, my favorite:
"It is my pleasure to deal with a journalist from your newspaper and a one who is also a woman."

He shut down reporters with deadly passivity, flattery and stultifying rationalizations of the sort real ministers feed to them to avoid answering hard questions:

"Thank you for this very good question."

"I thank you for giving our ministry an opportunity to talk about these important topics and to tackle issues that are of importance to our citizens. This project has a long history that begins in the 1980s."

Groan, yes, let's go back 25 years and not talk about the problems right now.

"There is no country in the world that could solve this problem..."

"...working with foreign partners, you know, we must coordinate..."

"I feel comfortable to personally meet you and the answer to your question is very easy. Studies predicted it would take five years when this project began, but then buildings has to be removed and the earthquake, you remember several years ago...we are doing our best to..."

After the Algerians Del took a crack at breaking the minister and it was funny how quickly the minister was shifting forward in his seat, paying attention and stuttering out some information. The reporter controlled the flow of the interview. The reporters then analyzed the differences. Del cut through the verbiage, interrupted, informed the minister of a looming deadline, hurried him, pressed.

The next day a young culture reporter told us she had tried an interview with "your system." She had to talk to an Algerian singer who has fallen into political disfavor and been barred from participating in a festival. He apparently didn't want to compound his troubles by going to the press so he refused to talk to her, saying reporters had caused him problems " It was hard," our pleased reporter said, but she said she just kept talking. " I said I just have some few questions. I have to be objective in writing my story. Why were you replaced? And he got stressed. He started to get angry, but it worked."

She told us she got all the details she wanted from him.

No excuse not to have a notebook with you

We have been exhorting reporters to ALWAYS carry a notebook and pen. You cannot be a journalist we tell them if you are not writing. It seems pretty basic.

Our fabulous local consultant is the biggest proponent of this push. He himself is never without a tiny notebook he carries in a shirt pocket. It's filled with notes of importance in his perfect tiny writing. Del sent him into ecstasies when he brought him back a bunch of little notebooks from a trip to London. He gave one of these precious notebooks to a top editor when that editor came to a meeting -- unforgivably -- without paper and writing instrument.

Still, when we began a recent meeting reporters came straggling into the conference room without notebooks, a signal they don't foresee anything interesting or important happening.

This time, instead of nagging, our consultant stood up in front of them, folded a single sheet of paper lengthwise, ripped it in thirds, and piles up the sections. With a clip on top, he had an instant baby-notebook. There is no excuse to be without a notebook, he told them again.

We laughed that next he was going to turn a page of newspaper into a printer's hat for them.