Debating the New Media

The Future of Journalism

Earlier this week, Senator Kerry presided over a Congressional hearing on the state of the media. With the newspapers laying off entire swathes of reporters, shutting down bureaus, and revealing major losses in their books, blame has primarily fallen on the “new media.” This term refers to the 21st century nexus of YouTube, Twitter, the blogosphere, and news aggregators that have placed a hitherto unattainable volume of information at our disposal, displacing newspapers from their niche.

Testifying at the hearing was David Simon, a former journalist from the Baltimore Sun and creator of the all-time best television show (not hyperbole), The Wire. For five seasons, Simon’s brainchild was unprecedented in its dedication to expose an America that had been forgotten by most mainstream media outlets: the drug-infested high rises, the decrepit education systems, the corrupt political institutions, and the withered labor unions. In The Wire’s final season, Simon directed his rage at the decline of quality journalism and the fall of the American newspaper.

Here is Simon’s testimony to Congress last week:



These are some valuable excerpts:

From those speaking on behalf of new media, weblogs and that which goes “twitter,” you will be treated to assurances that American journalism has a perfectly fine future online and that a great democratization is taking place. Well, a plague on both their houses.

High-end journalism is dying in America. And unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet is a marvelous tool, and clearly it is the information delivery system of our future. But thus far, it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host…

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Simon has a good point here. Society seems to have taken journalists for granted as people who merely observe, question, and write. This suffices as a quick job description, but there is a lot of craft that goes into it. You have to really know the institutions you cover, the various interests at stake, who has an incentive to tell you the truth and who does not. You have to sniff out the whistleblowers, those bureaucratic officials who have observed wrongdoing and are willing to expose it. This requires dedication and persistence, “a daily full-time commitment” as Simon says.

But while this approach has been jettisoned by many bloggers, Simon understates the plethora of go-it-alone independent reporters who do journalism well through the medium of blogs. As a matter of fact, the finest journalist I know at the UN is a blogger who doggedly pursues every contradiction of UN policy and conduct, confronting and challenging officials to the point of annoyance. In other words, quality journalism.

Ryan Tate of Gawker takes objection to Simon’s dismissal of the ‘new media’:

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived…

Collectively, these bloggers are doing just what Simon suggests: attending meetings, developing sources and holding government accountable every day…

And the best of the crop are doing so individually, on their own and, somehow, basically for free. Simon should spend as much time as he can on A Better Oakland… a thoroughly reported blog on the nitty-gritty of Oakland politics, complete with key video moments from government meetings, illuminating crime analysis, skillful fact-checking of political puffery, transit coverage, development coverage, thorough meeting recaps, spicy guest posts, and, yes, the occasional media criticism…

This is an important debate that we need to have. While mainstream American newspapers may fall by the wayside, the need to hold our leaders accountable will not. Will bloggers be up to the challenge?

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Simon, an intriguing individual with significant insight on the problems facing urban America. Check out the videos and transcript here.

I'd kill myself if I didn't use this as an opportunity to plug my favorite show of all time. Enjoy these legendary scenes:

Answering Captain Phillips

Piracy is a Response to Maritime Rape

Testifying before the Senate Commerce subcommittee yesterday, Captain Richard Phillips urged America’s leaders to find the root causes behind the piracy in Somali waters that led to his five-day ordeal last month. If the esteemed Senators don’t’ already know the answers, and are actually interested in finding out (both of which I highly doubt), then they’d be wise to forego the mainstream media as their source of information. The majority of Western media outlets of course, opted to focus on proper military solutions and Phillips’ heroism, more so than a genuine effort to understand what had led to piracy.

Phillips is going to be sincerely disappointed if he wants real answers to his inquiry, because it would require a modicum of sincerity and introspection from the political establishment, traits most certainly lacking. Here is the answer you’ve asked for Mr. Phillips: the Somali piracy that has been wreaking havoc on the high seas and was responsible for your capture, is itself a response to piracy…ours!

For years Western governments and corporations have taken advantage of the absence of a Somali government by ravaging the coastlines of fishing resources and dumping harmful toxic waste. Since this coastline belongs to the people of Somalia according to international law, this theft and plundering is by definition piracy. The fact that Somalia has no coast guard or navy to defend its rights does not make this practice legitimate, lest we forego the rule of law and accept rule of the gun.

Few media outlets have cared to bring this issue to light, the notable exceptions being Democracy Now!, The Huffington Post, and Al-Jazeera. African newspapers have done better to service to the issue by acknowledging “the other piracy.” In this article from The New Vision, a Ugandan publication, the author intimates with Somali locals on the matter to get their perspective:

However, fresh information that is increasingly becoming available is that since Siad Barre was overthrown from power and lawlessness settled in, big fishing companies from Japan, China and Western Europe made the Gulf of Aden their playground.

They came with huge trawlers, dug deep and took as much of the livelihood of these poor Somali fishermen and destroyed what they couldn't take with them. And because there was no government in power with a national coast guard, the situation went on for more than a decade when fishermen decided to take the law into their own hands…

Ordinary Somalis do not share the government view that these young men in their 20s are common criminals.

The article poses a sensible question that is nevertheless startlingly naïve:

Isn't it worth investigating by the international community, the MI5, the FBI and other international crime agencies to find the root cause of this menace that has made travel rather unsafe on Africa's East Coast?

No, it isn’t worth it if the answers are going to suggest that Western society’s limitless demand for seafood and need to dump its toxic filth in unprotected waters are indeed Somali piracy’s root causes. It isn’t worth it if an investigation will diminish the capacity to scapegoat a Somali teenager for the scourge of piracy.

In examining ‘The Flipside of the Hijack Coin’, Nigeria’s Daily Trust sees the issue through a more cynical lens. To sum it up:

The collapse of the Somali state since the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, has led to the massive illegal foreign fishing regime of poaching and destruction of Somali marine resources which has not been part of the international concern in the same why that the menace of piracy has been highlighted. Illegal, Unreported Unregulated (IUU) fishing fleets from Europe, Arabia and the Far East, have been active in Somalia waters over the past 18 years damaging economic and environmental life of the Somali people.

Major kudos to the author, Is'haq Modibbo Kawu, for so eloquently describing the phenomenon at work as the world “deals” with piracy:

The situation today is that a combination of biased UN resolutions, big power orders and tendentious news reporting by the major international news outlets have raised the stakes internationally about Somali piracy, but they have failed to mention the need to project Somali mineral resources from IUU violation in the same waters. It is in fact appearing as if the anti-piracy campaigns have as object the effort to cover up and protect illegal fishing activities in Somali waters.

What’s worse, even those fisherman merely trying to obstruct IUU’s, risk being destroyed by navies under the pretense of anti-piracy operations. To his credit, Kawu doesn’t equivocate in assessing this dire situation:

Somalia has therefore become a helpless victim of this massive international process of maritime rape!

That would be an honest answer for Mr. Phillips.

Sex Changes Things: Kenya's Sex Strike

Kenya's Women Declare 'Enough is Enough'

As if to take a page from the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, the women of Kenya have decided to use the gifts God gave them to force political change. In a fascinating exhibition of activism, thousands of Kenyan women are protesting their government’s ongoing instability by denying their men that most coveted of treasures: their bodies. Yes, you read that accurately. Male Kenyans have been forced to go without sex for a week, their women outraged by an electoral crisis that has been going on since last year.

To be sure, this episode has its comic elements:

“This will accomplish nothing other than embarrass us," said Martin Kamau, a resident of Nakuru, a major city northwest of the capital. "We are being punished, and yet we are not the ones causing the problems."

Kamau plans to plead his case with his wife. "Seven days is just too much," he said.

Others were not so worried. "Seven days is nothing," one man (said). "I can wait a year."

More than comedy however, the sex-strike is a courageous and admirable step. Kenya’s women have taken destiny into their own hands, defying the status quo of a deeply conservative society that frowns upon sexually suggestive content:

“We cannot allow our leaders to argue over non-issues while relegating the issues that affect this country to the back burner. When this happens, women suffer the most… "

In addition to targeting politicians, activists say the campaign aims to draw spouses into the conversation and nudge them into demanding change.

Kenyan women must be receiving a healthy dose of Greek literature, reminiscent as this is of Aristophanes’ classic comedy mentioned above, Lysistrata. To summarize, the play features a group of women from rivals Sparta and Athens, conspiring to deny their men sex in an effort to draw The Peloponnesian War to an end. In doing so, they disregard their prior allegiances and defy a male-dominated society. The parallels to the Kenyan movement are fascinating.

Leaving no stone unturned, the leading activists have even offered to conscript prostitutes, offering to pay them for lost earnings. The wives of national leaders have also been asked to join the fight and abstain in the bedroom. Unfortunately, I think we can also expect there to be a rise in domestic violence throughout the strike, as it’s certain to exacerbate tensions for men who have also had to deal with the political strife. These women should be applauded however. They have declared they are fed up with the Kibaki/Odinga government and are willing to brave the social establishment’s wrath to change their lot.

The Economist recently ran an article on Kenya’s political situation, a very helpful guide for understanding the anger that has fomented among its people. Here are a few excerpts:

Among the foreign diplomats looking on, optimists refer to the squabbling coalition as an “unconsummated marriage”. The less charitable say Kenya does not have a functioning executive at all, just an unholy alliance of fierce rivals. A schedule of constitutional, electoral, judicial, security, land and economic reforms was laid out in the original agreement between the two parties. A domestic tribunal to judge those responsible for the post-election mayhem was supposed to be set up and a truth commission established. Yet more than a year later the ODM and PNU have failed to agree on any of these issues.

New corruption scandals, confined to no party, are regularly revealed by Kenya’s papers. With so many senior figures from the main parties co-opted into the government—which has 94 ministers and deputies, each earning over $15,000 a month—Kenya has become almost a one-party state. Ministers constantly squabble over pay, protocol, seniority and even who gets the best rooms at government get-togethers. The churches, NGOs and foreign diplomats are left to play the role of opposition, cajoling and threatening from the sidelines.

Apparently, this is not the first such sex-strike in Africa aimed at curbing a national tragedy. The 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell features the courageous efforts of Liberian women to put an end to that country’s bloody civil war, employing sexual abstinence as their weapon. Check out the trailer below:



The Young Turks also covered the Kenyan sex-strike recently: