Crayons to Chaos

when fake journalism is the norm

My, my my. A month. How embarrassing. During my perfectly delightful lunch with Lindsay B., when she mentioned this blog I thought "Oh my gawd! I haven't updated Crayons at all!"

Racing to the end, with RW1 and everything else, I forgot to do the simplest things - like put up my last Critical Issues paper, which can encapsulate that class well enough. (I'll have a goodbye-to-RW1 post up later tonight-- I think.)

Those who cruise in here  from the SPJ page or one of the J-school blogs should envision what's below as my response to Dick Wald, the elfin TV executive with the hunky son from CNBC, and his string of guest speakers and films. 

For those who can't do that, the references to "Food Lion" in what' below refers to a 1992 ABC exposé of the supermarket chain, which was upended   by a sly, Swift-Boaty PR campaign on the part of the corporation. Their lawsuit and slick video news release cast deep shadows on a 2-year-long, solidly researched piece by ABC's investigative team.

--

One over-arching, never spoken, theme of this class is what most journalists takes as gospel – that journalism is the opposite of public relations. We're supposed to be afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted, puncturing holes in the smooth stories played out by politicians, corporations, churches. And much of this class has been about taking the hallmarks of good PR – super-clear stories with exact endings, data that all point the same way – and suggesting that they don't make good journalism.

But we're in an era where PR masking as journalism has defined our politics, with sometimes tragic results. So I want to suggest a  theme that will probably dominate today's class anyway, after I've turned this in: how do we interact with power, when they've learned how to do what we do?

orange alert turns astoria blue

So after the long post below, I managed to craft something with only 3 interview points, as advertised - and even kept it closer to the assigned 700 words than I'd ever thought I could. It took me all night, of course; I filed at 4:30 a.m., went home and to sleep, woke up at 11 convinced I had screwed it up. But a morning e-mail from Dale, my instructor, calmed that core fear, while sending me into another convilsion:

Aha, another night writer. I took a break tonight and flashed in
here, this is not really an edit, but a few comments. First, KUDOS
on getting details. Nice, nice, nice. But you need to make the lead
more immediate. Again, this is insta-editing on the fly, but I think
I'd lead with that Egyptian, especially in light of London. Take us
right into a scene with that person. Also, work on getting fuller
quotes. But I like, like, like a lot of this!

Always go with your first instinct: I should know that by now. So after consultation with Stacy, I did just that, and edited the rest of it. Here it is, prior to full edits by anyone but me (and a little help from Rache, who helped pace me through the all-nighter):

 

Stacy Sullivan/Dale Maharidge
Chris Lombardi
POS: ASTORIA
20 August 2005

Orange Alert Blue for Generation Y
Chris Lombardi

"I try to avoid carrying anything," the young man says matter-of-factly. "Or at least to carry less stuff."

A common resolution for any subway commuter, especially a young  man with many places to go: but the young man, Nordin K, 27, is not just making conversation. Here in Astoria’s “Little Cairo,” where young girls ride bicycles in full headscarf and old men in white pants brood over tiny cups of Turkish coffee, he’s explaining how he avoids having his day ruined by someone else’s fear.

Beside him, his friend Garni,24, nodded. “You don’t want to appear threatening.”

For these young Egyptian immigrants, the everyday hassle of commuting is magnified by the fear that someone will decide they’re terrorists. This fear has increased in the past weeks, in the wake of the London bombings  on July 7 and 19 and the July 22 police shooting of an unarmed young Brazilian mistaken for an Al-Qaeda suspect. 

“You have to always be thinking about it,” Nordin says.  He finishes his lunch, the sounds of the café pulsing around him.

 

listening to astorias

Report back, back half an hour ago after spending six hours on the beat: I don't think I had enough follow-up questions, and made some stupid mistakes -- never got occupations and phone numbers for enough people, but in general I think I have enough for a story.

Time to decipher what I've scrawled in a now-half-filled steno pad (I thought my handwriting was improving but not yet). I walked around all day with two minicassette recorders, but they seemed an unnecessary barrier in such quick conversations. And I told you I over-report: I talked to exactly twice the minimum number of people required for this assignment, thus making the all-nighter possibility more of a reality.

Some notes to help me grasp toward a story:

Getting off the R train at Broadway, I made a beeline this time to that senior center; I really wanted to get some old people's voices (and thought, selfishly, that I might get enough interviews to come back here earlier). The guard at Bffy- Dellamonica Senior Center waved me in when I said I was with Columbia J-school: I stupidly assumed, since I had heard Astoria was "saturated" with  us, that he knew all about it.

Not so. The Center is part of Catholic Charities, and permission from on high is required. In the time it took for me to find that out, I had a nice chat with the assistant director, who is also an adjunct at La Guardia (though in the nursing program), who told me to go to a local diner for half an hour, till the director was free.

So I went off to Sanford Diner, where I made my first approach - asking a couple at the next table, "I'm a journalism student at Columbia, do you have a few minutes?" The couple, Chris and Erica, smile; Chris, an intense, balding young man with a ready smile, works in nonprofit fundraising at Columbia, and has a friend who went through J a few years back. That calmed me right down: "I'll warm up on you1"

Have their daily lives changed because of terrorism, orange alerts, searches?  Not much, they say -- they both take the subway to work every day. But "Mostly we talk about it," said Chris. "We talk a lot about what the city's doing -- what it might mean for our civil rights."

  They're moving to Boston next month; not because of terrorism (because of a job opportunity for Chris and out of a desire for a better standard of living than they feel they can afford right now), but "I'm kind of relieved...I feel like I know something will happen" eventually, he said. "When I'm down in the tunnel and hear a noise, I wonder what will happen."

On the subject of searches: they've gone round and round about them. The subject of profiling -  a constant theme - came up for the first time here: "They're not able to profile," Chris says, "which is kind of counterintuitive." They'd both heard some story on NPR that the reason for all these searches was that some Al-Qaeda communication had advised acolytes: "Stay away from stations with checkpoints."

Neither has been called out to be searched: Chris says "I think I would object. It's not voluntary! You have to use public transportation, some people have to use airplanes -- there's no choice involved. No, it's not cool, b ut it's legal" because of Patriot Act, he says. He then quoted Ben Franklin on liberty vs. safety, and said "I think we are headed to a police state."

Chris, who's Greek and grew up in the neighborhood, said the current situation had sort of radicalized him, pushing outward the liberal politics he inherited from his public-school-teacher parents: "UFT types?" I asked, and he smiled.

The next interview, after I got turned down explicitly at the senior center --  not turned down but deferred, 'Fax us something and we'll plan it" which is tantamount to not possible with this story -- couldn't have been more different.

Maria Sherbatsky is an Eastern European immigrant of about seventy, who was in the  neighborhood today for the Feast of the Transfiguration, which celebrates a subtle moment in the Gospel with a harvest celebration (a sort of Byzantine Succoth, from the looks of the photos). Her first response to the terrorism question, then was religious. "I'm a woman of prayer," she said. "I pray for the conversion of the terrorists, that they realize what they have done; I pray that the war ends."  Still, in her daily life? She breaks out into a smile. "I lived in New York, and when I come to New York. I still use trains." What about the searches? "I wish they had some sort of detector to make it go faster," said her companion, a somewhat younger woman who refused to give me a name. "People are in a hurry it's difficult."

Then it was on to the Euro Delights Cafe, to talk to a pair of twentysomethings: Jenna Soleo, of Astoria, and her friend Kim Coleman of Chicago. Roommates at SUC-Geneseo, they both  now find themselves getting married soon (not to each other). They could be any of the skinny girls in my classes at CCNY or NYU (though with the gloss of the skinny millionaires I joke chased me out of San Francisco).

"I'm living in denial," says Jenna, a doctoral student at CUNY Grad Center who says she still takes the subway, and that  "It hasnt stopped me from flying." In Italy and other countries,  she noted, cops have machine guns [referring to carabinieri, we later agreed] and that security seems even more stringent in smaller airports in the U.S. 'In Kalamazoo, I was practically strip-searched."

As for the subway searches: "I feel like they're making a good effort," she said. "If something were to happen...I don't know if it can actually be prevented."  She sighed. "I give the terrorists more credit than I used to." Then she explained why:  on 9/11 she watched the Twin Towers burn out her window and made it downtown before the trains stopped running, finding herself amid the disoriented people covered in ash.  This makes her sensitive to people in places like "Montana -- I was at  a conference there, and people all over wanted to claim 9/11 as their own. I was a little annoyed."

Civil liberties concerns? "I studied the Middle Ages," she says,  and these kinds of convulsions "always happen when there's a crisis." She also pointed out "We get searched in a lot of places -- like the public library."

Kim, a quiet blonde with a slow smile, says fear of terrorism only comes to her "in flashes," often when she's traversing Chicago's many underground spaces. "Will this happen in Chicago?"  But it was when I asked about civil liberties concerns that the conversation took a surprising turn. First, she told   of seeing a South Asian man trying to do something at his bank and being told that he'd better never travel without over three forms of I.D. , or else "you could go to jail." She was shocked, she says: 'I guess cause of Patriot Act?"

Right after 9/11, said Jenna, "one of the bodega owners around here got beat up --and he wasn't even Arab....They can say all they want that they're not profiling."

Then came the surprise, for me: Kim adds that her fiancee is from the Middle East, and they're moving to Jordan next week for his job. "My family all thinks I'm going to Baghdad," she says wryly.

steamy journalists for universal peace

For most of this past week, the THI in New York was over 100. Yesterday, it was 107. The heat-humidity index, something I learned about when I was fourteen years old and working as a page in the New York Public Library on 42nd Street (yes, the one with the lions; no, despite Francis Coppola, we didn't have roller skates) is much more telling than a simple temperature. Back then, before they had air conditioning in the stacks, a THI over 100 was considered dangerous, and would let us go home with full pay: that soupy heat and humidity turns your limbs into cooked spaghetti and your brain into melteed ice cream. We would walk into the Library, our faces streaming, and await the official word.

It would be tempting to blame the THI, therefore, for my failure to liveblog Week 1, since any exit fom the building threatened its lassitude. I can blame equally the logistics of computing in the lecture hall space, as well as my tendency in general *not* to post small bits, but to try to make a cohesive whole, with links (like the Martin Smith portion), and the ridiculous desire to maintain some modicum of a home life despite this schedule.

The answer, I think, is to do it more in short bits, I think (a good piece of training in its own right). And I'll start now by giving you only Wednesday, and writing a second one tomorrow about the end of the week -- more impressions of the whole class, and how RW1 (my reporting class) is evolving.

First, Wednesday -- and the only thing I was required to be at was Andie Tucher's lecture, a 2-hour version of her patented intro to the history of American journalism. I'd heard a mini-version at the school's open house in April, where I first heard the anecdote about Joseph Pulitzer's 10-year fight to get Columbia to accept his $2 million, because journalism was so "disreputable." (I loved that story so much I thought of naming this blog "diseputable joe,"; I'd riffed further on the story here  in the other blog, connecting it to Deep Throat.)

This time, Prof. Tucher showed us an eighteenth-century American "news sheet" -- a single page looking a little like a cross between the Pennysaver and the Wall Street Journal: four columns across of delicate squares, alternately giving polite advertisements (personals, patent medicines, horses) and  news -- of government actions,  financial markets and military campaigns that might disrupt trade. In other words, as she said "news for elites."  These sheets were also political party organs: one for Democrats and the other for Whigs, with no pretense at objectivity - or even at trying to include a range of voices or ideas.

From that point on, Tucher gave some glimpses of he evolution (?)  from those staid documents to the cacophonies of today, focusing in part on how the voice and role of the reporter keeps shifting. And as with so much else, it's been war that catalyzed and/or exemplified these shifts.

Starting with the "penny papers," like the New York Sun,  newspapers claiming to appeal to "the common man," reporters wrote not to advance a specific party line but to interest readers -- and the Civil War was the first BIG THING in which all were interested. And a new invention, the telegraph, meant that for the first time correspondents could show up at the battlefield and file their stories back in New York, badgering generals and exposing scandals.

They wrote like other nineteenth-century writers, with their whole hearts and purple prose.  Tucher read to us this famous, quite first-person, quite purple battlefield report from the infant New York Times:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes  are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly  absorbing interest -- the dead body of an oldest born, crushed   by a shell in a position where a battery should never have  been sent, in a building where surgeons dared not to stay….  My pen is heavy.  Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of freedom in America,  how you are to be envied!

--Sam Wilkeson, filing from Gettysburg,   July 4, 1863 

 

"A reporter looking down at his dead son. Where would that  be in today's Times?" Tucher asked. "The op-ed section, right."  The path to the kind of neutral prose preferred by today's "serious" papers a long way off.

Tucher showed us similarly novelistic and feverish prose from Nellie Bly and the rest of the generation of "muck rakers" that followed the war, having learned from the battlefield that they could question authority.  Looking at Nelly Bly, Tucher asked "Who does this remind you of?" ""Victorian novels," I said involuntarily, thinking of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, of Bronte's Villette. 

As the new century rolled in, Joseph Pultzer started thinking about his legacy, and  lobbying for that journalism school. This part had actually been touched on the day before, by Deborah Wassertzug, the J-school's librarian. Demonstrating a database, she'd  showed us an article  from the Times, October 1, 1912: "    JOURNALISM SCHOOL OPENS ITS DOORS."  (Blogwhore that I am, I almost put up a pdf link here, until I remembered the 90-year copyright rule and the ethics agreement I just signed and turned in.  I'll  instead  squint at the photo-PDF and provide a few relevant quotes:

At the invocation, trustee Bishop Greer prayed that "the American journalists of the future might work toward universal peace."  Then the university's president declared,  a touch archly perhaps, that  "It is the object of this school to train publicists who possess a distinction between a stench and a perfume."  The Times then provides a delicious example of J-school students already digging up dirt: After getting assurance that they weren't "muckraking," a Democratic functionary tells them that  press coverage of Democratic politics  consisted of whispered one-on-one "press conferences," in which "I hand [the reporters] the canned stuff" (defined helpfully by the Times as "the colloquial name for prepared copy").  Not bad for the first day.

The 2-hour format for the lecture meant that Tucher skipped to the next big watershed for American journalism -- World War II.

The first hadn't been so, Tucher said: "We got in so late." Actually, the invocation for "universal peace" aside, World War I was a rather low point for the new  craft,, Tucher said: newspapers seized, journalists jailed under the Alien & Sedition Acts, explicit xenophobia. But World War II gave citizens,  all of whom had been touched by the war in some way, a communal experience -- some via writers like Ernie Pyle, some via the new medium of radio.

If Nellie Bly hearkened back to Bronte, Pyle's work sounds like someone else we've all read:

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.

I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don't ask silly questions.

Am I the only one who whispered "Hemingway" at those words?  That calm, measured accumulation if not too much grisly detail? But of course Hemingway was Pyle's competition, if not nearly as well loved --  Papa H., who according to Tucher stole the press pass for D-Day from his wife, Martha Gellhorn, died with many enemies. Pyle, by contrast, lived with and loved the guys he covered, as CBS News explains:

"He said I have gotten to the point where I can hardly stand to look at a group of fresh recruits coming in.
 

Why? Because, she said, he knew that half of them would soon be dead.  "He lived with them, he was their friend, and he got to the point that he couldn't stand to look them in the face."