Category: Respect

From The New York Times – “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort” and further Reflections on Journalism

Click here to read a reflective series on free speech.

A needfully challenging appeal to raise the level of discourse, and an appropriate inclusion to The Rhetorical WHY, from an Opinion piece in The New York Times (Feb 22, 2018) by Op-Ed columnist, Bret Stephens:

“This is the text of a lecture delivered at the University of Michigan on Tuesday [Feb 20, 2018]. The speech was sponsored by Wallace House.

“I’d like to express my appreciation for Lynette Clemetson and her team at Knight-Wallace for hosting me in Ann Arbor today. It’s a great honor. I think of Knight-Wallace as a citadel of American journalism. And, Lord knows, we need a few citadels, because journalism today is a profession under several sieges.…” [continue reading]

'Oddly enough, I feel offended...'
All That’s Fit to Print, Wiley Miller

Some thoughts of my own on the significance of a free press to our lives…

Next, I offer a series of responses I made to remarks by Hannah Arendt, published October 26, 1978 in The New York Review of Books, itself a report of her interview with Roger Errera). I encountered them in a Facebook post from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Arendt: “… how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”

Everybody has opinions – our five senses give us opinions.

In order to be “informed,” we need discernment enough to detect accurate information…

Arendt: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

For me, continual lies ultimately yield zero trust, but again, how would I know who’s even lying, but for my own discernment and experience?

At the least, if I were aware that all around were lies, that much I’d know is true. It’s not that “nobody believes anything any longer,” so much as it’s “everybody goes about searching out truth on their own.” The downside is when those individual searches for truth become disrespectful, as we’ve seen lately, or worse, chaotic.

Nevertheless, investigate! Accept responsibility to inform yourself. Accept or believe all with a grain of salt until such time as you can prove to your own satisfaction who and what are trustworthy. And, at that point, be tolerant, if not respectful, of others – this applies to everybody, all sides, liberals and conservatives and all points between. Taking the high road is not to be done with pride or smug assurance. It’s easy to nod and say, “I already do while others do not,” but even so, reflect upon yourself with each conversation, each debate, each exchange.

Open-minded and open-hearted – both are virtues, but they don’t have to be the same thing.

Arendt: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

On its face, this statement could only be accurate if you had some clairvoyance or a crystal ball.

By “everybody” doing their own investigation and accepting responsibility to inform themselves, I mean everybody. We’re able to trust news & media sources to the extent that they have lived up to their responsibility… to the extent we’re aware that they have. I support proper, professional investigative journalism and public intellectualism, both of which I gather to be in decline.

'Well, apparently you haven't heard. . . personal opinions are the new facts.'
The New Facts, Chris Wildt

Finally, I offer two sets of remarks about journalism by two long-retired anchor-journalists of PBS fame, partners Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. The first is transcribed from an exchange between them during a tribute to MacNeil upon his retirement in October 1995. The second – comprising two parts – is Lehrer’s closing words upon the “retirement” of his name from the title of the PBS NewsHour, on December 04, 2009. Following that, I’ve included a thoughtful follow-up by the PBS Ombudsman, Michael Getler, published the next week on December 11.

MacNeil’s remarks upon his retirement (October 20, 1995)…

MacNeil: You know, I’m constantly asked, and I know you are in interviews, and there have been a lot of them just now – I’m constantly asked, “But isn’t your program a little boring to some people?” and I find that amazing, because, well, sure, it probably is, but they’re people who don’t watch. The people who watch it all the time don’t find it boring, or they wouldn’t watch.

Lehrer: That’s right.

MacNeil: And it’s the strange idea that’s come out of this medium, because it’s become so much a captive of its tool – as its use as a sales tool that it’s driven increasingly, I think, by a tyranny of the popular. I mean, after all, you and I’ve said this to each other lots of times – might as well share it with the audience: what is the role of an editor? The role of an editor is to make– is to make judgments somewhere between what he thinks is important or what they think is important and what they think is interesting and entertaining.

Jim Lehrer’s guidelines of journalism (December 04, 2009)…

Lehrer: People often ask me if there are guidelines in our practice of what I like to call MacNeil/Lehrer journalism. Well, yes, there are. And here they are:

* Do nothing I cannot defend.

* Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.

* Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.

* Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am.

* Assume the same about all people on whom I report.

* Assume personal lives are a private matter, until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.

* Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything.

* Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions.

* No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.

* And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.

Here is how I closed a speech about our changes to our PBS stations family last spring:

‘We really are the fortunate ones in the current tumultuous world of journalism right now. When we wake up in the morning, we only have to decide what the news is and how we are going to cover it. We never have to decide who we are and why we are there.’

I am struck by the continuity of their respective final comments, about entertainment – each, in his own way, seeks to distance journalism from vagary, each thereby implying that we are susceptible to emotional or whimsical tendencies, which evidently seem capable of overtaking our focus to learn; otherwise, why mention the point at all?

  • Watch Lehrer’s remarks here, in a functional if awkward series of video archives of that 2009 broadcast.
  • In May 2011, upon Lehrer’s retirement, MacNeil returned to offer his own reflections upon his friend and colleague that include some further worthwhile commentary upon contemporary TV journalism
  • Watch them during a more recent (October 25, 2016) retrospective interview from 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural and community centre in Manhattan.

I recall “Lehrer’s Rules,” as they were called, making a small stir – some of it more substantive, meaningful, and some the critical “woe-is-Us” lament at the passing of favourite things. In amongst it all, as I mentioned, were the following comments from PBS Ombudsman, Michael Getler, which I include here, at length, on account of PBS webpages’ tendency to disappear.

In fact, a number of the PBS pages where I found these articles are no longer active – where possible, I have checked, updated, and even added weblinks. But I believe Getler’s comments, like the rest, are worth preserving, on account of their potential to provoke us to think and learn more about a free press and its relation to ourselves.

“Lehrer’s Rules” by Michael Getler (December 11, 2009)

A couple of people wrote to me in the aftermath of that Dec. 4 sign-off to say how much they liked Lehrer’s guidelines and asked how they could get a copy. That’s why they are reproduced above. A subscriber to the widely-read Romenesko media news site also posted them there on Dec. 6 and they also were posted on the campus site of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). “Whether you agree with all of Lehrer’s guidelines, or not,” that posting read, “he has surely earned our attention.”

That’s certainly true in my case. I’ve also been a devoted watcher of the NewsHour in all of its evolutions during most of the past 30-plus years, long before I took on this job four years ago. Although segments of the program have been the subject of critical ombudsman columns on a number of occasions, I’ve also said many times that it remains the best and most informative hour of news anywhere on television, and it has never been more important. I follow the news closely but almost always learn something from this broadcast every night.

Boring, at Times, But a Luxury Always

Sometimes, of course, it can seem boring. Sometimes the devotion to balanced he said/she said panel discussions can leave you frustrated and angry and no smarter than you were 15 minutes earlier. Sometimes the interviewing is less challenging than one might hope. But the luxury of an uninterrupted hour of serious, straight-forward news and analysis is just that these days, a luxury. And, in today’s world of media where fact and fiction, news and opinion, too often seem hopelessly blurred, it is good to have Lehrer – clearly a person of trust – still at work.

I had the sense when he added his guidelines to that closing segment last Friday that the 75-year-old Lehrer was trying to re-plant the flag of traditional, verifiable journalism that he has carried so well all these years so that it grows well beyond his tenure – whatever that turns out to be – and spreads to all the new platforms and audiences that the contemporary media world now encompasses.

Oddly, I did not get any e-mail from viewers commenting on the new NewsHour format, other than one critical message that said “do not post.” Maybe that’s a good sign since people usually write to me to complain.

Make no mistake, the now defunct NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is still quite recognizable within the new PBS NewsHour. So those who wrote earlier and said they didn’t want any change won’t be terribly disappointed. I, personally, found the first few days of the new format and approach to be a distinct improvement. The program seemed to have more zip and energy, faster paced, with good interviews and without the always predictable language that introduced the show in the past. It presented its news judgments more quickly, benefitted from the early introduction of other top staff members as co-anchors, and from the introduction of a promising “new guy,” Hari Sreenivasan, a former CBS and ABC correspondent who presents a headline summary from the newsroom and is the liaison to an expanded NewsHour Web operation.

Now, just to keep this a respectable ombudsman’s column, let me add a few quibbles when it comes to Lehrer’s rules, as posted above.

First, one of the interesting things about American journalism is that there are no agreed-upon national standards, no journalistic equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for physicians. There are, of course, many universal values and practices that vast numbers of journalists have voluntarily adhered to generally for many years, best exemplified by SPJ’s Code of Ethics. But the fact is that all major news organizations – from the Associated Press to the New York Times to PBS and CBS – have their own guidelines and standards that they try and live by. And they all have their differences.

Naturally, a Few Quibbles

Lehrer’s guidelines embody lots of the good, praiseworthy stuff, and we come out of the same journalistic generation and traditions. But I think on a couple of points they are actually too nice, too lofty, cruising somewhere above some of the grittier realities of journalism.

For example, “Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am. Assume the same about all people on whom I report.” Really? Bernard Madoff? Osama bin Laden?

Then there is: “Assume personal lives are a private matter, until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.” I would argue, and have, that the NewsHour withheld from its viewers at the time a legitimate turn in a major story – reported by all other major news organizations – last year when it declined to inform them that a former senator and former candidate for the vice-presidency, John Edwards, issued a public statement and went on ABC Television to acknowledge that he had had an extra-marital affair with a woman who had been hired by his political action committee to make films for his campaign. That’s news.

Finally, there is, “Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions.” I agree about the blind quotes when they are used to attack someone personally. But anonymous sources have often proved to be absolutely crucial to the public’s right to know what’s really going on in scores of major stories as they have unfolded from Watergate to secret CIA prisons overseas.

The most accurate and important pre-war stories challenging the Bush administration’s on-the-record but bogus case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were based on anonymous sources. Many of those stories, in part because they were based on anonymous sources, got buried or underplayed by newspapers at the time. Many of them never got reported at all on television, including the NewsHour. But there are times when there are mitigating circumstances – like internal threats within an administration or maybe jail time for leakers – when some sources must remain anonymous and when editors need to trust their reporters. And often you don’t know if the occasion is “rare and monumental” until it is too late. Pre-war Iraq, again, being Exhibit A.

Freedom of the Press_ Matteo Bertelli
Freedom of the Press, Matteo Bertelli

Some other links…

World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers

World Press Freedom Index

Ryerson School of Journalism

Edelman Trust Barometer

Freedom House

Lest We Forget

I am indebted to three of my students – Maddy, Kira, and Shannon – for collaborating to write this essay, which we formally read aloud during a school Remembrance Day ceremony in 2013. As I told them at the time, our planning sessions together were as good as any committee-style work I’ve ever done – everyone thoughtful, respectful, contributing, and focused – and I remain as proud of our group effort today as I was then.

I have only slightly revised our essay, for fluidity, to suit a print-format but have endeavoured to avoid any substantive changes.

One hundred years ago, the Dominion of Canada’s soldiers fought in the Great War. By November 1917, the Canadian Expeditionary Force had been in Europe for over three years, staying one more year and sacrificing their safety and their lives for their country on behalf of the British Empire.

What is sacrifice? Sacrifice is soldiers seeing past terror on the battlefield, placing themselves into vulnerability, and giving themselves on our behalf. Each year on November 11, Remembrance Day in Canada, we recognize our soldiers by wearing a poppy over our hearts. ‘Why’ a poppy is more well-known, yet since its adoption in 1921, ‘how’ the symbolic pin has remained potent is perhaps less well-considered. A century later, in such a different world, the relevance of the poppy as a way of honoring the sacrifice of wartime warrants reflection.

As time passes, the poppy’s symbolism, in and of itself, remains the same. We change – people, culture – and inevitably, as we change, our relationship with the poppy changes, too, however much or little. The poppy, the same symbol, is different for those who feel firsthand the costs of war: so many people separated, harmed, and displaced, so many lives lost.

Pains of loss are felt most intensely when they occur, by those who are closest to the people involved. For those of us with no direct wartime experience, what we feel and know matters, yet it also differs. To activate a more complete appreciation, one meaningful place to which we might turn is poetry.

During World War I, poetry was a common means for those with direct wartime experience to share, and to cope. For the lover in the poem, “To His Love,” by Ivor Gurney, one particular soldier’s death has wiped out his lover’s dreams for a comfortable future. Experiencing the fresh pains of loss, she could not possibly forget her soldier or his sacrifice. The poppy we wear both honours his sacrifice and “[hides] that red wet thing,” her loss. But, because of our distance, our poppy does not hold the same raw pain as it does for her, for those who have so immediately lost their loved ones. So, if our poppies do not hold that same raw pain, why do we continue to wear them?

The poppy stays the same because of the fact that each soldier’s death remains. Again, from “To His Love,” Gurney writes, “You would not know him now…” Generations removed, do we remember who this soldier was? Would we recognize him on the street? No. “But still he died.” We may find it difficult to assess the significance of his death, here in our world, far removed by time and distance. But let us appreciate, let us remember, in that moment of a soldier’s death, how he died: “… with due regard for decent taste.” A soldier dies with dignity, for his own sake, because that is all he has. He is a small blip in the universe. “But still he died,” and that will forever be. And for all who loved him, and for all he loved, we remember.

We continue to honour our soldiers, and the sacrifices of all during wartime, because of the timelessness of that sacrifice, which each one makes. Even now, removed from war, we can find reasons to remember the deaths of soldiers because the memory that remains of each soldier embodies our definition of a hero: ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances and giving themselves, perhaps giving their lives, on our behalf. When we wear their poppies, we let their deaths weigh on our present.

Let their deaths weigh on our present, and let their memories live in their stead.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

What On Earth Were They Thinking?

How often have you heard somebody question people who lived “back then,” in the swirling historical mist, who somehow just didn’t have the knowledge, the nuance, or the capability that we so proudly wield today?

“Things back then were just a lot more simple.”

“They just weren’t as developed back then as we are today.”

“Society back then was a lot less informed than we are today.”

It’s difficult to even confront such statements out of their context, but where I’ve had all three of these spoken to me in (separate) conversations, I challenged each impression as an insinuation that we’re somehow smarter than all the peoples of history, more skilled, more sophisticated, more aware, more woke (as they say, these days), that we’re, in the main, altogether better than our elders merely for having lived later than they did. These days, apparently, “we’re more evolved” – ha! 🙂  more evolved, that’s always a good one, as if back then everyone was Australopithecus while here we are jetting across the oceans, toting our iPhones, and drinking fine wines.

Well, sure, maybe things have changed since back then, whenever “then” was. But, more typically I’ve found, contemporary judgments levelled upon history are borne of an unintended arrogance, a symptom of 20:20 hindsight and the self-righteous assurance that, today, we’ve finally seen the error – actually, make that the errors – of their ways.

Surely, these days, few – or any – would believe that we’re ignorant or unaccomplished or incapable, not the way someone might say of us while looking back from our future. At any given point on the historical timeline, I wonder whether a person at that point would feel as good about their era, looking back, as any person on some other point of the timeline would feel, also looking back, about theirs. Is it a common tendency, this judgment of contemporary superiority?

These days, we might well feel superior to people who had no indoor plumbing or viral inoculations or Internet access, just as someone earlier would have appreciated, say, some technological tool, like a hydraulic lift to raise heavy objects, or a set of pulleys, or a first-class lever. It really is arbitrary for a person, looking back at history, to feel better about contemporary life because contemporary life infuses all that person’s experience while history’s something that must be learned, at a minimum, second-hand.

I’ll guess that learning ‘history’ means learning whatever has lasted and been passed on because what has lasted and been passed on has been deemed to have merit: we’re taught the history that has been deemed worth remembering. The kinds of things I’ve found to have been deemed worth remembering, i.e. the kinds of things I learned in History class, are the general mood of the times, the disputes and fights that occurred (violent or academic), a select handful of the figures involved, and an inventory of whichever non-living innovations and technologies simultaneously arose alongside all that. If, later, we demerit and no longer pass on the history that lasted up until then, and instead pass on some different history, then that’s entirely indicative of us, now, versus anyone who came before us, and it reflects changed but not necessarily smarter or better priorities and values.

For me, we shouldn’t be saying we’re any smarter or better, only different. So much literature has lasted, so much art. Commerce has lasted, institutions have lasted, so much has lasted. Civilization has lasted. Cleverness, ingenuity, shrewdness, wit, insight, intellect, cunning, wisdom, kindness, compassion, deceit, pretense, honesty, so many many human traits – and they all transcend generations and eras. People vary, but human nature perdures. I’ll trust the experts, far more immersed in specific historical study than me, to identify slow or subtle changes in our traits – hell, I’ll even grant we may have culturally evolved – and I can only imagine how many ways the world is different now as compared to to back then before now. But what does it mean to be better? Better than other people? Really? And who decides, and what’s the measure?

We can measure efficiency, for instance, so to say technology has advanced and is better than before is, I think, fair. Even then, an individual will have a subjective opinion – yours, mine, anybody’s – making culture not proactive and definitive but rather reactive and variable, a reflection, the result of comprised opinions that amplify what is shared and stifle what is not. As we’re taught merited history, you’re almost forced to concur, at least until we reconsider what has merit. That’s a sticking point because everyone will have an opinion on what is culturally better and what is culturally worse. What we call ‘morality’ inevitably differs, and suddenly we have ‘ethical’ debate, which is to say disagreement or even discord over which perspective is ‘right’. But to blithely say a people or culture is better, I think, is too subjective to rationalize and a questionable path to tread that maybe says a little more about the one who said it.

Consider this as well: we each know what we’ve learned, and as individuals, we’ve each learned what we value. But what we’re taught in Culture ‘X’ is what’s broadly valued and, thereby, prescribed for all ‘X’s. We’ve all heard the rather hackneyed epigram, that those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it. But maybe the ones screwing up just didn’t learn the right history to begin with.

I tend to abide by another hackneyed epigram, that they are wisest who know how little they know. And wouldn’t real historical wisdom and real historical understanding mean being able to see and think and understand as people earlier did? But short of firing up the Delorean for an extended visit some place some time, it seems to me that judgments about history are made with an aplomb that might be better aimed at acknowledging our finite limitations. We’re no angels. If anything, this error of judgment speaks volumes about us. Condescension is what it is, but in my opinion, it’s no virtue.

We should hardly be judging the past as any less able or intelligent or kind or tolerant or virtuous as us, especially not if we aim to live up to today’s woke cultural embrace of acceptance. Being different should never be something critiqued; it should be something understood. Conversely, in proportion to how much we know, passing judgment is assumptive, and we all know what Oscar Wilde had to say about assuming (at least, we know if we’ve studied that piece of history). At the very least, we ought to admit our own current assumptions, mistakes, errors, accidents, troubles, disputes, and wars before we pass any judgment on historical ones.

On that positive note, I will say that considering all this has prompted me to notice something maybe more constructive: so often, at least in my experience, what we seemed to study in History class were troublemaking cause-and-effect, bad decisions, and selfishly motivated behaviours. Far more rarely was History class ever the study of effective decision-making and constructive endeavour – maybe the odd time, but not usually.

Maybe my History teachers were, themselves, stifled as products of the system that educated them. What could they do but pass it along to me and my peers? Considering that, I might more readily understand how people, alive today, could conclude that all who came before were simply not as enlightened, not as sophisticated, or not as adept as we are now.

Yet that merely implicates contemporary ignorance… assumptions and mistakes still happen, errors still occur, accidents – preventable or not – haven’t stopped. Troubles and disputes and wars rage on. If the axiom of being doomed to repeat history were no longer valid, we wouldn’t still feel and accept its truthful description, and it would have long ago faded from meaning. All I can figure is that we’re still poor at learning from history – the collective “we,” I mean, not you in particular (in case all this was getting too personal). We need learned people in the right positions at the right times, if we hope to prevent the mistakes of history.

Not enough people, I guess, have bothered to study the branches of history with genuine interest. Or, no, maybe enough people have studied various branches of history, but they don’t remember lessons sharply enough to take them on board. Or, no no, maybe plenty of people remember history, but the circumstances they face are just different enough to tip the scale out-of-favour. Epigram time: history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Or maybe we’re just full of ourselves, thinking that we’ve got it all solved when, evidently, we don’t.

It also dawned on me, considering all this, that high school “History” class influences what many people think about broader “history.” My high school experience, and university too, was mostly a study of politics and geography, and toss in what would be considered very elementary anthropology – all this as compared to those other branches of historical study: archaeology and palaeontology come to mind as detailed, more scientific branches of history, but there are so many – literary history, philosophical history, religious, environmental, military, economic, technological, socio-cultural… on and on they go, so many categories of human endeavour. I’ve even come across a thoughtful paper contemplating history as a kind of science, although one that is normative and susceptible to generational caprice. One final epigram: history is what gets written by the winners, which some will rue, some will ridicule, and some will call “unfair,” but which I will simply acknowledge as what people evidently do.

And that’s really the point here: throughout what we call human history, where we’ve subdivided it so many ways – right down to the perspective of every single person who ever bothered to contribute, if you want to break it down that far – it’s people all the way back, so it’s all biased. So it’s neither complete nor even accurate until you’ve spent oodles of time and effort creating a more composite comprehension of the available historical records. And, dear lord, who has time for that.

History, in that respect, is barely conceivable in its entirety and hardly a thing to grasp so readily as to say, simply, “Back then…” History is people, and lives, and belief inscribed for all time. To know it is to know who lived it as well as who recorded it. Knowing others is empathy, and empathy is a skill trained and fuelled as much by curiosity and diligence as emotion or opinion. p.s. emotion and opinion come naturally and without effort. For me, valid history derives from informed empathy, not the other way around.

As far as recording history for future study… ultimately, it will again have been people recording and studying all of it, “it” being whatever we care to remember and record about what somebody was doing, and “doing” being all of what people were doing to the attract attention of those doing the recording. It’s all a bit cyclical, and completely biased, and someone will always be left out. So people might be forgiven when shaking their heads in judgment of the world “back then” because, without empathy, what else could they possibly know besides themselves?