What we too often forget about Tiananmen Square is the joy. It seems almost unseemly to mention it, in light of how many people died and how many lives were ruined by the crackdown that came later. But in those heady, early days when Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic visit made the students bolder than ever, this was the fizziest, most exuberant story I’d ever covered in China.
I had been a correspondent in Beijing for two years in the mid-80’s and landed in Moscow just as Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were getting really interesting. My Newsweek editors, in their infinite wisdom, were evidently reckoning that I’d covered one big, nasty, Communist country and could be trusted to cover another. In fact, the two were mirror images of each other: China’s economic reforms were vibrant and its politics dull, while Russia’s economy was gasping for breath and its political class couldn’t stop babbling.
Now Chinese politics had come alive. The weather was great and the square was thronged. The students sang The Internationale and really meant it (“Masses, slaves, arise, arise”); they erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty without a trace of irony. We cynical old hacks scratched our heads and pinched ourselves. Or as the correspondent for the London Observer put it on a brilliantly sunny day in May, turning his beaming face to me as we strolled through the square, “We’re getting paid to do this!”
The demonstrations felt especially meaningful to those of us who had listened, over the years, to countless endless lectures about how happy and satisfied the Chinese people really were. They didn’t want political freedom. They were satisfied with economic progress. Chinese officials were intent on purveying this explanation for their country’s political quiescence compared to, say, the Soviet Union at the time. And, absent any real manifestation of political engagement from the Chinese people, some of us had begun to believe it.
The size of the demonstrations grew and grew. The elite students were joined by office workers, factory workers, and even government bureaucrats. Together they put the lie to the Chinese government’s Big Lie. Chinese people had quite a few grievances, as it turned out, both economic and political, and they wasted no time in seizing this unprecedented moment to express them. This was a story that we correspondents always knew was percolating quietly below the surface. To put it on the cover of Newsweek magazine, week after week, was to vindicate not only the hopes and desires of the Chinese people, but also our own convictions about the truth about their country.
You have to remember how closed China was then, and how scared most people were. Foreigners were still a jaw-dropping rarity. We correspondents had no freedom of movement around the country – every trip outside of Beijing required special dispensation from the Foreign Ministry. Ordinary Chinese could get in huge trouble just for having unauthorized contact with foreigners. Our ability to know what was really happening in China was pathetically limited.
Tiananmen burst all those strictures. Suddenly, Chinese people were babbling about politics (just like Russians! it seemed to me). Their feelings and opinions were emblazoned on placards for all the world to see. Those few weeks of freedom were heaven for frustrated correspondents who felt they’d never really gotten the full story.
That the story ended in violence surprised no one, even while it shocked us all. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, either, that twenty years later, the Big Lie has taken hold again. Chinese people just aren’t interested in politics. Economic progress has left them satisfied.
Don’t believe it for a minute. Yes, personal freedoms are much more extensive and yes, people are pleased with the country’s economic success. They are also prouder of their country now than they were then, I think. But still, not far below the surface, China simmers with political discontent. The issues that sparked Tiananmen -- corruption, labor exploitation, the lack of free speech – still plague China today. It wouldn’t take much to bring about some kind of mass protest again. I’ve seen it happen before, and seeing it once made me surer than ever that it could happen again.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Torture and the world out there
What motivated many Americans to turn against George Bush’s counter-terrorism policies was, in part, a realization that the rest of the world had turned against them already. President Barack Obama’s decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and renounce the use of torture have proved enormously popular with America’s closest allies, and even some not-so-close. By the same token, his unwillingness to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of torture has important international implications that have not so far been part of the debate.
US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.
Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.
The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”
Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.
And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.
Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.
In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.
US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.
Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.
The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”
Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.
And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.
Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.
In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Ahmedinejad's rant and what it means
The footage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad haranguing a Geneva assembly hall is already becoming the iconic image of the latest international conference on racism. His speech sent Western diplomats scurrying for the exits in an effort to disassociate themselves from denials of the Holocaust. The immediate question is how far the United States overreacts to this unfortunate, but isolated, incident. The larger issue for Washington is how to navigate the terrain of international human rights that the Obama Administration says it wants to reclaim.
A lot of hard diplomatic work went into making sure that this week’s Geneva conference on racism did not go off the rails. More than seven years ago, the genuine accomplishments of a previous UN conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, sank into obscurity after some non-governmental organizations made anti-Semitic statements, and the international media could seemingly focus on nothing else. Early negotiations on this round did not look promising, either, and the Bush Administration effectively dropped out months ago in protest.
But wonder of wonders, the document that has been agreed in Geneva isn’t half bad. It contains no reference to Israel or the Middle East and rejects the dangerous concept that religions, as opposed to individuals, can be defamed or have their rights violated (a provision that many Islamic countries were backing). The document also reaffirms the tragedy of the Holocaust and condemns anti-Semitism.
So, now that it has won virtually all the concessions that it was seeking, what should the US do? Having refused on the basis of concrete objections to participate, Washington can hardly keep refusing to participate once those objections are met. Or can it?
Enter Mr. Ahmedinejad, a Midas with a radioactive touch. His anti-Israel comments actually received precious little support in the hall, and did not succeed in changing a single comma in the conference’s final document. The Norwegian Foreign Minister got it right when he urged conference participants to “not accept that the odd man out hijacks the collective efforts of the many.” And yet White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insisted that Ahmedinejad’s speech has showed that the Administration “made the right decision to not go forward with attendance.”
Right-wing bloggers are eagerly linking this latest dust-up to US participation at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where repressive governments are trying to keep a focus on Israel, not least in order to keep the focus off themselves. A deplorable development indeed. But is it an argument for the United States to disengage, or to re-engage? Diplomats from countries with very poor human rights records grow bolder in direct proportion to the waning of diplomatic energy from governments who are serious about human rights protection.
Barack Obama has vowed to break that cycle and become full participants at the United Nations. Renouncing torture and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay within a year were critical first steps toward engagement, and they have made it likely that the US will win a seat on the Human Rights Council again next month. If Obama is serious (and intellectually consistent) the US government should endorse the conference’s final document. Twenty-two of the countries who walked out of the Iranian president’s speech have already done so. That would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is making human rights policy on the merits -- and not letting Mahmoud Ahmedinejad do it for them.
A lot of hard diplomatic work went into making sure that this week’s Geneva conference on racism did not go off the rails. More than seven years ago, the genuine accomplishments of a previous UN conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, sank into obscurity after some non-governmental organizations made anti-Semitic statements, and the international media could seemingly focus on nothing else. Early negotiations on this round did not look promising, either, and the Bush Administration effectively dropped out months ago in protest.
But wonder of wonders, the document that has been agreed in Geneva isn’t half bad. It contains no reference to Israel or the Middle East and rejects the dangerous concept that religions, as opposed to individuals, can be defamed or have their rights violated (a provision that many Islamic countries were backing). The document also reaffirms the tragedy of the Holocaust and condemns anti-Semitism.
So, now that it has won virtually all the concessions that it was seeking, what should the US do? Having refused on the basis of concrete objections to participate, Washington can hardly keep refusing to participate once those objections are met. Or can it?
Enter Mr. Ahmedinejad, a Midas with a radioactive touch. His anti-Israel comments actually received precious little support in the hall, and did not succeed in changing a single comma in the conference’s final document. The Norwegian Foreign Minister got it right when he urged conference participants to “not accept that the odd man out hijacks the collective efforts of the many.” And yet White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insisted that Ahmedinejad’s speech has showed that the Administration “made the right decision to not go forward with attendance.”
Right-wing bloggers are eagerly linking this latest dust-up to US participation at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where repressive governments are trying to keep a focus on Israel, not least in order to keep the focus off themselves. A deplorable development indeed. But is it an argument for the United States to disengage, or to re-engage? Diplomats from countries with very poor human rights records grow bolder in direct proportion to the waning of diplomatic energy from governments who are serious about human rights protection.
Barack Obama has vowed to break that cycle and become full participants at the United Nations. Renouncing torture and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay within a year were critical first steps toward engagement, and they have made it likely that the US will win a seat on the Human Rights Council again next month. If Obama is serious (and intellectually consistent) the US government should endorse the conference’s final document. Twenty-two of the countries who walked out of the Iranian president’s speech have already done so. That would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is making human rights policy on the merits -- and not letting Mahmoud Ahmedinejad do it for them.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Prosecuting for Torture: A Little Help from the NYTimes
Hosannas to the New York Times today for giving American policy-makers a huge shove in the direction of a Torture Commission. The Sunday op-ed page devotes a giant piece of real estate to journalist Mark Danner for a recapitulation, with pointed commentary, of the heretofore-secret interviews that Red Cross officials conducted with “high-value detainees” at Guantanamo. The information soberly recounted in these memos leaves no doubt that US government officials committed multiple and grievous acts of torture.
This piece testifies bracingly to the enduring relevance of the American newspaper – and of the New York Times in particular.
We read a lot about the demise of newspapers today – including, poignantly, in the New York Times itself this week. But where else but a newspaper could this information come to light? Let’s examine the options.
Radio couldn’t break this story – there’s no “actuality,” no-one to interview. The Red Cross has strict rules about confidentiality and wouldn’t go on the record for a piece like this (God knows how Danner squeezed the documents out of them); the detainees themselves are inaccessible; and the government officials responsible for the torture are not, I’m guessing, giving interviews.
Ditto TV. No pictures. Television has struggled with this for some time; waterboarding is too creepy, and too staged, to be broadcast. Even Brian Ross of ABC, the TV reporter who has most consistently followed the torture issue (including, not helpfully, to argue that waterboarding works), had trouble illustrating his pieces on the subject.
The internet can help Danner’s piece achieve some prominence, and I hope it does. But how viral is torture? The social media sites are too busy trafficking in cute videos of dogs singing “I love you” (my 13-year-old loved it). If Danner’s piece were originally published in a blog or an online magazine, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. With all due respect to bloggers, nobody out there is pulling in the right audience -- neither in terms of seniority in policy-making, nor in concentratedness, by which I mean that everyone who's anyone on the torture issue will see this piece.
So we’re left with newspapers. And how many of them are there, with any heft or reach? Aside from the NYT, only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have real national exposure. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page would not run such a piece for ideological reasons. I’d like to think Don Graham would use his newspaper to crusade against torture, and certainly the Washington Post editorialized early and well against its use. But the entire Post op-ed page also came out strongly in favor of the war in Iraq and the paper has never really expiated that error, or the general sense that it is wrapped a little too tightly around the decaying corpse of Bush’s “war on terror.”
The NYTimes supported the war in Iraq too, of course, but it also issued a major mea culpa for the real deficiencies in its reporting on the issue. And in recent years, its editorials have been among the strongest calls in the country for accountability for the Bush Adminsitration’s crimes. One senses a real quest to make up for earlier credulity (like burying its first Abu Ghraib story on page A15).
Lord knows, there's still plenty to criticize in the Times' coverage on a variety of subjects. But if you want to see senior Bush Administration officials investigated and prosecuted for torture, then you've got to be thankful, today, that the NYTimes still has clout.
This piece testifies bracingly to the enduring relevance of the American newspaper – and of the New York Times in particular.
We read a lot about the demise of newspapers today – including, poignantly, in the New York Times itself this week. But where else but a newspaper could this information come to light? Let’s examine the options.
Radio couldn’t break this story – there’s no “actuality,” no-one to interview. The Red Cross has strict rules about confidentiality and wouldn’t go on the record for a piece like this (God knows how Danner squeezed the documents out of them); the detainees themselves are inaccessible; and the government officials responsible for the torture are not, I’m guessing, giving interviews.
Ditto TV. No pictures. Television has struggled with this for some time; waterboarding is too creepy, and too staged, to be broadcast. Even Brian Ross of ABC, the TV reporter who has most consistently followed the torture issue (including, not helpfully, to argue that waterboarding works), had trouble illustrating his pieces on the subject.
The internet can help Danner’s piece achieve some prominence, and I hope it does. But how viral is torture? The social media sites are too busy trafficking in cute videos of dogs singing “I love you” (my 13-year-old loved it). If Danner’s piece were originally published in a blog or an online magazine, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. With all due respect to bloggers, nobody out there is pulling in the right audience -- neither in terms of seniority in policy-making, nor in concentratedness, by which I mean that everyone who's anyone on the torture issue will see this piece.
So we’re left with newspapers. And how many of them are there, with any heft or reach? Aside from the NYT, only the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have real national exposure. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page would not run such a piece for ideological reasons. I’d like to think Don Graham would use his newspaper to crusade against torture, and certainly the Washington Post editorialized early and well against its use. But the entire Post op-ed page also came out strongly in favor of the war in Iraq and the paper has never really expiated that error, or the general sense that it is wrapped a little too tightly around the decaying corpse of Bush’s “war on terror.”
The NYTimes supported the war in Iraq too, of course, but it also issued a major mea culpa for the real deficiencies in its reporting on the issue. And in recent years, its editorials have been among the strongest calls in the country for accountability for the Bush Adminsitration’s crimes. One senses a real quest to make up for earlier credulity (like burying its first Abu Ghraib story on page A15).
Lord knows, there's still plenty to criticize in the Times' coverage on a variety of subjects. But if you want to see senior Bush Administration officials investigated and prosecuted for torture, then you've got to be thankful, today, that the NYTimes still has clout.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Old Hands, New Voice
This piece was written for the Columbia Journalism Review, as though from the perspective of 2014: looking back and describing How Journalism Got Saved.
NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down their foreign bureaus altogether. The Ameri¬can TV networks had basically shrunk their international presence to London. Covering the Iraq war had nearly bank¬rupted foreign-news budgets, and by then, the American public had lost interest in the Iraq war. Or indeed in foreign news at all, a lot of the time. It was tough being the most expensive and least read story in the queue. Like a faded diva in a ratty mink stole (“Oh, this old thing? I bought it on assignment covering Brezhnev”), foreign correspondents slunk from the stage, costly and unwanted.
Yet even then you could have spied a few positive trends. First, the basic cost of international fact-gathering and dis¬tribution had fallen precipitously. Cameras and recorders were absurdly cheap and the means of transmission cheaper still. (Marx might have called it a revolution in the means of production.) Then, too, it was finally dawning on everyone that the United States was rapidly growing more interna¬tional by almost every measure: the percentage of American businesses with interests overseas (and what was “American” business anymore anyway?), the percentage of the Ameri¬can population born in another country, the percentage of Starbucks customers buying the “World Music” CD at the cash register. You still couldn’t sell People magazine at the newsstand with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni on the cover, maybe, but international news was locating an audience. Why were the bbc and The Economist moving into a market here if one didn’t exist?
A disproportionate number of media executives back in 2009 had been foreign correspondents in their glory days, of course, but even they had to admit that those days hadn’t nec¬essarily been all that glorious. No one could quite remember Walter Cronkite’s last story about Burundi, back in the days when the American media were supposedly doing such a boffo job covering the world. And everyone had to admit that it was a lot easier finding out something about Burundi in 2009 than it had been back in, say, 1963. A lot of world news went uncovered, and unread, even in the glory days.
Fortunately, foreign correspondents were not alone. Alongside them on beats from Chechnya to Congo to the mountains of Nepal, an army of human-rights investigators, academic researchers, aid workers, and country experts of various kinds were also out there gathering facts. They didn’t get interviews with the prime minister very often, and they didn’t always feel it necessary to quote the bri¬gade commander insisting his men had nothing to do with that massacre in that village. But sometimes they had more expertise than the journalists who stole their insights, lifted their research, and quoted them in paragraph seventeen. The Internet, meanwhile, changed the game.
For thirty years, Human Rights Watch had been sending its researchers on missions around the world to investigate and report on issues of serious human-rights abuse. Those researchers had been churning out worthy reports couched in dense legalese—more like case files, intended for a special¬ist audience (the National Security Council expert on Central Asia, say, or the UN peacekeeping staff ) than reportage meant for the general public. But hrw started giving the press a run for its money in 2009, hiring experienced journalists for a new multimedia unit whose job it was, essentially, to report on the work of hrw. By early 2009, some sixty thousand pages were being viewed on the organization’s Web site every day. That traffic compelled hrw to speak in terms the public could understand. If the journalists weren’t going to cover those stories, then hrw, like other nongovernmental organizations, would have to do so itself. The organization had dozens of investigators covering more than seventy countries—more than the foreign correspondent corps of either The New York Times or The Washington Post. It lacked the journalistic muscle to turn its research into digestible information prod¬ucts—until grants from private donors gave it the means to attract experienced professionals from an industry that no longer valued them.
Now war photographers who could no longer snag an assignment from Time or Newsweek went on mission with hrw researchers. They shot video as well, and handed it over to a team of editors back at the Empire State Building in New York. Staff researchers were issued high-quality audio recorders to use when interviewing survivors of human-rights abuse, and former radio reporters assembled the audio files into powerful testimonials. The new hrw Web site (hrw.org) modeled itself on the bbc, with four prominent multimedia stories on the homepage and a clickable list, organized by geography and topic, with the latest information on human rights from dozens of countries. The day after the presidential inauguration saw homepage news on Obama’s decision to halt the military commission hearings at Guantánamo Bay (where hrw had two staffers at the proceedings); an Israel-Gaza pack¬age including a q&a on the complex issues of civilian casual¬ties and international humanitarian law, an audio interview with hrw’s researcher on the ground, and a lengthy briefing paper on the humanitarian situation in Gaza; and a piece on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. The audience for this material went beyond hrw’s own Web site. Because the mainstream media wouldn’t pick up whole stories edited and distributed by an advocacy group, hrw also made it available in disaggregated form. Radio reporters could pull a quote off the site and stitch it into their own stories. TV producers could use video shot by hrw in the field, mix it with a little stock footage or some wire shots, and create a for-eign-news piece from the field without ever leaving midtown Manhattan. And media companies were getting less choosy about where they got their stories from, anyway. For sure, the price was right: hrw gave its content away for free.
But it isn’t journalism! cried the stalwart defenders of the sacred flame. And they were right. But it wasn’t exactly a video news release sneaked onto local TV news by the Bush White House, either. The origins of Human Rights Watch’s material were clearly marked, not least because it wanted the publicity.
The idea caught fire. Within several months, other nonprofit research groups saw the value in producing their own digestible information products—dare not call it journalism!—and before long, they banded together to create economies of scale. Rather than replicating multimedia capability across a number of ngos, they formed a consortium to report on the work of them all. This news service leveraged the expertise within the nonprofit sphere to feed the mainstream media with high-quality international content, to inform the public about what was happening in the world, and to cycle multimedia content back to the ngos themselves, for use on their own sites or with their own donors. A board of overseers watched over the journalistic integrity of the product. And an open forum on the service’s Web site meant that no ngo could purvey a false or inflated storyline without the possibility of public challenge.
In 2014, just as in 2009, the public continues to hold the media in low esteem, right down there with businessmen and politicians. The nongovernmental sector, meanwhile, still enjoys higher approval ratings than any of them. What we learned is that readers don’t trust the information less because it doesn’t come from the mainstream media. They trust it more.
NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down their foreign bureaus altogether. The Ameri¬can TV networks had basically shrunk their international presence to London. Covering the Iraq war had nearly bank¬rupted foreign-news budgets, and by then, the American public had lost interest in the Iraq war. Or indeed in foreign news at all, a lot of the time. It was tough being the most expensive and least read story in the queue. Like a faded diva in a ratty mink stole (“Oh, this old thing? I bought it on assignment covering Brezhnev”), foreign correspondents slunk from the stage, costly and unwanted.
Yet even then you could have spied a few positive trends. First, the basic cost of international fact-gathering and dis¬tribution had fallen precipitously. Cameras and recorders were absurdly cheap and the means of transmission cheaper still. (Marx might have called it a revolution in the means of production.) Then, too, it was finally dawning on everyone that the United States was rapidly growing more interna¬tional by almost every measure: the percentage of American businesses with interests overseas (and what was “American” business anymore anyway?), the percentage of the Ameri¬can population born in another country, the percentage of Starbucks customers buying the “World Music” CD at the cash register. You still couldn’t sell People magazine at the newsstand with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni on the cover, maybe, but international news was locating an audience. Why were the bbc and The Economist moving into a market here if one didn’t exist?
A disproportionate number of media executives back in 2009 had been foreign correspondents in their glory days, of course, but even they had to admit that those days hadn’t nec¬essarily been all that glorious. No one could quite remember Walter Cronkite’s last story about Burundi, back in the days when the American media were supposedly doing such a boffo job covering the world. And everyone had to admit that it was a lot easier finding out something about Burundi in 2009 than it had been back in, say, 1963. A lot of world news went uncovered, and unread, even in the glory days.
Fortunately, foreign correspondents were not alone. Alongside them on beats from Chechnya to Congo to the mountains of Nepal, an army of human-rights investigators, academic researchers, aid workers, and country experts of various kinds were also out there gathering facts. They didn’t get interviews with the prime minister very often, and they didn’t always feel it necessary to quote the bri¬gade commander insisting his men had nothing to do with that massacre in that village. But sometimes they had more expertise than the journalists who stole their insights, lifted their research, and quoted them in paragraph seventeen. The Internet, meanwhile, changed the game.
For thirty years, Human Rights Watch had been sending its researchers on missions around the world to investigate and report on issues of serious human-rights abuse. Those researchers had been churning out worthy reports couched in dense legalese—more like case files, intended for a special¬ist audience (the National Security Council expert on Central Asia, say, or the UN peacekeeping staff ) than reportage meant for the general public. But hrw started giving the press a run for its money in 2009, hiring experienced journalists for a new multimedia unit whose job it was, essentially, to report on the work of hrw. By early 2009, some sixty thousand pages were being viewed on the organization’s Web site every day. That traffic compelled hrw to speak in terms the public could understand. If the journalists weren’t going to cover those stories, then hrw, like other nongovernmental organizations, would have to do so itself. The organization had dozens of investigators covering more than seventy countries—more than the foreign correspondent corps of either The New York Times or The Washington Post. It lacked the journalistic muscle to turn its research into digestible information prod¬ucts—until grants from private donors gave it the means to attract experienced professionals from an industry that no longer valued them.
Now war photographers who could no longer snag an assignment from Time or Newsweek went on mission with hrw researchers. They shot video as well, and handed it over to a team of editors back at the Empire State Building in New York. Staff researchers were issued high-quality audio recorders to use when interviewing survivors of human-rights abuse, and former radio reporters assembled the audio files into powerful testimonials. The new hrw Web site (hrw.org) modeled itself on the bbc, with four prominent multimedia stories on the homepage and a clickable list, organized by geography and topic, with the latest information on human rights from dozens of countries. The day after the presidential inauguration saw homepage news on Obama’s decision to halt the military commission hearings at Guantánamo Bay (where hrw had two staffers at the proceedings); an Israel-Gaza pack¬age including a q&a on the complex issues of civilian casual¬ties and international humanitarian law, an audio interview with hrw’s researcher on the ground, and a lengthy briefing paper on the humanitarian situation in Gaza; and a piece on the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. The audience for this material went beyond hrw’s own Web site. Because the mainstream media wouldn’t pick up whole stories edited and distributed by an advocacy group, hrw also made it available in disaggregated form. Radio reporters could pull a quote off the site and stitch it into their own stories. TV producers could use video shot by hrw in the field, mix it with a little stock footage or some wire shots, and create a for-eign-news piece from the field without ever leaving midtown Manhattan. And media companies were getting less choosy about where they got their stories from, anyway. For sure, the price was right: hrw gave its content away for free.
But it isn’t journalism! cried the stalwart defenders of the sacred flame. And they were right. But it wasn’t exactly a video news release sneaked onto local TV news by the Bush White House, either. The origins of Human Rights Watch’s material were clearly marked, not least because it wanted the publicity.
The idea caught fire. Within several months, other nonprofit research groups saw the value in producing their own digestible information products—dare not call it journalism!—and before long, they banded together to create economies of scale. Rather than replicating multimedia capability across a number of ngos, they formed a consortium to report on the work of them all. This news service leveraged the expertise within the nonprofit sphere to feed the mainstream media with high-quality international content, to inform the public about what was happening in the world, and to cycle multimedia content back to the ngos themselves, for use on their own sites or with their own donors. A board of overseers watched over the journalistic integrity of the product. And an open forum on the service’s Web site meant that no ngo could purvey a false or inflated storyline without the possibility of public challenge.
In 2014, just as in 2009, the public continues to hold the media in low esteem, right down there with businessmen and politicians. The nongovernmental sector, meanwhile, still enjoys higher approval ratings than any of them. What we learned is that readers don’t trust the information less because it doesn’t come from the mainstream media. They trust it more.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Remembering Alison Des Forges
No one else in the world combined the credibility of having written a definitive, 800-page history of the Rwandan genocide with the willingness to challenge the current Rwandan government for its abuses. Researching and writing about the genocide was far from easy, of course. But this work made Alison a hero to many people (as the tribute pages at www.hrw.org attest). By contrast, her work on the abuses being committed by the Rwandan government today made her something of a skunk at a global garden party. Rwandan president Paul Kagame remains personally popular in the West and many thoughtful people , perhaps motivated by their horror at the genocide, have helped to airbrush his ugly human rights record. On the very day she died, Alison was quoted extensively in the Washington Post, casting doubt on the Rwandan government’s thin rationale for invading eastern Congo yet again. Who will have the authority, the bravery, and the store of unimpeachable knowledge, to hold Kigali to account in quite the way that Alison did?
What made her famous, what made her beloved, was her tireless work on the genocide. What made her a model human rights activist was her insistence that basic standards of human decency are immutable and apply to everyone. At the time she died, the Rwandan government had banned her from the country. That’s so sad. But it also contains, in some way, the really inspirational message of her work.
What made her famous, what made her beloved, was her tireless work on the genocide. What made her a model human rights activist was her insistence that basic standards of human decency are immutable and apply to everyone. At the time she died, the Rwandan government had banned her from the country. That’s so sad. But it also contains, in some way, the really inspirational message of her work.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Speaking A Thousand Words
At Human Rights Watch, where I work, we see a lot of difficult pictures and read a lot of tragic reports, every day. But this image really sticks with me; I can’t shake it. I think it’s the proximity of the boot and the face. The boot recalls for me every Communist dictator, every rebel warlord, every brutal cop – every injustice that drove me into this business in the first place. And the face – the face is what keeps me here, the rictus of fear in his expression.
I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.
Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.
I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, “J’ai peur,” – a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.
Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
