Mobile Voices

Journalism has become an elite profession. It is an industry comprised of people with advanced degrees, numerous opportunities and broad worldviews acquired from extensive experience. And ideally so. Yet as journalists, we sometimes develop a skepticism of the wisdom of the common man. In our professional and personal experiences, we come to believe that working-class people lack the understanding, abilities and insight to report on–well, themselves.

Mobile Voices, or Voces Móviles, challenges that elitism and turns those assumptions on their head. The project, started by François Bar, provides working class people and immigrant day laborers with video-capable cell phones and a cutting-edge mobile interface to post them to the site. Their reports are nothing short of incredible–investigations into crooked contractors, man-on-the-street interviews on election day and cultural reports from Latino communities. Although anyone can contribute, VozMob has its own stable of insightful working-class correspondents–Adolfo, Crijim, Manuel, Marcos and Zamoran. They transmit their mobile repors via cellphone to the VozMob.net site, and voila! Community journalism that is produced by the community. A contributor to Mobile Voices myself, I look forward to seeing what my fellow reporters will do next!

Working-class reporters challenge journalism's elitism. Photo courtesy of VozMob.net.

Why we (still) need journalists

As journalists, we’ve long lauded ourselves as the fourth estate, the history writers, the democratic watchdogs and the eyes of the world. Yet as the internet continues to increase the facility of news gathering, reporting, delivery and distribution, the world’s eyes are being opened in new ways by new sources—not all of them professional journalists. Within the last decade, our readers have evolved from passive news consumers to active media contributors; “citizen journalists” who add as much to the conversation as they take from it.

New media has changed the way news is covered and distributed—blogs, web-only publications, mobile delivery, online video and a plethora of multimedia reporting. Technological advances have reduced the cost and difficulty of news gathering and have added many new voices to a now global, real-time discussion. So why do we still need journalists?

In today’s tough economic times, it has become fashionable to justify one’s existence. (Full disclosure—I am a journalist looking for a job.) But the fear of having wasted $120,000 in tuition learning a soon-to-be-obsolete profession isn’t the reason I believe we still need journalists. Nor is it because professional journalists are somehow smarter or more insightful than bloggers, citizen journalists or—dare I say it?—even Joe the Plumber-Turned-War Correspondent. And in light of what the news media has recently passed off as news–celebrity drivel, live car chases and MSNBC’s To Catch a Predator, to name just a few—I’ll also spare you the idealistic, “critical to democracy” virtue argument for why we need journalists.

On the contrary, we still need journalists both because of what they represent and what they produce. Journalists, by their very existence, encourage accountability. They produce contextualized reporting for a general audience that endeavors to present multiple viewpoints. And they engage in expensive, difficult investigations that expose corruption and injustice at local, state and federal levels.

Accountability

Before the birth of new media, journalists enjoyed a veritable monopoly on our ability to bring distant lands and people to American living rooms and breakfast tables. Pre-internet, there was simply no cheap, broad and accessible media outlet through which the public could publish. Journalism was left to the journalists, and, charged with simultaneously and single-handedly afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, we did a decidedly uneven job. We cracked the Watergate scandal and proved we could hold the highest office in the land accountable. But we had to issue Op-Ed apologies when we failed to ask the tough questions about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War:

“Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq’s weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists…It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves…we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged or failed to emerge.” -The New York Times, May 26, 2004

We helped end an unpopular war in Vietnam, but we spent less than an hour of television time covering the War in Afghanistan in 2008:

“Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year [2008], with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan…ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year…more coalition soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in May than in Iraq. No American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan…” -The New York Times, June 23, 2008

Yet through the American press’ triumphs and tribulations, we were accountable—by name, reputation and livelihood—to the general public. Journalists don’t merely hold the powerful accountable; they hold each other accountable. When professional journalists’ stories are wrong, there are consequences: readers complain, sources sue, competitors scoop them and editors crack down. There are no anonymous journalists; we stake our names, our reputations and our livelihoods on our stories.

The public expects that the information presented in a newspaper or evening newscast is accurate. And because there are consequences when we are wrong, we try hard not to be. Our information is vetted, verified and edited by a team of people whose ability to pay their mortgage and their kids’ tuition depends on their being right.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have less impetus to hold themselves, each other and their sites accountable. When bloggers’ posts are wrong, the consequences are different: readers may migrate, other bloggers may scoop them and ads may disappear. Bloggers can publish under pseudonyms, and generally speaking, bloggers and citizen journalists aren’t staking their names, their reputations and their livelihoods on the accuracy of their posts. Larger online publications like the Huffington Post and Slate aside, many sites are individual endeavors that don’t have editors to vet, verify and edit pieces before they are published.

And the public doesn’t necessarily expect a blog post to be accurate; readers (excluding Dan Rather, perhaps) rarely chase down bloggers for a correction. Until blogs evolve into more permanent, professional and accountable media outlets, we still need journalists in order to confidently know from whom—and where—our news is coming.

Context

Technological advances have reduced the cost and difficulty of news gathering and have added many new voices to a now global, real-time discussion. Bloggers, citizen journalists, Twitter users and anyone with a cell phone camera can often beat traditional media outlets to the scene. Most media outlets recognize their limitations and embrace this—CNN uses viewer-submitted iReports, for example. But while the digital revolution has made it possible for seemingly anyone to gather news, it hasn’t necessarily made it possible for anyone to report news.

News, by definition, isn’t merely information. It is relevant information of interest that has been collected, vetted, summarized, aggregated and presented in a timely, accurate and meaningful way. It is information that has been assessed and prioritized before being placed in a larger context.

Pointing a cell phone camera at a bridge collapse or tweeting the recent Mumbai terror attacks are ways of disseminating and sharing information, but not ways of reporting news. These reports are disambiguated pieces that haven’t yet been integrated into the larger context of all that is known about a given issue or event. Only when these pieces of information are combined with and compared against relevant interviews and background information do they become journalism.

We don’t, therefore, need journalists to just gather information—we need them to vet, summarize, aggregate and present it in a timely, accurate and meaningful way. We need journalists to place events in a broader social, political, economic and cultural context. We need journalists to interview multiple sources, research background information and then write it in a coherent way that is accessible to anyone with an eighth grade reading level. Most of what journalists do is really just organizing; but a piece’s organization and presentation is critical to the public’s understanding of complex events.

With all of the voices contributing to the global conversation about a given issue or event, new media also risks becoming a sort of Tower of Babel. Which tweets do you believe? Which cell phone video is really important? What information is newsworthy? Journalists are also professional expediters, summarizers and judges of what is (and what is not) news. Are they always spot on? No—think about how many stories you’ve seen on Octomom versus stories about the growing homeless housing crisis—but journalists do draw from extensive experience in assessing what is newsworthy. An iReporter or Twitter user in the field or on the scene, however, often lacks the broader perspective to know how what is in front of them fits into the greater scheme of things.

New media has increased the volume of information coming in exponentially. Journalists should therefore view iReporters and citizen journalists as valuable collaborators, especially in an era of newsroom cutbacks and bankrupt papers. But as the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the need for contextualized reporting—reporting that informs people rather than just tells them—is greater than ever.

Journalists also write for a general audience, endeavoring to incorporate and represent as many relevant viewpoints as possible. While cable news has recently descended into punditry and commentary (read: Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck), most newspapers and evening newscasts still require their reporters to omit their opinions.

Blogs, however, are generally geared toward specific audiences who already hold specific viewpoints. With some notable exceptions, blogs are “niche media;” people seek out and read blogs that confirm what they already know or believe. A die-hard fan of Becker and Posner, for example, probably wouldn’t be reading the Anti-Becker-Posner blog, and vice versa. Blogs further our understanding of specific issues, though they don’t typically present them in unbiased and objective ways. 

We still need journalists to vet, aggregate, organize and present information, as well as assess its overall value to the public. Journalists are generally better prepared to produce contextualized, significant and meaningful reporting for a general audience that reflects a healthy skepticism and a commitment to accountability than bloggers or citizen journalists.

Investigative reporting

We still need journalists to invest time and money into meaningful investigative reporting that exposes corruption and injustice at local, state and federal levels. New media has come a long way in its ability to report breaking news, provide commentary and punditry and produce feature pieces that might otherwise go unreported. But expensive, difficult and complex investigative journalism is an arena that new media has not yet broken into.

The Annenberg School for Communication recently awarded journalists Edin Lakin and Sandra Peddie of Newsday the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for their stories that exposed widespread corruption in Long Island’s shady “special districts”. Peddie and Lakin literally spent years piecing together bank records, interviews, testimony and city documents:

“‘In more than 100 stories over a year, the Newsday reporters uncovered and documented pervasive pension abuses, double-dipping by retirees and lavish spending by employees and retained lawyers of the little-noticed special districts that spend many millions of taxpayers’ money to provide services like water hookups and trash collection,” the judges wrote in their commendation, citing the breadth of the revelations and the resulting reforms. ‘From story to story and one special district to another, their investigation grew organically to include statewide laws and practices,’ the judges wrote. ‘Within months, the New York state legislature unanimously passed a pension-reform package and other legislation to address the abuses uncovered by Newsday. State government departments also changed rules and stepped up enforcement to end specific instances of corruption.’” –Geneva Overholser, Annenberg School for Communication

But investigative reporting like Lakin’s and Peddie’s can be as daunting as it is noble. Knowing how to effectively organize, repackage and present myriad hours of interviews, boxes of public records and startling discoveries is as important as collecting them in the first place. Bloggers may also lack knowledge or experience in how to access and effectively use public records, a skill most J-schools teach their sophomores. 

In investigative pieces, the sin of omission, even of the most trivial fact, is often the damning. Investigative reporting must be carefully crafted as well as carefully edited. In his “Guardians of Profit” series, Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Leonard first framed his investigation into the County’s professional conservators as broadly “about growing old and being taken advantage of.” From the 2,000 cases he examined, Leonard chose the most compelling characters to articulate and present the injustices and inequities of professional conservatorship. Poring over 2,000 cases and corroborating reports of abuse weren’t something Leonard did as a hobby; it was a full-time, frustrating job. Many bloggers simply don’t have the time to engage in such investigations.

The Boston Globe spent millions of dollars in its investigation of sexual misconduct by Catholic priests. The Los Angeles Times devoted four full-time staff reporters to vet and report claims that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger groped several women at Gold’s Gyms. And the American press’ most noble and well-respected investigation, the Washington Post’s reporting on Watergate, required two dogged, devoted reporters to drop all of their other stories and work exclusively on it for more than a year. Bloggers don’t generally have the financial resources to engage in large-scale investigative reporting.

Bloggers also lack the reputation and clout of big, established media outlets. Investigative reporters at big papers know that politicians cannot ignore calls from the Post or the Times forever. The targets of investigative stories are forced to respond because of the clout the media has in the public sphere. Fight with the press, they say, and you’ll end up covered with ink. But without committed investigative reporters, corruption at local, state and federal levels can flourish.

Ultimately, we still need journalists both because of what they represent and what they produce. In our rush to embrace new media, we forget that journalism is, at its heart, both a craft and a public service. Professional journalists still contribute to the public’s understanding and engagement in ways that new media have not yet mastered. And on that note, where should this reporter send her résumé?

Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is a senior earning dual Bachelor’s degrees in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She aspires to be a multilingual television correspondent.

ATVN – ADRIANNA BACHAN MEMORIAL

Remembering Adrianna Bachan.

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ATVN – LAUSD CUTS

Reporting on LAUSD

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ATVN – HEBREW UNION COLLEGE

Report on Hebrew Union College.

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A Thought on Afghanistan

“There’s a saying right now in the U.S. military that if you bomb a village and kill a civilian, you’ve lost that village forever.”

-Anand Gopal, Afghanistan Correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor

Lessons from the First Freelance War

War photographer Robert Capa declared: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” The best journalism is of course produced by those closest to the stories they cover. But physical and psychological proximity is especially crucial to accurate, relevant and timely war reporting.

Both the government and the news media are at critical junctures. President Obama has already committed 21,000 additional troops to the War in Afghanistan to fight the “increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.” Today, White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs confirmed that the President would not use economic stimulus money to save failing newspapers like the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times: “‘I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,’ Gibbs told reporters…Gibbs said Obama feels “concern and sadness” over the plight of the print media…”

Both government officials and journalists have long feared the day when a war is waged and there is no one there to cover it. In many ways, Afghanistan has the potential to be an even greater quagmire than Iraq, and yet the traditional news media is calling back their correspondents, boxing up their bureaus and switching off their satellites. Television news has already left its Afghanistan reporting on the cutting room floor–the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports that neither the War in Iraq nor the War in Afghanistan were among the top 15 news interest stories of 2008:

From the Pew Research Center for People and the Press

And although 70% of Americans say that television news is their primary source of information about national and international issues, coverage of the War in Afghanistan remains abysmal. A study of local television news coverage in Afghanistan by an independent media watchdog group illustrates how slashed budgets lead to an subpar reporting and an overreliance on official sources:

“Our first study of the local news coverage of the US policy in Afghanistan began the day US warplanes started dropping bombs in October 2001. We conducted a 75-day study of the three Grand Rapids based TV stations’ coverage of what was then exclusively referred to as “The War on Terror…”The type of stories that were presented on the local TV stations either focused on what the US military was doing, the response from the Taliban, or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Much of the footage that was used was provided by the Department of Defense…This type of coverage framed the war from the US perspective with limited information on what was happening to the Afghani people. Even more absent than stories on civilian casualties was the lack of any reporting that provided historical context to US policy in that region of the world in recent decades.” -Media Mouse, January 15, 2009

Without the resources or the commitment to covering Afghanistan in a meaningful, contextual and consistent way, the news media will essentially report only what the Department of Defense hands them. Reliance on official sources, failure to ask tough questions and the media’s willingness to stay “on message” led to journalists’ complacency in the run-up to the Iraq War. But Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t the first hot spots to be mishandled by the news media. If we, as journalists, choose to ignore or oversimplify our coverage of the War in Afghanistan, we also risk repeating Cold War history.

Tiny El Salvador became the "domino" in Western Hemisphere during the Reagan Administration. The U.S. gave the Salvadoran government $6 billion in military aid to fight a civil war that was killing 3,000 people per month. (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)

Before there was the War on Terror, there was the War on Communism. And in a country scarcely larger than Massachusetts, the American public was told that the Fate of the Free World and the security of the Western Hemisphere rested in the hands of a few poor farmers and fourteen rich families. Throughout the Cold War, the mainstream media seemed hesitant to get close enough to proxy conflicts to meaningfully cover them, as Capa said. They framed the debate in the government’s terms, and relied on official sources to produce sporadic, shallow reports that added little to Americans’ understanding of international relations.

In Chile, Cuba, Argentina, China, Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan and (to a lesser extent), Vietnam, the news media presented complex conflicts as simply part of the zero-sum U.S.-Soviet race. The people, the movements, the motives and the stakes could all be described, it seemed, as conveniently communist versus anticommunist, democratic versus undemocratic, free market versus socialist monsters.

In brief, the media covered Cold War proxy conflicts with a certain front- page containment—rarely did journalists point their lenses outside of the rigid Cold War frame created by the government. The media’s failure to contextualize its Cold War reporting led to a gross oversimplification of both the players and the stakes involved, especially in Latin America and particularly in El Salvador.

More than 70,000 were killed in El Salvador's brutal war (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)

Yet El Salvador was truly America’s first “freelance war.” The unprecedented access to both military troops and guerrilla forces that was granted to independent photographers and reporters created a dynamic new relationship between the military and the press. Freer of editors’ constraints and subject to less pressure by the embassy, freelance journalists could in many ways report what the mainstream media knew but did not want to say. El Salvador’s geography and general political chaos allowed accredited but unaffiliated freelance journalists to “drive to the war and be back in the hotel pool in the afternoon,” according to freelance reporter Marc Cooper.

Both the nature of the reporters themselves and of the news media in general contributed to freelancers’ ability to take greater risks and obtain edgier, grittier and more accurate stories. Freelance journalists in El Salvador looked outside of the government’s narrow Cold War lens, rejected oversimplified coverage and contextualized otherwise predictable two-dimensional reporting.

Freelance journalists were also generally more likely to cover ideological conflict in addition to combat missions. You would never have known it from watching network news, but Cold War ideology was actually quite complex. And it became more complex following the release of National Security Council Report-68 (NSC-68), which first defined the Soviet Union’s mission as world domination. The Soviet Union was “‘animated by a new fanatic faith…to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,’” and so for the next forty years, the U.S. government embarked on an ambitious and unambiguous containment policy. The media was in turn challenged to cover ambiguous civil conflicts in obscure places. The enemy was now a nuanced geopolitical and economic ideology that could be manifested virtually anywhere.

Covering Cold War proxy conflicts therefore presented unique challenges to news media outlets. Especially in broadcast news, coverage of ambiguous and nuanced domestic political processes in El Salvador didn’t attract viewers the way combat footage did. A lack of understanding of the political process within El Salvador and a general consensus by the American news media that such coverage was less important contributed as well, according to Cooper:

“Prior to the war, El Salvador was invisible. Coverage was neither good nor bad, but invisible. The problem is institutional with the American media. And it becomes accentuated when the place becomes a hot spot like El Salvador did. Then it gets a lot of coverage, but its coverage that is skewed and only focused through that one policy issue.” -Marc Cooper

Access to combat footage itself was heavily controlled by the Pentagon following the Vietnam War on the assumption that negative coverage had lost the war for the American military in Southeast Asia. The lesson learned from Vietnam was that “the government [should] provide its own news, using the media as a direct pipeline to the public, instead of surrendering control to editors and reporters,” according to military scholar Michael Walzer.

In 1984, the Pentagon’s Sidle Commission created a National Media Pool that restricted media access to military operations; the “pipeline” was in place, and mainstream media coverage of proxy conflicts suddenly became only what the Pentagon wanted the public to see.

Freelance journalists peered through the military’s dark veil and into real-time combat operations the way mainstream outlets that were part of the Pool could not, said Cooper:

“Freelancers were willing to take more risks. There was a pushing of the envelope that they were willing to engage in. The big problem in any sort of journalism is the question of access. When you begin to get truculent or conflictive with your sources they tend to cut off your access. If you are working for Newsweek or the New York Times, your editors are going to demand precisely that same policy skew of coverage. They’re going to demand you have open channels to the ambassador. The elite reporters pulled their punches because of that. I can say that the freelancers didn’t give a damn about those folks, so they were much freer to go out and do much more critical stories.” -Marc Cooper

Raymond Bonner of the New York Times was among the first to learn how the Department of Defense dealt with reporters who didn’t stay “on message” and toe the line. Bonner was the first to report on the massacre of at least 794 civilians by U.S.-trained government forces at El Mozote in 1981. Following the publication of Bonner’s story, the Reagan Administration decried it as guerrilla propaganda and pressured the Times to banish Bonner to the business desk.

Inside San Salvador's Cathedral, human rights groups and the Catholic Church kept hundreds of photos of body dumps so that family members could identify the dead (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)

Remembers Cooper: “When Bonner wrote those stories, he got pulled by the embassy. The New York Times definitely buckled. There were certain lines you couldn’t cross but freelancers could.” Being outside of the large networks and newspapers proved an advantage for freelancers covering Cold War proxy conflicts.

Freelance journalists in El Salvador were better able to present ambiguities and question powerfully vague rhetoric because of their relative freedom from financial and editorial constraints and their willingness to take greater risks. Mainstream media coverage generally followed the Reagan Administration’s agenda and framed the civil conflict as part of the greater Cold War containment strategy.

Few media outlets openly questioned the necessity of $6 billion in military aid for El Salvador. Even fewer mainstream journalists dared to report on the training of right-wing death squads at the United States’ School of the Americas, even though these tactical battalions committed some of the most heinous human rights abuses during the war. The U.S.-trained Atcatl Battalion was responsible for the murder of six unarmed Jesuit priests and two churchwomen at the University of Central America in 1989, although embassy pressure led most news media outlets to shy away from fully covering it.

Salvadorans visit the site of the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their maid and her daughter (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)

Only a decade later would the Los Angeles Times declare: “Our allies, we kept telling ourselves, were members of the Free World…El Salvador’s murdering oligarchy was ‘making progress toward democracy.’”

Freelance journalists were also better able to cover ideological, economic and political conflict because of the length of their stay in-country. Many networks and newspapers sent correspondents only when a major event was taking place, while many freelancers lived and worked in El Salvador for extended periods of time. Network “parachute reporters” landed in the capital and spent a few days covering a rigged election or a massive firefight with a certain ignorant zeal and naïveté. But freelancers often exposed the inherent contradictions in funding the unpopular side of a murky civil conflict in a country most Americans had never heard of.

Aside from presenting ambiguities and questioning the official line, freelancers also contributed some of the grittier stories and images to the coverage of El Salvador. Spencer Hardy was a freelance photographer who sold pieces to Time, Life and Newsweek. Hardy arrived in El Salvador shortly before the 1984 election with a fake press pass he printed and laminated himself. Hardy said he and his partner were willing to take greater risks to sell their photos than some of the network correspondents or staff reporters were:

“In El Salvador, you had journalists just waiting in the hotel for something to happen. When it happened, they would run out and cover it en masse. My partner and I would instead go out in the field, find the army or the guerrillas and stay with them hoping that something would happen. Being El Salvador, it invariably did.” -Spencer Hardy

Archibishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by death squads while saying Mass in 1980. A liberation theologian and advocate for the poor, Romero famously declared: "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people." (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)

Freelance journalists seemed to be willing to take greater risks for a number of reasons. Many of them, like Hardy, had flocked to El Salvador because “it was the only thing you could do to go and play with the big boys. I analogized it to always wanting to play football and getting to play for the first time on Superbowl Sunday without ever having been part of the team.” The conflict was generally low intensity and the troops involved were relatively few, Cooper said. And, said Hardy:

“It was cheap if you were trying to make a great adventure. You could get their cheaply, you could live their cheaply, you could go visit the war for two hours and be home for lunch. It leant it self to freelancers…Of course in El Salvador the army was kind of unprofessional and didn’t mind killing a few journalists now and then. But you didn’t have to be embedded and you could go where you wanted.” -Spencer Hardy

Freelancers’ willingness to take risks was also a function of the market. In order to compete with staff photographers, freelancers had to offer newspapers, magazines and networks grittier and more dramatic images that got closer to the action than those of their full-time counterparts. Hardy said his partner was a Vietnam veteran whose combat training allowed them to get closer than other journalists who “played it safe in the hotel.” Although there were several notable exceptions, freelance journalists were generally more willing to take risks, report untold stories and accurately present the ambiguity—and futility—of U.S. involvement in El Salvador.

Freelance reporters were sometimes more willing to invest and involve themselves in the stories they covered, according to Hardy: “If a photographer takes a photo of someone who is being led into a military compound, it might prevent them from being tortured or killed. Because someone saw them, they couldn’t just be ‘disappeared.’ In some ways, journalism prevents atrocities.”

Freelance photographers were far more likely than network correspondents to venture into places like La Puerta del Diablo, or “the Devil’s Door,” for example.

Right-wing death squads used the "Devil's Door" as their killing field (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)

On a cliff overlooking the capital, paramilitary groups and death squads shot members of the opposition and innocent civilians at the cliff’s edge so that their bodies would fall into the ravine below, eliminating the military’s need to dump them somewhere else. Freelance photographers helped human rights organizations and churches by photographing the dead at body dumps like these so that family members could identify them.

In their coverage of El Salvador, freelance journalists were largely responsible for setting the precedent of solid and accurate reporting that was independent of military and government control:

“By showing these people, you prevent them from dying in vain. We have no idea how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis or Afghanis have been killed because there’s not much coming back from freelance journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The access you had then [in El Salvador] was amazing compared to what you have now.” -Spencer Hardy

It is a precedent that continues and evolves today—in the form of bloggers and online journalists. America’s first freelance war offers valuable lessons for the government and the news media alike. As both the policymakers and journalists embark on an uncertain course in Afghanistan, they would do well to emulate to the freelance reporters in El Salvador who best met Capa’s challenge of getting close enough to truly cover people trapped in the reality of war.

Kaelyn Forde reporting from El Salvador

Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is a senior earning dual Bachelor’s degrees in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She aspires to be a multilingual television correspondent in Latin America.

“Shared responsibility, and shared sacrifice”

Sometimes, as journalists, experience isn’t our best teacher. It’s easy in local news (and at the network level) to fall into story ruts and become the sort of formulaic reporter or producer who knows what SOTs they want before a source even opens his or her mouth.

After all, our jobs require us to turn stories around more and more quickly. Just think of the early TV days when journalists truly had until 6 p.m. to put together the newscast–now if you’re not tweeting your story from the parking lot, you’ve already been scooped. But in our rush to get the story and get it on-air/online, sometimes our expectations and experiences cause us to miss what makes this story important.

Budget stories and school board stories are typically ones that suffer from our rushed reporting. We think of them as having the same sort of characters, likely outcomes and predictable SOTs. But this story was different. I sat among teachers, parents and administrators at John Liechty Middle School as they struggled to save LAUSD (again). And I heard some of those predictable SOTs about spending more money on education and investing in our children (again).

But when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed that all teachers take a 3% pay cut to save their colleagues’ jobs, the reaction was one few could have predicted. Many other people would have snickered cynically or rolled their eyes at the idea of giving up their hard-earned (and often meager) paychecks to save the job of someone they may have never met.

But among these public school teachers, there wasn’t a cynic in the house. “We didn’t get into this to get rich” and “This is what I can do to save the sanctity of education” and “We’re willing to give a little more” were the SOTs I didn’t expect. Here were people who came in early, stayed late and already spent their own money to buy books and supplies for their classes, but they were willing to give a little more when asked the first time.

That was a story we hadn’t heard–”shared responsibility” and “shared sacrifice” truly meant something to these people.

In my other major, International Relations, we’re divided into theorists and historians, those who think there are predictable patterns across time and culture and those who believe that each case is the unique intersection of events and people that hasn’t happened before or since. My experience at LAUSD leads me to believe the latter.

By Kaelyn Forde
April 21, 2009, 9:27 am
MONDAY REPORTER

This entry first appeared on Annenberg TV News: http://www.atvn.org/index.php/newsblog/reporterblog/shared_responsibility_shared_sacrifice/

Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is a senior earning dual Bachelor’s degrees in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. She aspires to be a multilingual correspondent.

Rethinking “In God We Trust”

When the Rev. Wayne E. Gaddis of Greater True Light Church asked to share a special prayer with those facing foreclosure or financial problems last month, more than half of his flock came forward. Greater True Light isn’t unique. Today’s tough economy has many rethinking the meaning of “In God We Trust.”

A recent Gallup poll shows regular church attendance holding steady at 42 percent. But pastors say the pews tell a different story. Facing unemployment, foreclosure, debt and uncertainty, many are turning to religion for comfort and strength–some for the first time.

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I’ve become intrigued by faith lately, as my work for the South Los Angeles Reporting Project has taken me inside some of Los Angeles’ many communities of faith. And as someone with a background in and passion for economics, the intersection of faith and finance is fascinating to me.

It is always assumed that hard times lead more people to prayer for purely selfish, simple reasons. Yet my reporting in the South L.A. community and among college students has shown me that like anything worth writing about, neither faith nor the economy lend themselves to lazy oversimplifications.

Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is earning dual Bachelor’s degrees in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations from the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism. She aspires to be a multilingual television correspondent. You can follow Kaelyn in the field at http://twitter.com/kaelynforde.

Localizing and humanizing

Most morning meetings in television news stations large and small involve the infamous “lift and view.” Read today’s newspaper headlines online or in print, lift them off the page and find a way to cheaply, quickly and engagingly tell them on television. With national or international stories, a fourth step is added–localize and humanize, which is reporter jargon for the age-old question: “tell me why I should care.” We use the words “localize” and “humanize” so often that we become a little distant and dehumanized ourselves.

When President Obama reversed a ban on federal funding of stem cell research Monday, we reporters divvied up the story in order to squeeze as many minute-and-thirty-second packages out of it as possible.

“You–localize it!” the executive producer shouted to one bleary-eyed, coffee-swigging day-of-air reporter.

“And you–humanize it!”they yelled to me.

To humanize a story–that word that makes us, as journalists, sound like space aliens–is really an attempt to report it in a way that helps viewers understand rather than just know. As journalists, we often don’t make the distinction between knowing and understanding. Ours is a job based on facts and information that can be known. But it is also one that requires us to deal with the complexities of the human experience–and that is something to be understood.

I knew that federal funding of stem cell research had far-reaching implications for treating and curing blindness, spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, heart attacks and diabetes, among others. But until I had spoken with two men whose quality of life (and, for one, the quality of life of his child as well) could be dramatically improved by this research, I didn’t truly grasp its impact. (I’ve used only their first names below to protect their privacy, but their responses aired live on Annenberg TV News on March 9.)

The people I had the privilege of interviewing for this story, Mark and David, unabashedly answered all of my questions–not one was too personal or too embarrassing. Both spoke frankly and honestly about how their lives and the lives of their families were affected by their disabilities–Mark shared what it was like for an active, energetic husband and father and an avid skier to live with early onset Parkinson’s.

“It’s a disease that only gets worse,” Mark said, showing me his shaking hands, a common symptom of Parkinson’s. “I feel like I’m fading away.”

Spinal meningitis as an infant severely weakened David’s legs. He told me he spent some of his childhood completely paralyzed, and although he can walk today with the help of braces, it’s difficult. But David told me that it was far harder to have a child with a disability–his son is deaf. He described the agony a parent feels over a gift they cannot possibly give their child.

“If a genie appeared and gave me three wishes and I rubbed that lamp,” David said. “My first wish would be for my son to hear as a normal person hears. Then I wouldn’t need the other two wishes.”

Both Mark and David allowed me to glimpse inside their part of the human experience–an experience I could never hope to understand without their help. And both taught me what resilience truly is–even in the face of challenging disabilities and illnesses.

For a story like this one, humanizing just doesn’t cut it. Reporting isn’t about just finding someone with a good soundbite, shooting your set-up shot, packing up your camera and heading back in time for lunch. It’s about seizing the rare opportunity to see the world through another’s eyes, and point your lens at a unique part of the human experience. I aspire to be a correspondent because of moments and people like those I met today.  The chance to look outside of myself and view the world from a different perspective, even if only for an afternoon, is priceless. And the opportunity to show the world what it’s like to live another’s life, even if only for a minute and thirty seconds, is this profession’s greatest reward.

By Kaelyn Forde
March 10, 2009, 8:34 pm
MONDAY REPORTER

A shorter version of this post first appeared on http://www.atvn.org/index.php/newsblog/reporterblog/knowing_and_understanding/