|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2002 Knight Lecture: Paul SteigerGlobal News Coverage After Sept.11
Paul Steiger and symposium panelists Gloria Duffy, Maud Beelman and Merrill Brown
Government actions stifle journalists' search for truth, top editor says
By Jia-Rui Chong
With governments around the world limiting access to accurate information in the name of national security and new competition arising from unreliable media outlets, journalists need to stick to their truth-telling mission more than ever, a panel of news and policy experts said Monday night. Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, was the main speaker at an event that, for the first time ever, combined the Communication Department's John S. Knight and Carlos McClatchy lectures. A discussion featuring Steiger; Maud Beelman, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com; and Gloria Duffy, CEO of the Commonwealth Club of California, followed Steiger's remarks. The panel was moderated by Jim Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships.
Steiger shared wide-ranging thoughts on American society and journalism in light of the last eight months, which has been particularly difficult for the Journal. He was at the helm when the newspaper's main offices, across the street from the World Trade Center, were destroyed on Sept. 11 and when its South Asia bureau chief, Stanford alumnus Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and killed in January. Steiger painted a grim picture of a post-Sept. 11 world that is politically and economically insecure, with a lack of information – or more precisely, the spread of misinformation – feeding that insecurity. "There has never been a more ruthless attack on the press," Steiger said. Governments around the world, he said, have purged outside journalists from areas they control, sown xenophobic distrust, controlled the media that their own people read, and barred outside information. "The ability to disseminate convincing lies is now more widely available," he said. Too many partisan news organizations, he said, have distorted the truth. "So many Arabs think that there were no Arabs involved in Sept. 11. That's not surprising, but it is dangerous and wrong." He praised Pearl as the "antidote" to such obstructionism and purposeful misinformation. Steiger called on the industry to hire more "talented and sensitive reporters" like Pearl. "We must not let that kind of intimidation succeed," Steiger said. "Brave journalists need to stand up to the admittedly increased danger to deliver a baseline of truth, not jingoism, to a world population that needs it." The panelists agreed with Steiger about the need to fight for access to information and to evaluate sources. Beelman criticized the Pentagon in particular. "I'm disturbed that Danny Pearl died in pursuit of information as our own government tries to clamp down on that information. Our role as journalists is to be critical and questioning," she said. Brown also expressed discomfort with what he called the recent pro-government stance of the American media, which he fears may explain the public's favorable impression of the media after Sept. 11. "I'm worried that the American love affair with the press was the effect of being pawns of a propaganda machine. There was a sense in the press that this administration was a mess. Then, as a business, we kind of forgot about that," he said. As the media return to covering the government with a skeptical eye, Brown added, readers' opinion might turn against them. "There's a rough period ahead if we challenge government misinformation in a public environment that is not ready to hear it yet." Another danger is that the U.S. public will accept anything that claims to be news as the truth. The panelists were pleased by the public's increased appetite for news following Sept. 11, but they cautioned that the public still needs to be discriminating. "The problem is everything looks the same. New York Times dot-com looks the same as crackpot dot-com," Steiger said. But Brown, who introduced himself as the "poster child for news on the Internet," did not put the onus of responsibility on the Internet, but on the audience. As we enter a new era in which fact and fiction look the same on the Web, he said, "People need to gather as diverse information as they can find and evaluate the sources. Be the good consumers I know you are." |
|
|
|
|
