On Thursday I went to the Humboldt University building on Unter den Linden.
I came roughly fifteen minutes early for the event, which was a talk within the frame of the Mosse Lectures about the history of war reporting.
Having traipsed around the building a long time ago, when I was figuring out whether to apply at the Humboldt University, it was not unfamiliar; the Senatssaal, nevertheless, was a new experience.
The Senate Chamber has nearly floor-to-ceiling curtains — framed in dark, laminate-like wood that appeared fairly East-German-like in its aesthetic — at its four or five windows with a prime perspective on the Humboldt Uni forecourt, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Bebelplatz and Unter den Linden itself, interspersed with busts of Hegel and companions. Twin full-length portrait paintings of gentlemen whom I presumed rashly to be the Humboldt brothers hang at the wall opposite. A ceiling partitioned, indented or coffered in four or five lengthy rectangles lies above an array of chandeliers, lamplights which are enshrouded in rows of dented, crystal-like squares, like glass tiles in a bath.
At the front there was a raised stage where the speaker could assume the podium at left, and multiple speakers could answer questions seated at microphones at the right.
The reason why I write this at length is, of course, because I had free time. The rest of the interval I watched the audiovisual staff, who were filming the talk, and the photographer, partly since I was fascinated that she was making flash photographs of the audience when the seats were half- or a third-filled and the point of taking pictures was in doubt, then transitioning to non-flash with little difficulty afterward.
A Chief of the Institute of German Literature at the Humboldt University took up the microphone first to introduce this fresh season of Mosse Lectures, named to honour the naturalized American grandson of the man who founded the Mosse publishing house (Berliner Tageblatt etc.). He was evidently deeply moved by the death of Anja Niedringhaus, the photojournalist who recently died in Afghanistan. — Her lecture will be replaced by a memorial, to which we were all invited. — Apart from his tributes to her, to Marie Colvin and to Jörg Armbruster, he mentioned as a topic the ethical considerations of journalists reporting on war.
As for female journalists in wartime, they have their own challenges and their own benefits, he said, reminding me at once that I'd read that women reporters tend to be far more easily able to speak with other women in Afghanistan (for instance) where religion-based barriers exist. Also, that they're less likely to be mistaken for fighters or for threatening figures in general. I'd have to look for the article again, because I did a lot of reading on the subject after Marie Colvin was killed.
GIVEN this introduction, the matter of the lecture itself came as a shock. The lecture was held by a professor from a university in Braunschweig, and the material of her speech was the comparison of peacetime and wartime reporting.
After quoting a newspaper report from 1866 about the Battle at Königgrätz, where Austrians and Prussians were slaughtering each other at will, she turned to the peacetime situation in the Weimar Republic and represented the press not so much as strivers for truth and enlightenment as malleable guests at the table of power. Invited to events and mingling with politicians, they were given information that they were permitted to publish and information that they were permitted to keep in mind as background information.
THIS symbiosis between the journalistic and political spheres reminded me at once of an exchange under a Guardian article (April 23rd), with the journalist who wrote the article:
[Commenter]:
Andrew, why are most [Note: politicians'] speeches released word for word in advance, leading to articles reading "...will say later today"? It makes the article weird and awkward to read and personally I find it irritating. Since when have politicians done it? Was it to get in that day's printed press, and if so, is it still necessary with news websites?
Andrew Sparrow:
It's probably been going on since the 18th century. I vaguely recall a story about a printer getting into trouble with the Commons authorities then for publishing a speech based on a text he had been given in advance. It certainly became normal once the lobby started to function at the end of the 19thc and start of the 20thc. Politicians release advance excerpts for two main reasons. 1. It means you get two bits of the news cherry: a story in advance, and then another on the day. And, 2, it means they can shape the agenda. If you release an excerpt with just four paragraphs, journalists will report those bits (if they think they make a story). But if you just give them the whole speech, you have less control over what "line" they will choose to take.
But I agree that the "will say" formula is irritating. I sometimes report it as "said, in an excerpt released in advance" as an alternative.
Besides there have been news reports elsewhere, also in the context of the research process of Zero Dark Thirty where the filmmakers had access to secret information, that American journalists receive classified information leaked to them by bureaucrats with or without permission from the highest levels. This is information only and not for publication. (James Clapper, head of national intelligence, has recently attempted to weaken the practice.)
IN World War I the German papers were given the material to publish by the war ministry; in the US and Britain the government permitted latitude in the style and matter of reporting, since the press was eager to generate its own propaganda and to censor itself. Partly the press went with the permissible premise that the safety of the armed forces shouldn't be undermined by revealing troop positions and other exploitable information.
Since the telegraph had permitted rapid transmission of this information to the foe, whereas earlier in the 19th century the use of the telegraph was far too expensive for journalists and William Howard Russell himself transmitted his reportage through letters, it had become important to intervene in the flow of data.
In World War II, censorship was evidently heavy in Germany, and guidelines were regularly issued as to the terminology etc. of the reporting. Even the press, it appears, was averse to the mendacious hodgepodge that resulted, for pragmatic if not ideological reasons.
The German public, of course, realized that the state reporting was lousy. Listening to the BBC secretly; rumours, even if the rumours were off the mark; and learning from those who had recently been at the battlefront; were all remedies to the state's grasp on information.
Previously, state censorship had almost been welcome as a lightening of the journalist's load. It is far less difficult for the journalist to attempt to imagine and reason whether his reporting will have ill effects if the state does it for him.
Professor Daniel also mentioned the Crimean War and its reporting, very briefly and in passing.
TURNING to the latter half of the 20th century and the present, she reiterated her belief with regard to the vaunted influence of William Howard Russell, who had written about the Crimean War for the London Times, in the latter century.
Famous war reporting, she said, is in fact never critical of war itself. It takes sides with officers on the ground over the ministers in London, she said with regard to Russell's dispatches; it builds on disgust with the length of the conflict, underequipment or high casualty rates amongst the soldiers, or on the draft as in the Vietnam War; but it never actually criticizes the existence of the war in the first place. Change, she implied, comes from realpolitik, not from articles.
This portrait of the do-nothing war reporter is as cynical, perhaps, as the portrait of the journalist as the political elite's stenographer. She balanced it out by praising Anja Niedringhaus and others who have tried to represent the local population who live in the war-stricken countries.
But neither description is entirely new, since frankly the "reporting" of the New York Times as well as many others during and before the Iraq War was so awful that I've read numerous articles about the climate in which its "reporting" was generated. Even during the Obama era the relationship between the press officers, Obama himself, and the representatives of ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. is worrisomely friendly; and the relationship between lobbies (gas, oil, environmental, etc.) and politicians and the press, in any case. Is laziness, political or personal bias, or fear of consequences, the main motivator?
The speaker didn't differentiate journalists' work and editorial interference, nor burrow into the quandary which my little brother found interesting in Marie Colvin's reporting: is it possible to be travelling with guerrillas or soldiers from one side of a conflict without being drawn into reporting mainly from their perspective and perhaps with their interests at heart?
Perhaps that wasn't necessary, but I would have liked if the speech generally had given far greater respect for war journalists in light of the recent death of Mrs. Niedringhaus and others; it underlined, too, the problem of writing and talking abstractly of a realm in which real individuals live, and the difficulty in presenting a varied reality if you are lining up the facts in a slot, as it were, for a thesis.
AFTER the talk ended, the Chief spoke again, apparently much walloped. He remarked diplomatically that the speech had seemed very 'gegen' (anti) and that perhaps we can turn to the alternative point of view in the discussion after the speech. A lady suggested that, for her and the people she knew, the famous photo of a girl running down a street after a napalm attack during the Vietnam War certainly had an effect.
The My Lai, Abu Ghraib, etc., disclosures were also unfriendly to the war effort in theory, probably. In practice I don't know whether these disclosures actually hampered it. Perhaps they might have been less possible if they didn't run parallel to the wishes of many in the government. Edward Snowden, too, was in the bureaucracy, and since he felt it worthwhile, we can examine intelligence programmes now.
So I was wondering if it's not perhaps the responsibility of the politician or the government employee to facilitate the right environment for the press, rather than the press itself. This is a scary thought; but if the press isn't free anyway, such political guidance, interference, or explicit non-interference, can hardly be more awful.
ANYWAY, though the American press has come up so often in this blog post, I read this talk largely as a stinging riposte against the awful journalism in the most popular German newscasts on the channels ARD and ZDF, and therefore enjoyed it hugely.
It appears to me that the ARD, at least, is constrained in its reporting abroad because it is (for example) in Egypt at the invitation of the government there; and, secondly, that it's quite possible that the major German news agencies are enmeshed with the German diplomatic missions abroad, so that it might be embarrassing or even prejudicial for perceived German national interests abroad if the German news domestically reports on anything which the host government doesn't like.
In addition, I think journalists, editors, newspaper owners, etc., can have misguiding tastes in their social environment. They talk with rich, ideological, or generally unobservant members of the elite who either say what people want to hear, or have constituted themselves as authorities because they like to express opinions and not because their experience supports the frequency with which they express them. Then the journalists have the strange notion that this cultivated level of society has bird's-eye insights withheld from hoi polloi in the mire of existence.
(One example that angered me was in an article about Brazil, where the Economist quoted a British person, presumably white as Michelangelo's David, who had lived in Brazil a few years, to the effect that affirmative action in Brazilian universities and workplaces is inadvisable as it would lead to racial hatred there. Why ask him?)
If the resultant articles were about fashions or art exhibitions, it wouldn't matter, I think. In political journalism it appears a prejudicial method.
The monoculture of hiring, too, has been criticized with regard to the New York Times. If you always hire friends of friends, people from one university, etc.; review books whose agents have an 'in' with you, etc.; and so on; the result is a tedious publication that does little to inform.
I don't know if that's a problem in Germany.
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