News 2006

July

• In a July 9 Washington Post article the Carnegie-Knight Task Force--including Shorenstein Center director Alex Jones--took on the issue of government secrecy and the press. Click here to read the article.

May

• In a recent lecture, Fred Schauer, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, discussed freedom of expression in the context of the recent Danish cartoon controversy. Delivered on May 25, the lecture was part of the Transatlantic Lecture Series of the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Click here to download a copy of the lecture.

• On Tuesday, May 02, the Shorenstein Center hosted a brown-bag lunch with Susan Chira, foreign editor at the New York Times. In “News from Iraq: How It’s Assigned, How It’s Reported, How It’s Presented to Readers,” Chira explained that journalists in Iraq are restricted by security concerns in their efforts to do in-depth reporting. Reporters face “an ever-tightening circle of where they can go and what they can see for themselves,” Chira said. In spite of such restrictions, however the Times is able to deepen its news coverage with reporters embedded in military units, and by pairing U.S. staff with Iraqi employees who can “get another dimension” of a story. In her role as editor, Chira said, she prefers to encourage writers to stress facts rather than attempt to predict what is ahead.

April

• John S. Carroll, Harvard's Knight Visiting Lecturer and the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Seattle on Wednesday, April 26. The full text of Carroll's speech, "Last Call at the ASNE Saloon," is now available. Click here to download.

• On Tuesday, April 11 the Shorenstein Center hosted a brown-bag lunch with Mark Jurkowitz, media critic for the Boston Phoenix. In a talk entitled “Jill Carroll and the Crush of Celebrity Status,” Jurkowitz suggested that the initial response of many bloggers to the Christian Science Monitor reporter’s condemnation of the U.S. military presence in Iraq—remarks Carroll made on videotape just after her release—was the first significant opportunity the blog world had had to exercise serious self-criticism. Many bloggers had reacted by prematurely attacking Carroll, only to learn later that her remarks had been made under duress. Bloggers often too easily yield to what Jurkowitz called “the pull of immediacy,” rushing to publish before taking the time to ask questions or vet the quality of the information they’re sending out. Political bloggers can be guilty of the same "journalistic malpractice” they accuse mainstream journalists of, Jurkowitz pointed out.

• On April 4 the Shorenstein Center hosted a brown-bag lunch with Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. McManus spoke to the Kennedy School community on what he called his “first love”—covering foreign policy. Focusing on the allocation of scarce resources as a way of explaining the quantity and quality of foreign affairs coverage done by major news outlets today, McManus acknowledged that, in a post 9/11 world, foreign policy news resources are gobbled up by coverage of the War in Iraq and by the war against terrorism in general. Interestingly, he maintained that despite the scarcity of resources and other pressures major newspapers are facing, foreign news coverage has not diminished—not among the nation’s top papers. Market research at the Los Angeles Times, he said, reveals that sophisticated consumers demand in-depth foreign affairs coverage. This segment of the readership, he said, will sustain foreign news bureaus through the hard times.
 

March

• On Tuesday, March 21, the Shorenstein Center hosted a brown-bag lunch with Walter Pincus, veteran intelligence reporter at the Washington Post. In a talk entitled “Covering National Security,” Pincus gave a broad outline of his career so far and offered insights into how the news reporting industry has changed since his early days as a reporter. In particular, Pincus bemoaned what he felt amounted to a weakening of ties between journalists and government officials. In the past, the public benefited from a greater depth of reporting, Pincus said, thanks in part to strong bonds of trust between reporters and their sources in government. In the current, polarized climate in which journalists and government officials interact, news reporting has become limited and one-dimensional.

• James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times Win Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting
 

February

• For whom does a journalist work? On Tuesday, February 14, the Shorenstein Center hosted a brown-bag luncheon with Ken Auletta, “Annals of Communication” columnist for the New Yorker magazine, to discuss the question. Broadly speaking, Auletta said, the news media serve two groups: the general readership, on the one hand; their corporate owners, on the other. The interests of these two groups routinely collide. But, at the end of the day, who is the boss? Auletta maintained, while acknowledging the implicit elitism of this stance, that journalists who consider themselves public servants must be willing to put the interests of their readership first, even at the cost of their jobs. To bridge the “cultural divide” between readers and media bosses, Auletta proposed that business interests and journalists work together for consumers by applying marketing principles, such as branding, to long-standing journalistic values like credibility and trust.

• On February 8, the Shorenstein Center hosted a brown-bag luncheon with Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor for the Washington Post. Hiatt’s talk, “Purple Journalism: Red State–Blue State Era,” considered the implications of a highly partisan political culture and an increasingly fractured media environment on opinion journalism. As editor of the Post’s editorial, op-ed and letters section, he said, he is intent on presenting a wide range of opinions and maintaining an editorial position unaffected by partisan interests. This presents a tricky challenge in today’s technological climate: nowadays readers can easily turn to venues—talk shows, blogs, etc.—that tell them only what they want to hear. But there is good news, too. As Hiatt sees it, the Post’s competitive advantage is in the quality of its product, especially in its news and foreign news sections. He added, too, that the glut of unfiltered opinions on the Web can increase the value of an editorial page.
 

January