Enlightened journalism feeds the soul and the body

"You don't go into a bar to get sober," said Larry Werner.
He wasn't just a common sense drinker.
Larry surfed the wave of consumer reporting that rose in the 1960s and 70s at enlightened newspapers. He developed the beat for The Courier-Journal, which in those days never saw a rising tide in journalism it didn't want to crest from its Kentucky seaside of distinguished publishing.
The separation between news and advertising at papers sliced through media waters sharper than fins on a surfboard. So it was only natural to create a reporting beat that actually worked against advertiser interests.
Today's media have made an, ahem, accommodation.
Always true has been that journalism enjoyed all the ethics it could afford. As publishers and broadcasters and Internet entrepreneurs quest for an elusive, new business model for themselves, the balance shifts from consumer interests to commercial interests.
Truth in advertising, truth in labeling, truth in contracts used to create targets for consumer reporters who honed in on abusive practices like sharks on a surfer's toes.
Their movement reversed the old caveat emptor into "let the huckster beware."
The spirit is willing in broadcast, print and online newsrooms. But the flesh is weakened along with all beat reporting. The economy, you know. And the com-revolt. It's remaking reporter-made news into audience participation news.
Still, the cycles of media attention (let's not put them down as mere fads, shall we?) still function to expand the topics of journalism.
Food journalists are the new consumer  reporters. Not recipe writers. Food journalists. Real food. Real journalism.
And the guy at the top of his form is Michael Pollan, author of five books and the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
Now, he is a common sense drinker. And eater.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," is the mantra of Pollan's In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto. (Penguin Books, 2008, ppb., $15).
The way he parses those three ideas in 244 pages creates a stylist's model for journalists in developing their ideas. As in The Omnivore's Dilemma and especially The Botany of Desire, the writer's wit is the sucrose that makes the fiber go down.
And the plain talking trinity of concepts -- true food, not much, mostly plants -- hands everybody a flashlight in the grocery gloom of our plentiful but unhealthful eating habits.
If a package says "nutritional," it probably isn't. If a single serving size could feed a half dozen, let those other six people have it. If processed food is the way you get your veggies, roll your grocery cart over to the produce section or better yet to the local farmers market.
Pollan proves we have industrialized and marketed our food chain until it's wrapped around our obese and diabetic necks.  What we eat in the way we eat and in the amount we eat it is killing us.
You can't say, "Listen to your Mom," Pollan warns, because corporatization of our corporeal-ty goes back so far it sucked the old girl in too.  
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm turned off by the goody-two-shoes admonitions of consumer-ites about "read your insurance contracts" and "mind your peas" and fast food queues.
I don't need baleful finger-wagging or excited arm-waving.
Give me common sense. Pollan does.
He makes my wife's spinach gently braised in olive oil and tossed with mushrooms and chevre with a nice glass of Cabernet on the side go down smoothly because of -- not in spite of -- his scientific reporting.
News organizations rattle their chains, locked into ethical conflicts of interest with grocery ads and cereal commercials and spots for the food web of restaurants -- scene of our crimes against the nourishment of our own bodies.
So Pollan and other food journalists have an impact in counter-intuitive stories that promote healthful eating. Student journalists show an interest in taking up the cause.
Oh, contrarian journalism looks like a drop in the bucket of greasy fried chicken, reprocessed potatoes layered with hydrogenated fats and 20 secret chemical and synthetic additives.
But the history of movements in media is that crusading journalism works when the facts are right, the message is simple and the warning is commonsense.
You don't go into supermarkets and fast food restaurants to get healthy, you know.
          
    

Narrative journalism can make some sense of humanity's senseless disasters

F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century
By Mark Levine
Hyperion, 2007, 307 pp., $25.95

We know storms, we Southerners. Violent weather writes large in family Bibles.
Hurricane Gustav bears down on Breaux Bridge, La. as I write these words. We wait word our son’s family is safe there.
Our storm child once lived through the worst tornado outbreak in memory. He was 18 months old on that date, April 3, 1974 – in Hillsboro, Ala. for his doting grandmother’s birthday.
Today we’re swapping text messages to stay in touch. But 34 years ago I have to wait hours to learn the safety of my child and his mother, visiting the Lawrence County farmhouse she grew up in.
I suffer separation guilt even now, stuck as I was in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent. Finally I learn Granddaddy covers my little family with mattresses and pillows and stands watch as tornadoes dance their deadly hoedown.
Before the twisted ballet finishes 17 hours later, 148 funnels click their heels in 13 states and a province of Canada. Their paths add up to 2,584 miles. The dead number 335 souls, the injured 6,000 people and the damaged property $600 million for 25,000 families.
It all starts over my own family. But the most devastated Alabama region lies just to their north, across the Tennessee River, in Limestone County.
Mark Levine describes the devastation like a novelist. Or with the quality of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm. Or Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Narrative journalism makes sense of disaster, roughly a Greek derivation for “losing your lucky star,” Levine writes.
He pursues his story of the “superoutbreak” through the memories of survivors: In a moment your life changes. It’s that sudden…You don’t know why it happened to you and not someone else. And since it happened to you, why did you survive it? Others didn’t.
The Alabamians who fill his book are people you know. They are people you care about. They are people of the whole family of humankind, more subject to disaster than we care to think about.
The science of severe weather grounds the narrative, told through the quirky tale of a Japanese physicist, Tatsuya Fujita. As an immigrant to the young science of meteorology in America, “Mr. Tornado” creates our “Richter Scale” for storms. So “F5” means winds above 261 miles per hour on “The Fujita Scale” of intensity.
Fujita determines Limestone suffered “incredible” winds up to 318 mph.
The year 1974, Levine reminds us, produces streaking at the Oscars when The Sting wins. Evel Knievel plans a rocket ride across a mile-wide canyon in Idaho. A French daredevil crosses twin towers of the new World Trade Center on a cable.
It’s odd the author omits the context of legislation the storm system inspires. Since I covered Kentucky issues for The Courier-Journal, I stand in the Oval Office when the also star-crossed President Nixon signs the Disaster Relief Act of 1974.
Louisville took terrible hits from nature’s April 4 attack, backgrounding my story.
My own family stories of storm survival still ground me as a Southerner. As an American. As a human.

Blandish with art but brandish the text

Looks aren’t everything. Too bad. Words count too.
I’m gazing at the graphic front page of a community newspaper. Never mind which one. The techniques I see are common to many.
What smashing news coverage!
Police break up a local drug ring. Prosecutors move to confiscate nine crack houses. Grand jurors indict 28 persons.
Photos of the defendants and a map with inset pictures of the homes engage my eye and mind. The graphics coax me to learn the story. They beckon me into the article.
This is print journalism to stop electronic news in its tracks.
Boy, howdy. Do I ever want to read the story.
But I can’t.
The first paragraph is long as a freight train when you’re stopped at a crossing with ice cream melting in the summer heat.
And there’s a word missing. Even after my mind supplies the meaning, the sentence is still awkward.
I like narrative style, when it works.
Sometimes, though, it’s best just to blurt the news out: “Cops bust drug suspects.”
As happens when any reader sees one glitch, I look for others.
The main head is dully passive.
The overline says, “Authorities disrupt alleged local crack ring.” Disrupt?!? They kicked a gang circle smack into a square.
And the named individuals deserve the softer “alleged” until proven guilty, but the general enterprise of trafficking without names attached does not.
Another line requires translation from its headlinese.
Suddenly the graphic treatment stands out more than the words.
That’s too typical these days in journalism.
TV and Internet and magazines and newspapers all show us a look.
The eye beholds a glory which fades when the content or the expression of it enters the head through the spoken or written word.
Journalists pay so much attention to appearance. They forget basics such as clarity, directness and plainspoken storytelling. Those matter as much as the graphic blandishment.
Blame specialization. We have separate desks, separate training, separate responsibilities. And in a hurry we forget to marry the specialties in a total package.
The only uniformity is in the reader or viewer, expecting the whole presentation to equal the sum of its parts.
Too bad when it doesn’t.

Arts and Letters was a horse, no press release at all

The art of the public relations agent comes out in press releases, which generally are artless.
They can be elaborate. They can entice. They can blare, rarely trying the subtle approach.
They are why city editors have messy desks.
They are the stuff of the logo, the release date, the contact information.
No tree should have to give a life for one. No electron should have to spin a tizzy over one.
But press releases are not going away, no more than their authors in media relations departments.
Press releases can be the cry of the Sirens, who seduced the crew of Ulysses on his odyssey. Tough men, they, but prone to have their heads turned by sexy maidens. Or, press releases can be terse, useful guides to the morning line for reporters to take slight notice of and then discard.
So we need to put them into perspective.
New York Times business writer Joanne Kaufman does not. She does dignify the press release with a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/media/30toxic.html?ex=1372478400&en=109705c354560eb5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
We find out the best words a PR writer can use to attract the attention of a journalist for exposure in the media.
A kind of a science as well as a recklessly purported art figures in Ms. Kaufman's article: The proper technique uses words most likely to be picked up by an Internet search engine these days.
We even learn a book by PR stunt planner David Seaman is due out in October, "Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz." Makes you feel dirty just thinking about it.
The biggest little secret in public relations, it turns out, is timing. Make sure the press release comes out on a slow news day, the Times article concludes.
Well, there's no true conclusion. I will supply one. The story is dutifully non-judgmental. I will be, dutifully.
A press release has one value and one only, as a tip sheet. The best ones in my experience are so labelled, "Tip Sheet." Trust it any further and you're liable to tip over. Even phone numbers and addresses are suspect, to be checked and verified while the journalist re-reports any information in the release, which is never to be quoted or treated as valid information from an original source.
Did you get that, young journalist?
Ms. Kaufman did not report the journalistic value of press releases. Allow me. There is none.
Journalism is what a reporter brings to an idea. The idea may come from a tip by a useful press agent. But the journalism is value-added.
Oh, me, oh my!
You will depart this blog post with the thought journalism is an art and public relations is a service industry whose product is mechanical, the press release.
You think correctly.

Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.