From the Head Fellow: A Trip to Islam and A Jewish Quarterback
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75Istanbul has been added to the Knight-Wallace Fellows’ travel itinerary, and how that happened says reams about the way the program works: The project was arranged by Fellows, for the benefit of Fellows, current and future.
The exchange will be with CNN Turk, a joint venture between the American network and the Dogan Media Group. The venture is beginning on precisely the same terms that launched our exchange with Clarîn of Buenos Aires. We supply two semesters worth of fellowships—one person all year, one person each semester or two in a single semester, it doesn’t matter to us. In return, CNN Turk pays for a 10-day visit for the whole KWF group led by “their” own Turkish colleague, Bora Bayraktar, an international affairs correspondent, who will have arrived in Ann Arbor the previous month. We’ve signed on for three years.
Why Turkey? Because it is the keystone of what passes for stability in the Middle East, and the bridge between Islam and the West. We have made a point of including Turkish and Turkey-based journalists in the KWF group. In the spring of 2004, I asked Fatih Turkmenoglu of CNN Turk and Yavuz Baydar, who divided his time between the network and Millyet, one of the largest Turkish dailies, to test the waters back home about an exchange.
They are quite a team. Baydar was serving a term as president of the International Organization of News Ombudsmen while Turkmenoglu is a national best-selling author. I was pleased but not surprised at their success in cementing the partnership. The visit is scheduled for the week of February 20, leaving optional time for additional touring during the University’s spring break.
One excellent but perhaps not obvious idea for exploration is already in the works: the politics of water. Much of the region’s scarce water arises in Turkey and flows down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through Syria and Iraq on its way to the Persian Gulf. Across the Middle East, who gets water is even more important than who sells oil. Where did this idea come from? From current Fellow Cynthia Barnett, whose study topic for the year (and probable book) is the history of water rights in the United States.
The purpose of such trips is completely straightforward. Even before the horrendous and continuing cutbacks, American newsrooms by the 1980s had become places with an insularity level that simply terrified me. My hope has been to use travel to radicalize people about the importance of foreign news far beyond and unrelated to the war, famine or volcano eruption of the moment. By importance I very much include the idea of interest. Journalism as a whole seems to be forgetting that interesting stories create interested audiences. Faraway places are bursting with things that speak to the human condition in as many ways as there are individual hopes, fears, achievements and sorrows.
Given the modest size of our program (12 Americans a year), isn’t this a vain hope? Not at all. Allowing for duplication, over the last five years we’ve given leading figures from 50 or so newsrooms strong arguments for expanding the scope as well as the size of the news hole. Five years more and we’ll double that and 100-plus is a lot of newsrooms.
Okay, I admit it’s not bad fun and doesn’t hurt applications, either.
Benny Friedman, 1930.
We have been experimenting with a sports fellowship for a decade and although the results were excellent in terms of those who came and what they added to the mix, the arrangements were not. Funding was temporary and two years ago, it failed. Enter Bert Askwith of New York, who came to the University as a freshman in the fall of 1927, worked for The Michigan Daily, and got the idea of his life from a strike on the New York Central Railroad. To get home, he decided to rent a bus. To pay for the trip, he sold tickets to his friends. Shazam! Seventy-odd years later, Campus Coach is a company of considerable size.
Convinced that Friedman’s legacy did not get its due because of the prevalent anti-Semitism of his era, Askwith gave the lion’s share of an endowment to perpetuate Friedman’s name in sports, and inspired others to join him. Donors include Sirius Radio CEO Mel Karmazin; New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon’s foundation, the Judy and Fred Wilpon Family Foundation; columnist/author Mitch Albom; investor Walter Weiner; and a team of sports-minded UM alumni put together by Detroit attorney Ira Jaffe—Mel Lester and Doreen Hermelin, Ira and Nicki Harris, Martin R. Goldman, the Theodore and Mina Bargman Foundation and the Stanley Imerman Memorial Foundation.
That’s all pretty wonderful, but there’s more. Under terms of a matching grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, KWF will receive an additional $1-million to strengthen the international program.
