From the Head Fellow: Education with Ordinary Airline Tickets and Two Extraordinary Editors
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Eisendrath (left) and Boratav, CNN Türk, talk Turkey.
Ricardo Kirschbaum of Clarin (Buenos Aires) and Ferhat Boratav of CNN Türk (Istanbul) are leading the exploration of an interesting proposition: Why should an American journalism fellowships program that already offers unlimited opportunity for study at a great university feel bound to extend the experience far beyond the classroom? Or for that matter, the country? It’s a fair question, often asked when people learn about the KWF travel schedule.
There are several answers. One has to do with the kind of people journalists are. There’s a joke about the impossibility of “herding cats,” a frequent explanation for why newsrooms are so notoriously difficult to move in any coordinated direction. Cats cannot be taught, although they learn all kinds of things on their own, for purposes not easily explained. We also tend to do nothing until, for whatever reason, it is absolutely necessary (call it a deadline), and then we pretend that the whole thing was our idea in the first place. Does that sound familiar?
That’s why ordinary pedagogy just doesn’t work on journalists, including Knight-Wallace Fellows. The lesson plan for the program’s travel is large—to attack the profound insularity of American journalism. Yet KWF is small, made up each year of a dozen or so Americans. The inertia is pervasive—lectures and weighty conferences have failed to demonstrate to American journalists that the world is important in any sense requiring change on their part.
It has become fashionable to point to a recent uptick in the amount of foreign news in U. S. media. That is utter nonsense. The increase merely registers our state of seemingly permanent war. Where Americans are fighting isn’t foreign news in the sense of understanding how other societies function; it’s merely about how you blow them up, or vice versa. Of genuine foreign news, there is next to nothing. Hopeless? I don’t think so. Over a decade, allowing for multiple Fellows from the same organizations, KWF will bring in some of the most active, influential players from 100 newsrooms. Radicalizing them about why they should care about foreign news is a decent start. That’s what we hope we’re doing.
In the articles of this special travel issue, I think you will note a certain excitement and surprise about the discovery of important stories in unreported places that simply go missing.
KWF ’05 is rather typical in one way. A few members, like Maria Fleet of CNN, have spent much of their working lives abroad while others, such as Stephanie Reitz of The Hartford Courant, didn’t even have a passport. Watching each other react to the world is an important part of the KWF travel experience. It tells them what it takes to inform an audience.
Argentina and Turkey are not places for which most newsrooms have an “expert,” meaning, as we all know, somebody who once went there, read a book or has a friend, the qualifications changing with the degree of needy immediacy by the editor in charge that day. I like to think that the excitement about little-known places rubs off. I like to hope that excitement sometimes translates into running a wire story from somewhere not perceived as “important” just because it is fascinating.
Increased competition is usually cited as the main reason newspaper readership has been stagnant for a generation and network television viewership has declined. I disagree. Competition matters, of course, but the main problem is that news from traditional sources isn’t interesting enough. The overall potential audience, after all, has grown dramatically, and migrated to where the interest is.
So much for theory. In Buenos Aires, Monte Reel ’00 is fact. Five years ago, he arrived in Ann Arbor as a 28-year-old general assignment reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wanting to pursue Arabic studies and narrative writing. He did. He traveled to Buenos Aires with us, and a couple of years later joined The Washington Post. When its foreign editor went looking for somebody for the Buenos Aires bureau, Monte had already been there. In fact, he had interviewed the Argentine president with KWF and talked to the mothers of “the disappeared ones” from the Dirty War. He took up the Argentina assignment in December and told his story over the dinner KWF throws for foreign media in Buenos Aires.
I love Monte Reel’s experience not because of the Post’s decision to assign him somewhere the program had taken him but because it illustrates what I tell every Fellowship candidate during the interview at Wallace House: “Dreams come true and our job is to give you everything you need to make it happen.”
