Journalism and the Role of Anthropology

Entering college, I didn’t even know what anthropology was, let alone did I think I would add it as a second major. I had to get some science credits, so I signed up for a 100-level anthropology class called “Intro to Evolution.” Thus began my love affair with the social science of humans, past and present, and how they relate to one another.

Even after taking that first class I wasn’t quite sure how or if I’d be able to relate the knowledge to my career, which I still knew would be in journalism. However, I had found something else I was passionate about and loved learning, and I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to delve further into it while still in school. I added anthropology as my second major after finishing that class freshmen year.

It wasn’t until I took another 100-level course called “Comparative Cultures” that I realized just how useful the knowledge from this degree could be. I’ve always wanted to be a foreign correspondent – to travel the world and write about the people and problems and solutions that affect them. What was anthropology but understanding people and the cultural context of their problems and the solutions to them?

I really believe that anyone seeking a job in journalism, especially if they want to be a foreign correspondent, should pursue knowledge in anthropology, and I absolutely recommend to fellow students going into the field that they take at least a few anthropology classes if possible. My anthropology classes have taught me so much about how to go about truly understanding other cultures, dropping the natural judgments we have without realizing it from the culture we grew up in, observing other peoples’ ways of life without the Western filter, etc.

It’s so easy for travelers to go to other countries and see the problems there and say, “Oh, the solution is simple. Just do this,” or to see something different and think, “That is just strange/wrong/underdeveloped,” when in reality, our version of “development,” “normal,” and our solutions simply might not work in that particular cultural context.

A realization I had, for example, from some recent reading is that our approaches to empowering women and gender equality in the United States simply aren’t the best approaches in Muslim countries. Solutions need to be seen from their cultural context and worked through them. Women in the United States might look to women in Afghanistan and say, “Allow them to dress how they want! They’re so oppressed!” when in reality, the majority of the population of women, being devout Muslims, might not even want to shed their traditional head-covering garb. They may not even feel oppressed by them. Instead, feminists should, as some are in the Middle East, examine the cultural context of the Qu’ran and educate people on how “rules” or laws relevant to feminist issues are simply not applicable anymore.

For example, the practice of polygyny, which is acceptable in the Qu’ran, is challenged by feminists now because further historical and anthropological study shows that this was only true because women’s husbands at the time the Qu’ran was written would often die in battle and have no way of supporting themselves; so, it was the brother’s duty to marry his brother’s widow in order to provide for her and her children. Polygyny was a matter of survival, where it simply isn’t anymore.

Polygyny is certainly not a hot debate for advocates of women’s empowerment in the United States, of course, but only because it is not relevant to our particular culture. Anthropology teaches us to really understand a culture (through the ethnographic emic/etic approach of living with a group of people for an extended period of time and taking up their lifestyle completely to understand it while simultaneously observing it).

Obviously, journalists work on a deadline, and don’t have a year to devote to every group of people they report on; however, having a basic understanding of anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology, can be extremely helpful, I think.

I ended up dropping my second major in anthropology and keeping a minor in cultural anthropology instead in order to graduate within four years; plus, I wasn’t particularly interested in some of the required classes, such as forensic anthropology or primate studies. I was able to take far more than the required 18 credits for the minor, however, and took every culture-related anthropology course I could while in college.

I know that when I do land a job as a foreign correspondent, or even just in my personal travels, I will have a better understanding and an ability to really relate to the people I meet thanks to the classes I’ve taken in anthropology. Again, I recommend to aspiring journalists everywhere to take whatever anthropology classes they can just for the knowledge, even if a degree is out of the question.

 

Agenda-setting in the Media by Corporations Instead of Journalists, and the Yes Men Solution

 

Journalists are involved in deciding what the public thinks about and looks at and how they look at those things. They essentially tell us what we should care about. One of the issues with this lies in the fact that these agenda-setters are corporate-owned media, where it isn’t always journalists who are deciding what is news and what isn’t news; this is, more often than I think the public realizes, at the discretion of the corporations who own the publications. Take NBC, for example. NBC is owned by General Electric. If a potential news story comes out that could possibly harm GE and its many assets in any way, or that didn’t line up with the aspirations and “values” of GE, do you really think NBC would choose to, or even be allowed to, broadcast it? Absolutely not. And it’s not just NBC that’s run like this. It’s all of the major news outlets that people read/watch/listen to on a daily basis that are run by corporations such as Disney, Time Warner, News Corp., and Viacom.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a point about the power the media have in deciding what people think about:

“Where journalism has by far the greatest impact isn’t in persuading people … but in helping put issues on the agenda.” 

Where does that leave us if journalists are being told the agenda by corporations who have only business in mind? GE and these other corporations that own the media don’t have any care about shining light on problems that “are not illuminated, that no one is thinking of,” as Kristof continues to say in the interview.

There are many solutions to this problem, I’m sure. I won’t pretend to be an expert on solutions to media consolidation, but I know there are several articles out there by people who are. My favorite people focusing on this issue, however, are somewhat unorthodox problem solvers, and they aren’t exactly journalists.

The Yes Men use “humor and disruptive action” to bring attention to the overlooked evils of corporations and their disregard for real human issues in the name of profit, profit, profit. The description they give of themselves on their website reads,

“Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues.”

Essentially, this team of what I like to call “peaceful anarchists” create fake websites impersonating big and powerful companies and wait patiently to be contacted by someone who invites them to an event representing the company they’re impersonating. Of course, the people who invite these two men, who go by the aliases of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, have no idea that they are impersonators about to pull a prank of “identity correction” in order to help shed light on how these entities so often act in dehumanizing ways.

The Yes Men have successfully impersonated companies such as McDonalds, the World Trade Organization, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The point of such pranks (which are often quite humorous, especially in how blindly the audience follows and applauds the often ludicrous claims and ideas the duo presents) is to bring public attention to events or issues these companies have caused that have not received ample media attention.

My favorite stunt of theirs is when they went live on BBC World Television posing as Dow Chemical accepting responsibility for the first time for the Bhopal disaster in 1984 in which a gas leak at the Dow Chemical-owned Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, India caused more than 3,000 deaths (although estimates vary considerably, and some say upwards of 8,000 deaths were a direct result of the leak and methyl isocyanate contact.) Twenty years later, thousands of people in the surrounding shanty towns continue to be affected by the incident, including a rising percentage of people with diseases and deformities related to the chemical.

Jacques Servin, or Andy Bichlbaum, went on live television as “Jude Finisterra,” claiming to be a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, and proclaiming that the company had a new $12 billion plan to fully compensate the victims of the Bhopal disaster.

Some people question the point of providing momentary false hope to the victims before it was (rather quickly) discovered that it was a hoax, and of putting a company in this kind of position. To me, and to the Yes Men, the answer to that seems obvious. The point is to give the media a reason to talk about something they should have been talking about in the first place and to continue to hold accountable one of the largest chemical companies in the world that didn’t take responsibility for its actions and cost thousands of people their health and their lives. The prank brought attention back to something that slipped away from the public’s eye because the media stopped covering it.

After talking about this event in a class, a fellow college student asked me how I, as a journalism major, wasn’t mad at how the Yes Men had duped BBC and “made them look stupid.” First of all, just because I’m a journalist doesn’t mean I have blind love and devotion for every organization that people look to for news. Second, just because I’m an aspiring journalist also doesn’t mean I don’t see the negative sides of the media industry. In fact, it makes me even more interested in fixing the issues that the Yes Men brought to light. Not only were they holding Dow Chemical to account, but they were holding the media to account for its negligence in reporting about this incident. I could be imagining things, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the media wasn’t reporting heavily or at all on the fact that thousands of people in India continued to be very directly and negatively impacted by the incident, a story which could be harmful to a corporation that makes billions in profits every year.

 

 

 

 

The "C" Word and the "S" Word

I don't consider myself a socialist. (In fact, I don't really have a label for my political views, and I'm not too eager to). However, I really loved this November interview with Seattle's socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant on Salon.com entitled "Capitalism is a 'dirty word': America's new socialist council member talks to Salon."

I'm not necessarily a socialist, but I'm certainly no cheerleader for capitalism, either. At least not with the way it's working right now.

"…that’s the way that capitalism works. The nature of the system is that it’s supposed to be driven by greed; no one’s supposed to be concerned for anybody else, nobody’s supposed to worry about the common good - those are not things that are supposed to motivate you, that’s the principle of the system. The theory is that private vices lead to public benefits - that’s what they teach you in economics departments. It’s all total bullshit, of course, but that’s what they teach you. And as long as the system works that way, yeah, it’s going to self destruct." –  Noam Chomsky

I see a lot of good ideas and potential for changing this system for the better in Sawant's ideas for Seattle. What do you think of America's first big-city socialist council member's ideas?

 

Warnings in The Hunger Games

I saw "Catching Fire", the second film of "The Hunger Games" book series by Suzanne Collins, last night. It was absolutely breathtaking. I had goose bumps at least five times throughout the two and a half hours in the theater, and I’ll admit I cried. Three times.

Its cinematic quality was, in my humble opinion, flawless. However, I can only hope that viewers see the parallels and warnings the film has for real life. Whether or not Collins meant for her novels to be in the same realm as Orwell’s "1984" or "Animal Farm," "The Hunger Games" and "Catching Fire" are ominous tales of fiction that warn of a very possible type of future for a society governed by fear and control.

I’m not saying that we do live in a police state, and I count myself lucky to live in the United States where I can do what I want, within reason, and say what I want – just as long as I don’t hold too much public sway.

Whenever I bring up the possibility of such dystopian future, I feel like most people don’t take me seriously, and that’s ok; and, obviously, "Catching Fire" is a work of fiction. I know, though, that the reason the film got me so fired up was that there are still parallels between Katniss’s world and mine. For example, the extreme gap between the poor in the thirteen districts and the rich celebrities and politicians of “The Capitol” who run everything. Then there’s the scene [spoiler alert!] where Cinna, played by Lenny Kravitz, is beaten and dragged away by the “Peacekeepers” after designing a dress for Katniss that has the wings of a mockingjay, the symbol for the rebellion/revolution in Panem. I’m not drawing a parallel here with a real world country ruled by a dictatorship. I’m comparing it to what goes on right here in the United States.

In an earlier post I wrote about how journalists were uncovering that U.S. Navy missiles had accidentally downed TWA Flight 800 in 1996, and the media, specifically CBS, was working together with the FBI to hide this information from the public. CBS reporter Kristina Borjessen, who was working on the story, describes what happened at a press conference afterward:

“[FBI Agent] Kallstrom rattled off a prepared speech, and then it was time for questions. A man raised his hand and asked why the Navy was involved in the recovery and investigation while a possible suspect. Kallstrom's response was immediate; ‘Remove him!’ he yelled. Two men leapt over to the questioner and grabbed him by the arms. There was a momentary chill in the air after the guy had been dragged out of the room. Kallstrom acted as if nothing had happened.”

Although the questioning man was most likely not beaten or killed, there is an uncanny resemblance here between the fictional Panem’s “Peacekeepers” and the FBI workers and, unfortunately, the media.

We can further look at how our version of “The Capitol,” the corporations and politicians who want to control the public and what they know, tries to quell peaceful protests, although not usually  resulting in murder, as in Collins’s novels. Again, in an earlier post (the one before this), I talk about police working to monitor Facebook for potential protest organizers and organized protests  to stop them before they start.

My point is that although these popular works of fiction are far more extreme than the world we live in, it doesn’t mean there’s not a hint of warning or an urge to awareness in them.  

Maybe because it’s a Hollywood film these parallels become more invisible and incredulous to the public – “It’s just a movie!”  I believe that works of fiction can be just as influential as nonfiction in inspiring awareness and action – even sci-fi, dystopian, post-apocalyptic movies about 16-year-old girls who wear flaming dresses and have perfect aim with a bow.

 

Police Monitoring Facebook to Silence Potential Protestors

A recent story from Political Blindspot has been haunting me since it was published this October. Its title, “Facebook and Twitter Sync with Police to Squash Protests Before They Start” pretty much sums up the short article. Apparently at an International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Pennsylvania

“a Chicago Police Department official told attendees at this law enforcement conference that his department has been working directly with a ‘security chief at Facebook’ to block certain users from the social networking site if it is determined they have posted what is deemed ‘criminal content.’”

I did some research on the sources, and it seems legitimate. One of the quoted sources shows videos and pictures on their website of the conference, including a picture of the slideshow defining “Social Media Monitoring Tool.”

First of all, since when did it become acceptable for the PD to decide what “criminal content” is? Is that not something that should be determined by the Supreme Court? And what about the First Amendment right to free speech? We’re not talking here about finding evidence for murder cases. We’re talking about people organizing protests. We’re talking about Occupy Wall Street protestors. We’re talking about those following in the footsteps of those who organized and partook in the Arab Spring, which was so successful in overthrowing decades-old dictators and unfair governments in the Middle East thanks to the very social media outlets that the police in the United States are now trying to censor.

They are obviously afraid of something. Could it be the growing discontent of the people in a flawed and disintegrating system? Could it be the dissipating boundaries between billions of people around the globe thanks to social media, which makes it harder for us to be controlled by them?

If so, then good. We are doing something right as a people and using our right to free speech and freedom of the press, since Facebook and Twitter, although they are not media companies, are still ways for people to distribute news.

This censorship is wrong, but I don’t foresee it working. The people of the United States are too free to allow this degree of police state madness to really take ahold.

At least I really hope so.

 

Why You Shouldn't Trust the Media

“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.” – Noam Chomsky

(source)

Before I started to really understand how the system works, meaning the government, the media, corporations, etc., my only sources of news were The New York Times, CNN, and NPR. Not only did I consume their news every single day, but I consumed only their news every day, and I idolized them.

Today, still a news junkie, I continue to read articles at The New York Times website, and I still follow my morning ritual of listening to NPR’s Morning Edition with my morning coffee and cigarette, but the more I realize just how corrupt, selective, and controlled mainstream media is, the more I delve into independent news outlets to find out what’s really going on in the world. I started off slowly, supplementing some headlines from Salon with my daily dose of The Wall Street Journal, but now I find myself making the popular media my daily vitamin rather than my main course meal. Since doing extensive research, I’m simply distrustful of mainstream media. As I should be.

If you know anything about how capitalism works, you know that the following mantra holds true in every field of work in the United States: Money. Is. Everything. Corporations have the money. Corporations own the mainstream media. Therefore, they have the ultimate power in determining what news consumers know.

Concentration of media ownership has been rapidly increasing since the 1980s, as six corporations have taken ownership of an unbelievable majority of what Americans watch, hear, and read every day. Media consolidation has put 90% of our news in the hands of NBC Universal, CBS Corporation, News Corporation, Viacom, Walt Disney, and Time Warner.

Of course, news outlets are not going to publish anything that goes against the ideologies of their corporate owners or advertisers, nor will they publish anything that could potentially harm the image of their owners or advertisers, even if the potential story is harmful to the public and completely verifiable. Why? Because within this system, profit is more important than the public’s well-being. Even for journalists, who in the past have been seen as the watchdogs of just these corporations and the government, and whose goal was originally to protect democracy by helping the people be informed. Today they are failing us.

In the past when reporters have tried to cover important news-worthy stories that are potentially harmful to the people with the money, those reporters have been fired. Look at Emmy award winner Kristina Borjesson, author of the book Into the Buzzsaw, which is about her experience at CBS trying to publish a story about how a US Navy missile had accidentally shot down TWA Flight 800 and how the FBI was trying to hide it from the public. Borjesson was consequently fired from CBS, as was law enforcement consultant Paul Ragonese, who was replaced by James Kallstrom, who also happened to be the FBI’s TWA 800 task force chief.

Another example of mainstream media corruption fueled by profit comes, not surprisingly, from FOX News. Reporter Jane Akre and her husband, investigative reporter Steve Wilson, had been working on a story about hormones in milk, part of which had to do with the infamous corporate giant Monsanto. When Monsanto’s lawyers wrote FOX News saying that the story would be damaging to Monsanto and have “dire consequences for FOX News,” FOX responded by firing the news director and general manager. The rest is summed up in the following paragraph online:

“It was not long after our [unsuccessful] struggle to air an honest report had begun that Fox fired both the news director and the general manager. The new general manager, Dave Boylan, explained that if we didn't agree to changes that Monsanto and Fox lawyers were insisting upon, we'd be fired for insubordination within 48 hours. We pleaded with Dave to look at the facts we'd uncovered, many of which conclusively disproved Monsanto's claims. We reminded him of the importance of the facts about a basic food most of our viewers consume and feed to their children daily. His reply: ‘We paid $3 billion dollars for these TV stations. We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!’”

The reporters were continually threatened with losing their jobs, were told to distort their story to be more favorable to Monsanto, and bribed with money to keep everything they had uncovered a secret, but they refused and were, of course, fired.

 

 Most journalists or aspiring journalists I know would probably confidently say that they would never give in to such bribery and would hold journalistic ethics and standards of democracy above money; however, I would argue that it is also our responsibility as journalists to know where our news is coming from and to understand the context from which it is coming from. As watchdogs, we have to always be skeptical of where information comes from when writing stories, but also when reading or listening to them, keeping in mind that sad-but-true fact that in the current system, money runs everything. Being idealistic about mainstream media is the fastest way to be duped and manipulated by an exploitative capitalist system. The best way to avoid this is to read alternative news.

Some of my favorites are Salon, Political Blind Spot, and Mother Jones, a non-profit news organization. Where do you get news that isn't owned by any of the "big six?"

 

 

Wise Words of Anderson Cooper

“Be honest about what you see, get out of the way, and let the story reveal itself.” – Anderson Cooper

Angling Heartstrings

Most journalists I know personally cite many reasons for why they wanted to go into the field: They want their voices to be heard. They like the excitement. They saw the famous movie “All the President’s Men” and decided right then and there that they wanted to be the ruthless and pensive Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. One idealistic aspiration for entering this career field, however, lies at the foundation of their career path – a desire to transform the world for the better.

Reporting is truly a powerful tool in causing change. As the Tom Stoppard quote at the top of my blog says, 

“…if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

The news is where people find out about conflicts that affect the entire globe, and knowledge is the catalyst for change. Anderson Cooper said,

“A lot of compelling stories in the world aren’t being told, and the fact that people don’t know about them compounds the suffering.”

Through reporting alone we can educate and therefore make a difference. The angles we take in our reporting can have an greater affect on the readers’ urge to incite change, as well.

This piece from The New York Times is a prime example of how a different angle, a humanitarian angle, pulls at the heartstrings of its readers, even though they’ve likely read the same kind of story several other times.

When reading about natural disasters, war, or other horrific phenomenon that happen around the world, it’s difficult for most people to really register all the facts and statistics and number of dead, etc. It’s not until an event hits close to home that people really, truly care. So how do you make a tsunami that killed thousands in East Asia, or a bombing in the heart of Baghdad, affect the thoughts and emotions of people living in the Midwestern United States? You do it by putting a human face on the facts and statistics. 

Everyone knows that there’s perpetual conflict happening all around the Middle East. It seems there’s a new headline every day about a suicide bomber blowing up a building somewhere in Afghanistan, resulting in tens of civilian casualties. It’s been going on for decades now, and as sad as it is, humans become desensitized to this kind of news, glancing over the headline as though it were another annoying denture ad. I wish I could claim freedom from the guilt of this myself, but we’ve all done it. This story from The New York Times, however, caught my eye because it gave the same old story in a whole new way.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times Bibi Hawa with daughters               

Behishta, 5, left, and Mursal, 7, and a son, Faisal, 6, at home in Kabul.

Ms. Hawa lost two daughters, Khorshid, 15, and Parwana, 11, in

a suicide bombing on Sept. 8.

Instead of simply reporting on the fact that a suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of a street resulting in an uncertain number of casualties, the reporter tells the story through the lens of a family who lost two teenage daughters in the blast: how the girls’ other siblings desperately tried searching through the piles of severed and bloody limbs for their older sisters, how the mother found out, the grief of the father, and the nightmares of the shopkeeper who watched it all happen in front of his store.

It’s all fact, but it’s fact through a human lens. This article made me emotional, even though I’ve read so many articles and heard so many times on popular media outlets about suicide bombers blowing up streets.

This article brings close the stories of these beggar children who are literally risking their lives every time they go outside to play. In this way, it might bring people closer to wanting to stop this madness, if they can only see its impact on a human level. It brings people closer to wanting to save the world.