A. Award

Colby College News Release (113.0K) (click to enlarge)

Here is a news release from Colby College about a prestigious journalism award to be presented to Bill Kovach. Rewrite the material for a newspaper or broadcast station in Atlanta.

B. Kovach

     Here are excerpts from an address by Bill Kovach on his being honored with the 48th Elijah Lovejoy Award for journalism at Colby College in Waterville, Me. In 1837, Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Ill., by a pro-slavery mob that objected to his anti-slavery editorials. The mob destroyed his press as well. A graduate of Colby, Lovejoy is considered America's first martyr to freedom of the press.
     Kovach worked for The New York Times,  The Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before becoming the curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. After 11 years in that post, he became chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.
     Write 350 words. Presume the address was given today.

     Elijah Parish Lovejoy was born in Albion, Maine, on November 9, 1802, 198 years ago this day.
     Five slugs from a double barrel shotgun ended his life in Alton, Illinois, in 1837. He was buried on what would have been his 35th birthday.
     They killed Lovejoy because he believed in the promise of democracy, in human freedom and dignity. After he saw a slave burned at the stake, he said so, persistently and forcefully....
     Journalism does more than inform us. Journalism engages us and allows us to moderate those forces, which shape our lives. Lovejoy used a cast-iron, hand-cranked flat bed press to try to shape and moderate the forces, which distorted the life in slaveholding America. It was a crude instrument, limited in production and distribution, for such an important task.
     Journalists today are equipped with a communications technology, which has the power to recapture Plato's sense of the best path to the truth by recreating person-to-person communication between the eyewitness of an event or the originator of an idea in a venue that allows challenges and questions.
     Journalists today routinely interact with their readers or their viewers around the world as I did several days ago by e-mail recently after an appearance on Jim Lehrer's News Hour. Doubters could challenge my views and I had the opportunity to sharpen or modify my own ideas.
     But for all that the means of journalism have changed since Lovejoy's time its purpose has remained constant, if not always well served. For all that the speed and the techniques and the character of news delivery have changed, there is a clear theory and philosophy of journalism which Lovejoy knew and which flows out of the function of news and it is this: the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self governing.
     We entered the 21st century with a communications web with over 200 million people connected by the Internet worldwide. It is abundantly clear that the technology permits the creation of endless communities of interests.
     Yet despite the potential it is far from clear whether the communications revolution will fully realize the possibilities of the democratizing power that it has made available.
     This is so, in part, because of a coincidence of three events: the end of the cold war; the opening of the Internet; and the globalization of commerce. In combination these forces dramatically change the political and economic forces that shape today's press. Beginning as early as Lyndon Johnson's great society and continuing at an accelerated pace after the end of the cold war, political power has significantly shifted from the federal to the state government level.
     But the organization of the press as a tool for democratic engagement has not shifted accordingly. The national focus of the most powerful news media—the national newspaper and broadcast television—keep the American people much better informed about the activities of their federal government than of state governments. Local television, in fact, does not even cover state government on a daily basis in most states.
     Globalization places news organizations inside conglomerates without borders for whom the notion of citizenship and traditional community is obsolete. For these market-driven organizations their news division are valued for their ability to attract a mass audience; for the sale of the corporation's other products such as nuclear power generators or entertainment; and for the political access and influence they can command. They are among the richest and most active special interest groups, which lobby government at all levels in the United States. Their power became starkly apparent when their lobby in Washington shaped the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major revision of the laws since 1934, and essentially turned over control of the public air waves to private forces for an international competition which favors monopoly power.
     We are seeing for the first time the rise of a market-based journalism divorced from the idea of civic responsibility. Consider the words of Rupert Murdoch talking about his company winning television rights in Singapore.
     "Singapore is not liberal, but it's clean and free of drug addicts. Not so long ago it was an impoverished, exploited colony with famines, diseases and other problems. Now people find themselves in three-room apartments with jobs and clean sheets. Material incentives create business and the free market economy. If politicians try it the other way around with Democracy first, the Russian model is the result. Ninety percent of the Chinese are interested more in a better material life than in the right to vote."
     These words by a modern publisher advocating capitalism without democracy have no meaningful precedent in American journalism history. Yet there is a growing list of examples of ownership subordinating journalism to commercial interests. The day Time magazine was acquired by America Online, Time-Warner chairman Gerald Levin called the move "a natural fit." The fact that one company had a journalistic mission and the other had none, or that the journalists at Time magazine, CNN or Fortune might now have conflicting loyalties when trying to cover the Internet, cable and a host of other areas of commercial activity, all seemed incidental.
     Similarly, Michael Eisner, head of a media empire, which includes ABC News, says he does not think it appropriate that "Disney cover Disney." In the mind of the man who runs the conglomerate ABC News has not only lost its distinctive identity but now has to struggle with whether and how it can cover its parent $23 billion corporation whose global operations range from sports teams and theme parks to cable channels and Internet portals.
     Thus private interest is elevated above public interest. These forces may gradually shape the First Amendment as less the protector of the citizen's right of free speech than as a private economic right.
     Michael Sandel, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University has wondered if, "there should be a nagging voice in us all asking: is democracy going to be bought up too?"...
     These uses of the technology not only change the universe with which the institutions are concerned; they also change the content the companies provide. You can see this impact most dramatically on entertainment companies as they utilize the power of computers to produce more dramatic and violent action movies—movies that need no translation and generate worldwide sales and income.
     In community after community, cable systems have opened local government action to the public in a way never possible before, "creating a novel kind of television news [bringing] events directly to the people, 'gavel-to-gavel' without editing or interpretation. The audiences are small...but they are huge compared to the numbers who actually show up at a city council meeting or a house debate."
     The key, then, lies not with the technology but with how the technology is organized. The Internet is a powerful tool for mobilizing people who are already motivated to seek out specific information. This power was clearly demonstrated by the rise of a new generation of protestors who showed up in Seattle to attack the policies of the World Trade Organization, and the international monetary fund, and other "anonymous institutions of economic power." It was seen in the ability of a woman named Jody Williams and an assortment of non-government organizations to force reluctant national governments around the world to accept an international treaty to ban the use of land mines in warfare.
     Toward the end of the last century Larry Grossman, former president of the public television system and NBC television, looked ahead to the impact of the new technology on the democratic process and sounded this warning:
     "As we go about the complicated task of reshaping representative government and redistributing political power in the electronic republic, we must retain the delicate constitutional balance between local and national, between private interests and the public good, and between minority freedom and majority rule. Those will not be easy tasks. But we cannot afford to miss the opportunity to use these new means of communication for the public benefit."
     To accomplish that, the theory of journalism that we have inherited from Elijah Parish Lovejoy must inform the basis of journalism for a new century—a journalism of sense making based on synthesis, verification, and a fierce independence. These are the values that hold the only protection against the forces that threaten to subsume journalism inside a world of commercialized speech.
     History has taught us by bloody experience what happens to a society in which the citizens act on the basis of self-interested information, whether that be the propaganda of a despotic state or the edicts of a sybaritic leisure class substituting bread and circus for sovereignty....
     News decisions based on the same goal of mass appeal tend to filter out important complex social and political stories, which might draw only limited audiences.
  &  So we've come to this: after struggling for centuries to remain free of government control and censorship public interest journalism now finds itself struggling with similar pressures from private ownership. Independent journalism may in the end be dissolved in the solvent of commercial communication and synergistic self-promotion. The real meaning of the First Amendment—that a free press means an independent press—is threatened for the first time in our history even without government meddling....
     Civilization has produced one idea more powerful than any other, the notion that people can govern themselves. And it has created a largely unarticulated theory of information to sustain that idea called journalism. The two rise and fall together.
     Our freedom in a digital century depends upon not forgetting the past, or the theory of news it produced, in a surge of faith in technological and corporate rebirth.
     For, in the end, if the life and death of Elijah Parish Lovejoy teaches us anything, it teaches us that freedom and democracy do not depend upon technology or organization so much as they depend upon individuals who invest themselves in a belief in freedom and human dignity.

C. Cecil

     You are covering a talk given by John R. Hunt, the Cobalt bureau manager for the North Bay (Canada) Nugget. Hunt has been with the newspaper 40 years and writes a widely read column and broadcasts a commentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Presume that the talk was given at a Freeport Kiwanis Club luncheon meeting at Clark's Cafe. Write 250 to 300 words.

     My car was making a funny noise the other day, so I took it to one of those antiseptic palaces, where I described the symptoms to a nice young lady, who called in a distinguished-looking gentleman with a stethoscope around his neck and a certificate on the wall which announced that he was a doctor of motors.
     My car was taken away while I sat in a luxurious waiting room, reading old magazines and wondering what the experts were doing. Eventually I was told that my car was ready. I was presented with the bill and wrote a check, then drove frantically to my bank, where I persuaded the manager to cover it, and by the time I got home the car was making the same funny noise again. So I went for a beer at the Legion, and bumped into Cecil, the retired mechanic.
     Cecil is retired, most reluctantly, because he is just about 65 years old. He doesn't see too well, because he always insisted on using a cold chisel without any goggles and got a chunk of steel in one eye, and then he damaged the other eye because he insisted on using a welding torch, again, without any goggles.
     But oh, how I wish Cecil, and all the other old mechanics I have known, were still in business today.
They didn't wear white coats; in fact, they were usually covered in grease from head to foot. They didn't use a stethoscope. Cecil could stick his thumb against the block, feel the vibrations and tell you if you needed new spark plugs, new points or a ring job.
     Cecil was a man of very strong opinions and ran his own garage for years. In fact, he refused to work on my car for a long time because he was a dog lover, and when I was a member of the local council, I hired a dog catcher who picked up Cecil's dog. Cecil beat the dog catcher to a pulp and paid a heavy fine. But he also refused to work on my car, or any one else's car who supported dog catchers. In fact, I believe he refused to work on the town truck, with the result that our snow-removal program was paralyzed.
     If you called Cecil out late at night, he took a pair of pliers and some baling wire and a hammer. If he couldn't get the car to start with minor adjustments, he would attack it with the hammer and beat it into submission.
     If you visited Cecil in his garage, you didn't sit in a waiting room. If you were lucky, you found an old crate or an orange box, and generally you took some newspapers with you to spread or you would have to take your clothes to the cleaners. And, if Cecil liked you, he would direct you to the back of the shop, where you could usually find some potent antifreeze and a fairly clean tin cup.
     But Cecil could take the motor out of a Chevy and put it into a Ford, welding new mounts and making new connections. He could take some beat-up jalopy that a teen-ager had paid twenty bucks for, and make it sing like a bird. And, if Cecil told you that your car was finished, you didn't argue, you had it towed to the dump.
     And, when you got a bill from Cecil, you shoved it in your hip pocket and told him that you'd settle up on pay day, or maybe later, and he would only chuckle, or let rip with a few cuss words, and then crawl back into his grease pit and flail away with his hammer.
     There are still a few Cecils out there. Running one-man garages, charging moderate bills and doing a good job. If you know one, cherish him, treat him gently, even buy him a drink, because as cars grow more complicated, and motorists more helpless, the Cecils of the automotive world are a precious and rare breed. But, I'd take him, covered in grease, smelling of booze and swearing like a trooper, in preference to all the white-coated doctors of motors that I know.