Old Guard: News in the Raw
“Anonymous” wins a Polk Award? What’s going on here?
The award is of historic journalistic merit, for the network video of the dying of Neda Agha-Soltan, from a bullet wound suffered at a protest in Tehran last June. Right up there with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photos by Eddie Adams of the spontaneous street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner in 1968, and John Paul Filo of the Valley Daily News & Daily Dispatch of Tarentum and New Kensington, Pennsylvania, of a student mourning over the body of a murdered student protester and Kent State in 1970.
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But “anonymous”? Unprecedented. Important.
“Anonymous,” surely plural, were the people who recorded the death scene, uploaded the video to the Internet, and spread it, almost instantaneously, to the world. The award might be, “in a way, a kind of backhanded recognition of the fact that neutral platforms like YouTube and Facebook can actually disseminate news — news in the raw — in addition to being just social networking,” says John Darnton, the new Curator of the Polk Awards, which has just announced its awards for 2009. It may be the ultimate acknowledgment of the news business’ growing, and contentious, resource, in what is widely described as the citizen journalist.
Darnton recalls the deliberations of the Awards Committee, which recognized the drama and impact of the video: “Isn’t that the definition of news?. Something that gets people talking and thinking and reveals something?” Yet, “we all talked about it for quite a while because we’re giving this award at a time when the professional status of journalists is kind of under assault, in a way. By people who think anyone can go out “there and just report on things.”
“I don’t think its brain surgery,” concedes Darnton, who won two Pulitzers himself as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, “but I do think it’s a craft that’s developed over time and includes certain values. As an award program we’d like to uphold those values. We want to pay honor to them, so in this case it went against our grain a little bit, but it is also our way of saying we’re in a new kind of world.”
He does take umbrage, though, against the term “citizen journalist.” “If you’re walking down the street and somebody collapses in front of you and somebody else runs over and administers CPR because they happen to know it, and saves the victim, you wouldn’t go home and say you saw somebody saved by a citizen doctor. You’d say you saw someone saved by a bystander who happened to know CPR. Right?
“Same thing here. I like to call them bystanders — not journalists. Just good bystanders.”
Darnton acknowledges the importance of the amateur bystander’s contribution to the information flow, as observational journalism. accumulating force behind the idea that the “web is the wave of the future, we don’t need newspapers, print is dead, newspapers are arrogant, dinosaurs, etc. It becomes a very emotion-laden argument. But there’s something that they don’t notice, and I wonder if you have: All of what they might call scoops, on the web” — he cites the casually overheard: Trent Lott’s praise for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, George Allen’s macaca remark, Obama’s scorn for the rednecks in Pennsylvania — “All of them have one thing in common, and that is their way of knocking people down. In that sense they’re exposés: You catch people saying incredibly stupid things. Gotcha.”
That’s all news, occasionally of genuine consequence, to be sure, occasionally also unchecked, wrong, and harmful . But the success of the quick-and-easy, sensational, superficial, and cheap of the new media may mask the urgency of the quest for new ways to preserve the values of the old., Darnton believes. “These are not the same as discovering that there’s a program of extraordinary rendition, or wiretapping without court order — the stories that should rock the country to its constitutional foundation.
“It’s almost a different game, so what we have to do is get the web onto the stories of real substance that involve digging and working and money and time and resources. That, I say, is the major problem confronting American journalism today” Absent solution, “who knows, maybe over time consumers will kind of lose the ability to discern what is quality and what isn’t.”
So far, “people still want quality journalism,” Darnton contends, with enthusiasm. The question is: Do they value it enough? How can it be funded? Through what model?
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Video: “Neda Iran”
Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
