"The end of cartooning as we know it"

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That’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Peters’s fear. Barack Obama is a lot harder for satirists like Peters and other editorial cartoonists to lampoon than John McCain. For Peters and his fellow cartoonists, Campaign 2008 has been a gift. See the story on National Public Radio (Click here for full story link.).
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Editorial Cartoonists Review Election '08

Campaign Caricatures

Morning Edition, October 28, 2008 · One thing Barack Obama and John McCain have not had to worry about during the long presidential campaign is making caricatures of themselves.

Luckily for them, that’s someone else’s job: editorial cartoonists.

Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Mike Peters of The Dayton Daily News recently joined Renee Montagne to look back at some of the memorable moments of the race between Obama and McCain.

The satirists’ themes are like a history of the campaign: the candidates' early struggles to define themselves; the emergence of Sarah Palin; and America's increasingly gloomy economy.

And both are worried that a victory for Obama could mean hard times for cartoonists.

“He’s just going to be very difficult to mock,” Luckovich said.

“It’s going to be the end of cartooning as we know it,” Peters said.

<more at website>

Book Review: Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies

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The text for Honors Media Smarts (F08). Here’s a review from Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85/2 (Summer 2008), pp. 454-456.

Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies
Howard Good, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2008. 192 pp. $75 hbk. $24.95 pbk

Journalists make great protagonists, and that’s why novelists and filmmakers love them. Accountants and mechanics rarely find themselves in the sorts of professional pickles that journalists do. And the very nature of journalism gives its practitioners complex lives in the path of action. What more could a storyteller want?

Beyond mere structural convenience, however, there’s something about the fundamental nature of the business that has attracted generations of writers and directors. It’s the ethical quandaries that journalists face. Reporters are rarely portrayed as simple heroes, and they are almost always portrayed as deeply flawed people, unhappy in love and usually with one or more substances regularly abused.

The focus in Howard Good’s Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies, which collects essays by Good and 11 other scholars, is on the complex relationship between journalists and truth. More than the rah-rah dig-us hero worship of All the President’s Men, the films dissected in this book of essays pose complex problems, perfectly suitable for discussion in journalism ethics classes.

Reaching back to pre-Second World War America, the writers mull the conniving reporter of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and the hero-worshiping/truth-denying sports scribe in Pride of the Yankees. These sorts of movies have been around since Hollywood’s Golden Age. And Citizen Kane, of course, perhaps the greatest of all American films, serves up a couple of ethical whoppers that would be at home in any class discussion.

Beyond the devastatingly negative portrayal of journalists’ personal habits, films often focus on reporters skirting the truth for some other end than the public’s right to know. In Under Fire, a photojournalist fakes a picture. In His Girl Friday, a convicted felon is hidden by a reporter in need of a scoop. In Ace in the Hole, a down-on-his-luck reporter tries to resuscitate his career by hindering the rescue of a trapped cave explorer—at least until his story plays out.

Most of the essayists in Good’s volume look at fairly recent films, always with an eye not only toward the ethical issue presented onscreen, but how these films can be used to help student journalists develop richer morals and values.

Shattered Glass, from 2003, focuses on one of the most pernicious problems in the profession today—the fabricating journalist. Based on the story of New Republic reporter Stephen Glass, the film shows his utter disconnect from the world of the journalists around him. Yet most of the magazine staff seems charmed by the self-deprecating Glass. It’s only when the unpopular young editor of the magazine, Chuck Lane, is approached by an online journalist that he begins asking questions about Glass and the sources for his stories. Glass has gone to great lengths in his subterfuge, creating Web sites for the bogus companies he mentions in his stories, and setting up phone lines with answering machines to throw fact-checkers off track. He has the rest of the staff on his side, charming and flattering them, and so the editor emerges virtually as the lone hero trying to publicly do the filthiest of media laundry. Eventually, his diligence forces the other staff members to see beyond the smiling, well-groomed charmboy to the dark heart of a serial liar, whose fabrications cut to the very heart of the New Republic’s—and journalism’s—core commodity: credibility.

At the opposite end of the ethical spectrum is 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck (does that comma bother anyone else?), the rare film that shows a journalist modeling traditional heroic attributes. Like Shattered Glass, it comes from a true story—in this case, the oft-told tale of CBS broadcasting icon Edward R. Murrow’s lonely battle against the dangerous demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the red-scare 1950s. The movie, much like reality, probably doesn’t tip its hat enough to other journalists who began attacking McCarthy and his –ism earlier, suggests writer Michael Dillon, but the point is that when Murrow pulled the rug out from under the meglomaniacal McCarthy, it was on television, in front of a huge audience. Murrow is played spot-on by actor David Straithairn, and a bespectacled George Clooney tackles the supporting role of producer Fred Friendly.

Both of these films pose ethical questions that go to the heart of journalism, and Good’s contributors do a nice job of discussing this core issue. One portrays a villain, the other a hero. Films are generally limited to two hours by virtue of sitting-tolerance, and so naturally some messy accuracies and historical events are telescoped. In his essay on Shattered Glass, Matthew C. Ehrlich of the University of Illinois notes that we never get an indication of Glass’s motive: why did he deceive? The inside-the-office detective story provides the substance of the film. Yet that lapse in storytelling becomes a wonderful teachable moment. The motive is the part of the picture left blank, with room for the viewer to put in the coloring. Well, class … why did he do it?
And that’s true of most of the films covered in the book: The Paper, Wag the Dog, Absence of Malice, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Broadcast News, Veronica Guerin, The Year of Living Dangerously and Welcome to Sarajevo. None of these films, successful and complete as works of cinematic art, wraps their ethical issues up in a simple happy ending. If there is one consistent message, it is that nothing is simple and rarely are endings truly happy.

Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies examines mostly recent films about reporters at a crossroads. But beyond the mere declamation of what the films show, Good’s book has imminent practical value, filled as it is with questions for further discussion and other teaching suggestions.

WILLIAM MCKEEN University of Florida

Censoring Movies—More on the Hays Code

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As part of our examination of the role of movies in U.S. society, it is worthwhile looking at efforts to “control” Hollywood and to “protect” Americans from undesirable movie content.

In addition to the Pease chapter on Hollywood and Free Expression elsewhere on AskDrTed, I recommend this from National Public Radio for more on issues of “controlling” film. Read, listen and view this piece by Bob Mondello, and think about these issues in the context of what we’ve been discussing about the roles, impacts and relationships between mass media messages and society. The motivation behind the Hays Code was....what? And how can you relate those issues to the mass communication theories we’ve studied, and what we’ve been examining in terms of free expression and mass communication and society?

(here’s an excerpt)
Movies: Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On
by Bob Mondello
All Things Considered, August 8, 2008

When people talk about the “more innocent” Hollywood of years gone by, they’re referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn’t always so innocent.

For decades, it’s true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be “wholesome” and “moral” and encourage what the studios called “correct thinking.”

But that code, which was officially abandoned 40 years ago this year, was the result of a nationwide backlash — an outraged reaction to a Hollywood that by 1922 had come to seem like a moral quagmire, even by the bathtub-gin-and-speakeasy standards of the Roaring ’20s.
click here>

News IQ????

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Guys:

This is kind of fun. Go to this website, part of the Pew Research Center, and take the News IQ test.

The Pew Center is one of the top U.S. research outfits on media issues, and conducts tons of polls and studies—some of which might be of interest for story ideas.

Writing—More on Nut Grafs

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What is a “nut graf”? Is it an essential component of the well-constructed story?

The short answer is this: The nut graf, coming high in the story (~3rd/4th graf, depending), answers the “So what?” question. After the lead—summary or narrative or whatever—it is a pause as the story gets under way that explains in a tight, focused kernel why the story is important. Does it repeat a summary lead? No. It expands the summary lead “hook” to give the reader the larger picture.

A summary lead might say:

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama met for the third and final televised debate of their long and hard-fought campaign at Hofstra University Wednesday in an encounter that highlighted their differences on economic issues and someone called “Joe the Plumber.”

The nut graf, coming after a background and possibly a quote graf, would expand that summary to answer reader questions, highlight implications and address the “So what?” question—why does it matter?

Though tough and substantive, the debate apparently did little to change the trajectory toward election day, less than three weeks away, as the Democratic candidate maintains a substantial lead in national polls

For more on Nut Grafs, see these links through the Poynter Institute for Media Studies:

1. The Nut Graf, Part I

2. The Nut Graf and Breaking News

3. The (Sometimes) Superfluous Nut

. . . and this from “No Train, No Gain,” the site for writing coaches:

1. Nut Grafs

2. “So What?” Graphs [sic]

Colbert on Global Warming

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Glacial Horrors in Higher Ed!

Steven Colbert reveals that professors at one Rhode Island college force students to think! Click here for brief video.

Columns—Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas at our Wedding

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Remembering a wedding
and a (continuing) national trial

By Ted Pease
©1997

Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas came to our wedding.

It was an intimate affair, as they say, at a small Vermont inn on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, 17 years ago today.

It had snowed that morning, then turned to rain, so the skies were gray. Everything else was wet and slushy. Except inside Shore Acres Inn, where Brenda finally made an honest man of me.

There were just seven of us: My sister and her boyfriend were there from Maine. The justice of the peace was the innkeeper/bartender who took off his gloves and Minnesota Twins hat, put down a squash and did the deed. The dogs wanted to come, but they were muddy. Then there was Brenda and me. And in the ether, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were there, too.

Hill, a law professor from Oklahoma, was accusing Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually harassing her when he was her boss at the EEOC. They weren’t really at our wedding, of course, but they were very much present. Come to think of it, so were Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio, and the entire Senate Judiciary Committee.

I am the first to admit that I’m terrible with dates—I have been known to forget my own birthday. It’s not that finally getting Brenda to marry me isn’t the most important event in my life, but without Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, I probably would have a hard time remembering Oct. 12, 1991.

Sexual harassment is not something most of us associate with our wedding anniversary. At least I hope not. But engraved in my memory of the day I got married are the images and sounds of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the voices of now-Justice Thomas, Senators Biden and Kennedy, Specter, Hatch and Simpson, and — most of all — that of a courageous and doomed junior law professor from Oklahoma.

The Hill-Thomas hearings reemerge every time we observe our wedding anniversary.

From Washington came a flurry of live, primetime televised hearings by the all-male, all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a black man nominated by then-President George H. W. Bush to the Supreme Court. A “high-tech lynching” was what Thomas called it, invoking race while deflecting questions over both his qualifications and his conduct.

That morning (Columbus Day, a national holiday honoring a white man who “discovered” America and helped eradicate the native peoples already living here — but that’s another tale), the Thomas hearings were live on TV and radio as we ate breakfast and dressed for our wedding. Distracted by both unfolding dramas, we didn’t talk much; same for many Americans, I guess, 60 percent of whom told pollsters they watched the hearings “closely.”

The story was riveting, and continued on the car radio as we drove to the wedding. When we got there, the innkeeper/JP greeted us at the woodpile, where he’d been chopping kindling. He had headphones in his ears and the Walkman tuned to the same National Public Radio station, which also was on inside, with Sen. Arlen Specter brutally cross-examining Anita Hill as we got ready. They turned off the radio while we got married, but it came back on afterward, amid congratulations, photos, brunch. On the 60-mile drive to Montreal, we held hands, and listened more. High above downtown Montreal, in the honeymoon suite of the grand old hotel le Reine Elizabeth, we opened champagne, put on the fluffy bathrobes, and turned on CNN.

So it is that Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill will forever be part of how I remember my wedding.

A lot of important things happened that weekend, 17 years ago now, and we’re still living with most of them. For me, the most important was marrying Brenda, obviously—a glorious thing. And for all women and men in America, the events surrounding Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to serve a life term on the U.S. Supreme Court still resonate.

Anita Hill put her life—and Clarence Thomas’s—on the line. She didn’t win that fight, but she also didn’t lose: As a result of what she began, women and men across the nation began an uncomfortable but important process of reviewing issues of sexual harassment and sexual power that have been open secrets for too long. One long-term result is the current series of courts martial in the military, where 70 percent of female officers and enlisted have said they have been sexually harassed. Another was a booming commerce in gender books, new life to authors such as Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, Susan Faludi, Robert Bly and Deborah Tannen, all cashing in on how men and women relate with themselves and each other.

Ironically perhaps, the Hill-Thomas hearings ushered in 1992, called “The Year of the Woman.” In an interview that year, journalist-cum-TV producer Linda Ellerbe told me that she thought three women—Anita Hill, along with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and Murphy Brown, the TV character who had a well-publicized squabble with Vice President Dan Quayle—had helped start a process that “forced people to rethink their attitudes toward women.” More importantly, Ellerbe said, they “caused women to rethink how we see ourselves.”

“Each of those women,” Ellerbe said, “has through the mass media moved us an inch here or a couple of inches there. Mainly, they did it by being women without apology.”

Today, 17 years after her part in what may have been the most important political dispute between the sexes since suffrage, Anita Hill remains a woman without anything to apologize for. In her book, as in her testimony 17 years ago this weekend, Hill calmly and directly speaks truth to those in power, a courageous example to the rest of us.

Anita, thanks again for the wedding gift. Brenda sends her best.

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This column ran in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal in 1997. ©Ted Pease