And a Pole shall lead them

The second panel I saw at the PEN World Voices New York Festival of International Literature (which can be heard here) was Whose News?: A Global Perspective on What Makes News and Why. The panel was structured around this:

How are journalism and news media influenced by cultural and political factors that vary widely from one region to another? Do media moderate or reinforce these differences? What responsibilities do these factors impose on journalists reporting for an international audience?

The panelists were:
Moderator Nicholas Lemann, a calm and slightly detached man who's the dean of Columbia's journalism school; he took everything in stride, and seemed to be beyond passion--for him, it was just the night's gig. He informed us at the start there would be no opening statements, he was just going to start throwing out a question to each panelist. It worked well, although really, his questions were nothing special.

Adam Michnik, the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, which his bio lists as the "first independent Polish daily newspaper," founded in 1989. He was great, in a very particular way--he had an interpreter, and much of the panel consisted of him going on harangues, in the stereotypical gruff Slavic way, followed by her translating, and then him going off again. Lemann's first question for him was basically what kind of pressures does your paper face--he said economic and political, and that it was easy to resist when it was your enemies attacking you but harder when it's your friends making 'requests'. He said things like a real journalist must never have friends in government; and freedom and truth are in permanent deficit. No wonder communism fell, the guy was like a force of nature.

Juan Luis Cebrián was on this panel as well; he took some ribbing from his friend Michnik about all the friends he has in government. He talked about fighting commercial pressures, and how at least in his case he has right of veto over advertising content as well.

Åsne Seierstad, a pretty Norwegian journalist and novelist who wrote about her experiences in Afghanistan in The Bookseller of Kabul and her time in Iraq in 110 Days and her stint in Serbia in With Their Back to the World. She said she doesn't think there's any such thing as neturality, and aspiring to it would be boring. She was kind of a lightweight on this panel and knew it, several times deferring to others to answer a question first. She recounted how the bookseller she wrote about was unhappy with the way he was portrayed and thus has now shown up in Norway, where he's suing her and also writing a book, about her (well, actually, 6 chapters about his true story, 3 about her--he's apparently going around interviewing her colleagues and friends).

Gianni Riotta, a neat and kind-faced Italian newspaper editor who had the audience laughing at all sorts of things even while he'd protest "you're not supposed to laugh". He said to Seierstad that she was the hero of the clash of civilizations, while the audience laughed he said no, seriously, the fact that this guy is suing you and writing his own book is great, we want Osama to sue us. In response to Lemann's question about Italian politics, he said "the biggest defeat of my life" was how objectivity and firmness, what he called the classic virtues of American journalism, were losing in Italy (and here). He also empahsized how hard it is to find common fabric nowadays.

So the second round of questioning focused on how journalists can present truth. Cebrián said as someone who studied philosophy (I challenge you to find an American editor who could say that!) earlier in life, truth is a very strong word--he preferred to focus on printing facts. It's tough though, he said, since the largest newsroom in the world is the secret services of the U.S. government; and that government lying in general is a huge problem.

Michnik said only God is objecitve, which is why humans need the commandment not to lie. He also said that he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, unlike everyone else on the panel, because he always picked democracies when they're up against totalitarian regimes. It's interesting, Poland was like our staunchest ally--I wonder how much of it had to do with his paper, or if it was the other way around.

Riotta said about truth he doesn't underestimate the intelligence of his readers, but doesn't overestimate the lack of information they have. He agreed with Cebrián (who everyone looked to as an elder statesman) and said you have to make a stab at truth in order to try and get at the facts. Life is tragic he said... followed by "don't laugh." He ended with a tangent, that the Internet was supposed to be the great bridge, but instead has become a divider, with everyone seeking out what confirms their beliefs.

Seierstad picked up the Internet thread, saying everything happens so fast now--which is why we need books, where you can digest and dig deeper. She contrasted searching for facts with finding knowledge.

Third question was whether the Danish newspaper editor did the right thing in purposedly seeking offensive Muslim cartoons. Cebrián asked for whom? His paper? Even if it was a mistake, you're allowed to make mistakes in a free country.

Michnik said he didn't publish the cartoons for "lowly" reasons, namely he didn't want Polish embassies to get attacked. But he strongly defended the right of any newspaper to print them if they had wanted to.

Final question was how newspapers handle political correctness--both in response to the left and the right, Lehmann specified. Michnik said in his days they didn't discuss certain things, but less self-censorship, more good upbringing. Funny, I noticed a lot of people reacted to his interesting comments before the translation, he must really be a big deal among Poles.

Nobody else really had much to offer on this question; Michnik jumped in on an audience one about China, saying Polish papers once published their front page as it would look under censorship in Belarus, with lots of blacked-out words and sentences; he thought the Times and the Post should do the same one day, with what it'd look like in China. He asked people to talk to Chinese dissidents--they may be bitter, they may exaggerate a bit, but they know the truth... which journalists who can't even speak the language can't get to. He ended by saying that democracy in China was the #1 question for the world's future.

It was interesting, an annoying woman behind me who talked to her faux-intellectual friend throughout actually started yelling "No!" when Michnik jumped in on questions. I guess she didn't like his blunt, excitable style, that with the translator did go twice as long as everyone else.

But journalism needs more people like him, who care and work in plain, straightforward ways. Lehmann at some point said we probably didn't realize how illustrious this panel was--he was right, it's hard to grasp the importance of journalists living in a country that isn't undergoing much in the way of revolution.

I mean, for all our issues and problems, we're not facing the fundamental problems that even Europeans are. And American journalism is caught up in issues that fundamentally boil down to whether media companies can keep making 20-30% profits every year, or whether they're going to join the ranks of the world's non-oil companies.

Photos via PEN.