Witnessing Haiti 1/21

Carly Yuenger

On yesterday's show we took the time to talk about our emotional reaction to the devastation in Haiti and about how witnessing the suffering of others, as difficult as it is, can be productive.

Witnessing pain and destruction can make us feel numb and disconnected. It can even bolster negative stereotypes. But, as our guests and callers pointed out, it can also bring about empathy, solidarity, political resolve, and understanding.

Take a listen as our guests, Kaethe (kay-tah) Weingarten, a Harvard professor of psychology and the director of the Witnessing Project, and Carrie Rentschler, a communications professor at McGill, talk us through the pitfalls and potentials of witnessing.

Or, leave a comment below with your thoughts:

• How has the media coverage of Haiti made you feel?
  
• How do you keep from feeling "compassion fatigue"?
  
• How can we transform our concern for the people of Haiti into something that lasts after the media coverage subsides?

Walter Cronkite and Journalism Today

Carly Yuenger

On today's show we remember the life and work of journalist and news anchor Walter Cronkite by thinking hard about what journalism was, is, and can be.

When Walter Cronkite started out, there were only 3 national broadcasting networks and the evening news lasted 15 minutes! Journalistic practices, the news, and the media through which we get it have all undoubtedly changed in the last 50 years, and changes seem to come faster and faster through ever-evolving new forms of media and new uses of old media.

The use of Twitter during the unrest following the recent Iranian elections and the ever-increasing number of 24-hour cable news channels suggests we have a lot to catch up on with regard to how we think about and use news media.

But this doesn't mean we can no longer tell the difference between better and worse news and news sources. The values that made Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America may help us sift through the news we encounter today. It may, however, demand that we look longer and harder for the good stuff and that we become better and more critical news consumers.

How do you think we as news consumers should catch up with the times? What does good journalism mean to you? What does it mean to be a critical news consumer and what today makes it difficult to be one? Add a comment below or leave a voicemail for our mailbag segment at 1-877-GLOBE-07

Bill Moyers Answered My Questions During Live Chat

Lisa Bu

Bill Moyers, host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, is one of my most respected people. He had a live chat on the PBS web site Tuesday. Many people have submitted questions, and I did too, expecting only a slim chance of being picked for answer. But amazingly, he picked both of my questions and gave the following answers. That made my day.

***
Lisa: Where do you get your news among gazillions of sources? Any strategy to overcome information overload?

Bill Moyers: Every morning I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and segments of the Washington Post -- to get a sense of how they are playing the same stories as well as their own original reporting. The Times has done superb coverage on the Great Collapse (my term for what's happening to us.) I spend a couple of hours on several Website--starting with talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM.com), going on to townhall.com to see how the conservative base is responding to the news and alternet.org and/or truthout.org for the liberal perspectives. I graze all day as time allows across a mulitude of sites --news and opinion --and check in occasionally with the AP and Reuters. I also have several newspaper among my "favs" -- Los Angeles Times, Times of London -- that I will visit over the course of a day. I still prefer magazines stacked beside my bed, however -- and right now they include Harper's, Reason, National Review, The American Prospect, In These Times, Mother Jones, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, YES, and the quarterly of the East Texas State Historical Society. I don't have a strategy for managing the information overflow except to read what I want and then ask myself, with the computer off and the magazine closed, what do I thik about what I've just read? Well, actually, I find good movies a great antidote to overanalyzing the news.

***

[The class I refer to in the second question is the J201: Introduction to Mass Communication for which I'm a TA. Sorry I should have said "intro to mass communication" instead of "intro to Journalism" in my question.]

Lisa, Madison, WI: Few of my students in a college intro to Journalism class watch PBS. How do we attract more young citizens to quality/public media?

Bill Moyers: That's our fault in public television . We have too few broadcasts grounded in reporting -- the best is NOW with David Brancaccio and Frontline, the best documentary series since CBS Reports -- so we don't have that farm club I spoke of earlier. Our local stations have too few resources to cultivate new talent. The BBC is a great newsgathering organization because it was established with a dedicated tax that produces revenues of about six billion dollars a year -- that's why listeners and viewers get a feast of news and information not to mention some great cultural programming. Public media in this country has never had the means to grow our own journalists, and we don't now. We need to reconstitute ourselves with at least a third of our programming devoted to news and public affairs and a trust fund to provide the training that produces generation after generation of independent journalists.