Poland's "Homosexual Problem"

The fish rots from the head.

It’s a Polish expression. I heard it through the simultaneous translation at the “Bridges of Tolerance” conference in Krakow November 27-29. The interpreter told me it’s a common Polish expression when talking about problems in politics or society. I take it to mean that if you’re thinking is corrupt, your actions will be corrupt as well.

I was invited to the conference to provide an “American” perspective on how the media covers gay and lesbian issues. Of course, there is no monolithic “American” perspective but I did my best.

The topic is especially sensitive in Poland, which is deeply Catholic, unlike Ireland with its strained distrust thanks to ongoing priest and nun abuse accounts which continue to pop up, and unlike the United States where many American Catholics are quite happy to break to with the Vatican on birth control, abortion and accepting gays and lesbians without believing they are sinning.

In Poland, the Catholic Church is the symbol of resistance against the Russians and before them the Nazis, and before the Nazis, the Russians again. Pope John Paul II was Polish, and involved in the underground during World War II, so Poland has a special relationship with the Vatican, and have a deserved pride (although few Poles would comment on the Vaticans conspicuous silence during the Spanish Civil War, the 20th century’s bloody Catholic fratricide from which the Vatican stayed away.)

But what they refer to as the “homosexual problem” in Poland has caught them, and the rest of Europe, off guard. The country is not only traditional but homogenous, so when gays and lesbians flexed their free expression muscle by putting on a gay pride parade in Warsaw in 2005 without permission from the city, it was the country’s first experience with a minority demanding to be recognized. And like many other countries before them, it was met with resistance.

The Vatican is quite clear about how it regards homosexuality, and Poland takes its cue from Rome. But it has now become an issue for many gay and lesbian activists who say they are discriminated against. They won a small victory the summer of 2006 when the city of Warsaw allowed a gay pride parade, but gays and lesbians face a much tougher opponent: Polish national identity, which many feel threatened by entry into the European Union, and the introduction of the euro by 2012.

The Polish press is a mirror of this confusion about how to address “the homosexual problem”. And I think that’s quite normal, as I said on this panel about how gay and lesbian issues are covered in the media. Participating in a democracy, whether as a journalist watch dogging government and powerful organizations, or whether as a private citizen marching in a gay pride parade, or advocating for restricted recognition of gays civil rights, is messy, and often times unpleasant. But it’s the anti-perspirant on the stench of corruption and injustice, and without an independent media and press, the foulness of the fish head rotting would creep deep into the roots of Polish society.

The more the topic is debated in Poland in an independent media and press, the more I think gays and lesbians will be recognized as a part of Poland. The door has opened, and the church is right to think now it will lead to greater demands. But that is the natural progression of a society that values freedom of assembly and freedom of expression and the rule of law – the smell of rot disappears once the fish grows a new head.

The German Media Landscape: Destruction of a Free Press?

The front page of der Tagesspiegel last week had a hefty center piece on the train strike, which is taking a toll on Germany's import and export system, which relies on the trains to bring and deliver goods to the country. An important national, if not European, story for Germans. 

But another story, also on the front page, but pushed off to the left hand margin, was an article about der Tagesspiegel's discovery that the police had intercepted their reporters' mail and eavesdropped on their interviews with source. Similarly, NDR, the public broadcasting station learned that not only reporters, but an editor, had been caught up in the surveillance of suspects during the course of interviewing them for a story. 

The director of NDR, Jobst Plog was clear about the ramifications for a free press in Germany if it is confirmed that a district attorney gave the go ahead to conduct the surveillance as part of an investigation of alleged left wing radicals. 

Surveillance in Germany takes a different tone than in the United States. Most Americans haven't felt the fear or paranoia of being spied on by the government. We've had a few moments: the McCarthy era, and blackballing people for alleged Communist affiliation. J. Edgar Hoover's almost Nazi like obssession with keeping files on everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Robert Kennedy to Abbie Hoffmann. 

But they were not ordinary people leading ordinary lives. They took risks, they antagonized. An FBI file is almost a badge of honor, because it indicates that you raised to the level of importance that the government ought to know what you were doing. 

Not so in Germany. During the Nazi regime, students regularly reported on their parents comments at the dinner table to teachers, who reported it to the local Gestapo. Anyone who criticized Adolph Hitler at a private party could be arrested; anyone who spoke out against the government even in passing to a friend could be detained. And anyone could be listening: your neighbor, your teacher, your aunts and uncles. It was a regime that turned people on each other. 

When the country was split, the Communist Erich Honecker, after 9 years imprisoned by the Nazis, took lessons from the Communisty Party head and eventually lead the most notorious secret service in the world: the Stasi. After the wall fell, and people burst into the basements of the Palast der Republik, they found millions upon millions of files. The Stasi had kept records on everyone, East and West Germans. And they had lists of informers, some paid, some "informal". When the German government received the Stasi files from the CIA in 2000, the BBC reported on the concern about exposing former West Germans as Stasi agents. Families are learning that a beloved relative was in fact an informer; wives learning that husbands were spying on them, and vice versa. As an individual you can request your file and look at it, but it's so sensitive, even 17 years after the wall has come down, that no one except journalists or researchers, are allowed to look at the Stasi files. Journalists are prohibited from publishing or broadcasting information from the Stasi files that were collected through secret methods, like taping a conversation without someone's knowledge or taking their picture without them knowing. But of course, the Stasi was all about secrecy, and the majority of the information was collected secretly. 

That was chilling enough. One of the first things the U.S. did when it "denazified" Germany after the war was building up an independent press. It has served the country well, from the undercover reports of Guenther Walraff on living as a Turkish factor worker to the exposure of the Hitler diaries as a fake. Germans are engaged in their democracy, proud of it, and they should be. They, and the rest of the world, paid a heavy price for it. 

When the press learns that it's government has been spying on them, spying on their whereabouts with sources, how can Germans begin the road to trusting each other, and reporters? In so many ways, it is a young democracy, a young nation state, and it is an infant in trusting the stewards of its democracy - the press - to safeguard the promises of the German constitution, one of which is the right to privacy. German privacy laws are very strict, and when you think about the history, you understand why. The press cannot function effectively if the government is spying on reporters in the interests of national security. The press cannot safeguard the freedoms demanded in the constitution when a government deploys its powers to secretly collect information. That is a step in the direction of a military junta, of a type of dictatorship. It's not of an individual, but it's of an entity, like the Nazis, who pass laws and exercise them for the "safety" of the country. The Nazis were democratically elected, and within two years, stripped Germany of its democratic practices. The country has come so far, and it's a leader for other European nations. It's time to leave the secrecy behind, and let the sunshine begin to heal the sores of government chafing. 

The German Media Landscape, Part One

The shocking tale of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung giving up its tradition of no pictures on the front page has gripped the pundits in Germany. Journalism in Germany is declining, the standards are being lowered, und so weiter und sofort as they say here in the Fatherland.

I have always thought pictures were dangerous to journalism. You know that one of the Afghan refugee girl with the haunted eyes on the cover of National Geographic? That was a bad call. And raising of the flag at Iwo Jima? What a load of tripe to even consider for placement on the pages of a newspaper.

Photojournalism has a provided some of the iconic moments of history. And God forbid you create a newspaper that (gasp!) more people would want to read. The BILD is of course awful, but the paper is a well known tabloid and it's cheap to buy too. I don't think the FAZ is falling into this category.

German newspapers are not quite in the position as American papers. It's a fairly literate population, but of course this is changing as younger readers turn to the Internet. But this change is slow, since unlike the U.S., Germany hasn't had a recent baby boom. The last one occurred when all the boys and men disappeared into the eastern and western fronts and never returned in 1945. So these people will keep things afloat, and quite healthy for many years to come.

Still, German publishers are turning to the web as in the U.S. A recent article the English edition of Der Spiegel 'The Perils of Online First' goes into detail about the efforts of newspapers to publish first on the web and neglect the print product, which is a bit like shooting themselves into the foot. Uwe Knüpfer is experimenting with an online publication in the Ruhr area of Germany but it's a hard sell. They too are searching for the holy grail of how to make journalism on the Internet financially sustainable, and hopefully lucrative in the long run.

The article I think neglects one perspective, and that is that journalism standards are not necessarily neglected on the web. I'm trying to think of a good example of when that happened, and they don't give one in the article. If anything, there are examples of great online journalism that involve interactivity and better explanations of our society and how it works. The NY Times is doing this, as well as the Washington Post. I'll give a nod to the Star Tribune as well, because they produced excellent work on the plight of Liberians in Minnesota, which made an impact on policy. Even Der Spiegel has wonderful online segments, most recently about the Baader-Meinhof gang and their reign of terror when they murdered politicians and important ministers.

I think the problem lies in that there is a generation of journalists - I would call them the Lost Generation - who are being taught journalism without understanding the ethics of online reporting because their teachers don't know either, and nobody is really talking about it. If they are, I haven't been made aware it. Journalism schools are putting emphasis on new media, which is good, but as far as I can tell, very little on what is right and what is wrong and what the obligations are. I don't pretend to have the answers.

KSTP, Why don't you just change your call letters to USSR?

My leftist buds will no doubt tell me that I'm naive, and my defense of the Hubbard family owned KSTP franchise in Minnesota was misplaced all along.

I will still defend the Hubbards on some things (like giving candidates free air time and hosting live debates), but I was sorely disappointed in their coverage of the aftermath of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The mayor, R.T. Rybak, signed off on opening up a pedestrian bridge, which allowed closer viewing of the wreckage. KSTP sicced one of their serious, manly reporters on the hunt for Rybak (who as many reporters in the Twin Cities know is probably the most accessible elected official this side of the Mississippi). He got reporter-tough with him, asking him to respond to the emergency responders who didn't want the site opened up.

Follow up interview with Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek. Remember this guy? The disgraced public safety commissioner in Minnesota who is on the record as using racial slurs in interrogating suspects as a Minneapolis cop and was forced to resign as a result? Well, the Comeback Kid Stanek got elected in 2006 to the sheriff's office, and he's loving it. The interview was between him in the KSTP's studios and some blonde cupcake who looked like she was barely literate. She gently probed him on what it meant to the families to limit access to the site. His eyes filled with tears, he choked up but somehow managed to make it through the tough interview with Barbie. He should have announced his candidacy for governor right then and there.

According to a former employee of KSTP, Gary Hill, expect more of this. The Hubbards are getting into the newsroom, and they're not leaving. They've always been idealogues, as I well know, making hefty contributions to Republican candidates, but they've always been explicit about their politics, which I'm grateful for. But painting Rybak as the bad guy, and Stanek as our knight in shining armor, besides showing KSTP's gross bias, is inaccurate.

I'd love to see a robust discussion about the ethics of access to disaster sites, the appropiateness of showing body bags, playing the tapes of the final moments of some of the victims, and other unpleasant things. If it were me, I'd show the bags, but I know other news executives feel differently.

KSTP was my station choice immediately after the bridge fell down. It's now fallen by the wayside, because I know the Hubbards are pushing their political agenda on an issue that has no good guys or bad guys. It's painting the story of government incompetence as black and white, when it's several different shades of the rainbow. Maybe KSTP should change their colors to red, the color of the Soviet flag, who so excellently spewed propaganda to the disservice of their constituents, but for the greater good of improving the lot of a small group of people who could only think about preserving their political influence.

When Print Journalists Go Broadcast

It shouldn't surprise many in my most recent hometown of the Twin Cities that a few print reporters have taken up residence at at least one broadcast outlet. I happened to be escorting a group of teenage miscreants to tour the newsroom and meet the News Director at Minnesota Public Radio (what a generous fellow Bill Wareham is - he must have teenage children).

I knew there was a new sheriff in the newsroom. Chris Worthington, a higher up editor at the Pioneer Press, was one of the rats to leave the sinking ship early before the buyouts, and ensconced himself as Bill Wareham's boss in July of 2006. Traversing between media is nothing new in the Twin Bergs - TV goes to print, radio goes to TV, newspaper heads go to magazines. It's a small reporter's world here.

So it was with much surprise when Wareham, who is a candid fellow but shrewd, told our budding journalism students that he thought MPR could have responded more quickly to the I-35W bridge collapse, which had occurred just four days earlier. And that he noticed a difference in how broadcast and print approach such catastrophes. He noted that Worthington came from a print background, so his response was to assign the stories to the appropiate beat. Wareham wanted to get as many people on the ground as possible to get live coverage moving as soon as possible.

Even though Worthington is a print guy, it's still no excuse. News outlets have had Internet capabilities for several years now. Why is it so difficult for print guys to adapt to this new order? I get the "we don't need to rush and make sure our information is accurate", but in a calamity of the I-35W collapse, not rushing hurts your coverage in the long run. It didn't take too long before the state and the feds moved in, blocking off access to the site -- those were golden opportunities to get footage up close and personal, and footage that served the public interest. It's won't be too long before we forget the horror of the collapse, and the press has a responsibility to show those images, not the ones taken from far away.

Broadcasters historically have loved to win print reporters to their newsrooms. Print guys love to dig up dirt, and have neat tricks and a history of sources to expose fraud, waste and abuse. But the order is no longer print reigns supreme with the best coverage, then radio, and TV at the bottom of the barrel with its ridiculous anchors and pundits who editorialize and shout. The Internet has become the great leveler in journalism, allowing broadcast outlets to shine, and show those print guys, you don't know how to cover everything. In fact, those ancient methods may hamper coverage, and the public interest.

Moyers: Old but Good

It must be the way he asks questions. Because at first glance, he's not much to look at. A well-educated, privileged white man who doesn't take it for granted.

He seems to take a natural curiousity about everything, even with guests who's views he finds repugnant, as recently happened with a libertarian writer. He treats them relatively the same, with dignity, with respect, ared with information but itching for a conversation, not a fight.

I remember first reading Bill Moyers, not watching him. My advisor for the extended essay requirement of the International Baccaulaureate Diploma recommended "The Power of Myth", Moyers' iconic interviews with mythology professor Joseph Campbell. I was more interested in Campbell at the time, and quoted him in my my final thesis.

I met Moyers again, 4 years later, in a journalism class. The professor, while not a great instructor, had the foresight to make us watch part of "The Public Interest" series, another iconic Moyers work. In the presence of the ruthless, Republican strategist, Michael Devers, Moyers exuded his trademark calm and respect, which is why I suppose, so many admire him. He confronted the beast, continues to confront the beasts, as well as the better angels of our nature.

so it must be in the questions, but it's also his eye for a good story. And people make good stories: villains, underdogs, heroes, philosophers, powerbrokers, you and me. He connects them, and us with the contempoary issues of our day: corruption, patriotism, civic duty, honor, redemption, falls from grace. He takes on meta issues, such as the recent documentary on how the American press covered the lead up to the war in Iraq.

Bill Moyers is an anomaly in the white noise of talk radio, network sitcomes and inane local news. He's high brow journalism at a time when the educational and civic ability of Americans is at an all time low ( look at the number of Americans registered to vote - and then look at the even more depressing figure of those registered to vote who don't make it to the polls.) It begs the question of whether Moyers is doing a service by remaining above the fray, or limiting his audience by remaining (and forgive me, Bill, because I love you) old-fashioned.

Perhaps he would riposte with an avuncular chuckle, then a thoughtful response about how the American public can be trusted so long as it's supplied with the facts.

Or maybe he would say that public broadcasting is the last refuge for true independent journalism to take chances and he won't compromise.

Moyers is 73 this year, 2007. He was a child of World War II, cut his professional teeth in the Johnson administration and Vietnam, and turned to what was then a still noble calling, television journalism. But I fear Moyers abilities are lost on Gen Y and future generations. I fear he is an anachronism, and I fear that while he may be practicing the best journalism in the United States, he is limited by his understanding of how to reach my generation (I'm 29 at this writing). As devoted as I am to Moyers, not even I catch every show.

Who will remember this icon? Who will say "there but for the grace of God goes Bill Moyers?" I've spent the last 6 months at a Big 10 school, spending time in the campus newspaper newsroom, and a mention of Bill Moyers gets blank stares and a shrug. It's depressing to see Moyers' work go underrecognized, if not completely unrecognized. And I wonder how he will continue to fare with the expansion of the web.

But Moyers is the king of comebacks. He has repeatedly said he is retiring, then returns with a new series. He seems to prefer appearing alone, the center of gravity. His instincts are right on: we trust him to ask questions we want answers to, and we trust him to ask questions we never even thought of. Not many have that happy talent.

The future of Moyers: relegated to insomniac tv sets of the blue hairs? Or underground hero to young journalists?

No Virginia Tech on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report

This will be brief: a salute to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (or should I say a tip of the hat?) for steering clear of the Virginia Tech shootings. Sometimes if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. It was only when the fallout occurred over the loopholes in the gun law that they responded, staying true to their ethics of afflicting the comfortable, rather than afflicting the afflicted as the MSM is so wont to do.