Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal Appointed to the Livingston Awards National Judging Panel

Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal

Wallace House is pleased to announce the addition of Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal to the Livingston Awards’ national judging panel.

Stephens is the foreign-affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal,  a member of the paper’s editorial board and the deputy editor of the editorial page, responsible for international opinion. He was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for his column “Global View,” receiving the honor for “his incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.” He is a regular panelist on “Journal Editorial Report,” a weekly political show carried by Fox News.

Stephens joined the Journal in 1998, worked for the paper in New York and later in Brussels. In January 2002, he was named editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, a position he assumed at age 28. At the Post he was responsible for the paper’s news, opinion, digital and foreign-language operations, and also wrote a weekly column. Stephens returned to the Journal in late 2004. He has reported stories from around the globe and interviewed scores of world leaders.

“Recognizing and supporting high quality journalism is more important now than it has ever been,” says Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House. “The Livingston Awards affirm the very best in our profession. Bret brings an impressive journalistic range and a keen eye for excellence across a variety of platforms and styles that will further bolster our accomplished group of judges.”

In November, Livingston Awards announced the addition of María Elena Salinas of Univision News and Stella M. Chávez of the Houston NPR affiliate, KERA. Salinas joined the Livingston Awards national judging panels. Chávez joined the Livingston Awards regional judging panel.

The Livingston Awards national judges review all final entries and meet to select the winners in local, national and international reporting. In addition to Stephens and Salinas, the national judging panel includes: Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent, CNN; Ken Auletta, media and communications writer, The New Yorker; Dean Baquet, executive editor, The New York Times; John Harris, editor-in-chief and co-founder, Politico; Clarence Page, syndicated columnist; Anna Quindlen, author; and Kara Swisher co-founder and executive editor of Recode.

The regional judges read all qualifying entries and select the finalists in local, national and international reporting categories. In addition to Chávez, the regional judging panel includes: David Greene, host, “Morning Edition,” NPR; Stephen Henderson, editorial and opinion editor, Detroit Free Press; Shirley Leung, columnist, The Boston Globe, Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer, “Frontline,” PBS and Amy Silverman, managing editor, Phoenix New Times.

 

Covering Trump: The Presidency and the Press in Turbulent Times

6 headshot bw

December 2, 2016 

4:00 to 5:30 p.m. 

B1580 Blau Hall
Ross School of Business

Event is free and open to the public

A panel of national journalists and a political science expert will offer analysis about the presidential election and the tempestuous aftermath during a public discussion at the University of Michigan.

The focus will be on criticism of the media, what journalists, pollsters and political experts missed, and the path forward in covering an unprecedented presidency and divided country.

Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House at U-M, said it is important to hear from reporters who have covered the presidential election from the beginning.

“It is even more important to turn our attention to what comes next,” Clemetson said. “We are entering uncharted waters. As much as news organizations need to to examine their coverage priorities, news consumers need to become astute in assessing the flood of information coming at them and the role and function of a free press in society.”

The panel includes alumni of the U-M Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists who covered the campaign and will report on the transition, as well as a former Livingston Awards winner and a U-M expert who follows elections and voting behavior.

Panelists:

● Craig Gilbert is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington bureau chief and author of “The Wisconsin Voter” political blog. He has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and has written extensively about the electoral battle for the swing states of the industrial Midwest. Gilbert was a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

● Vincent Hutchings, U-M professor of political science, is an expert on public opinion, elections and voting behavior. He studies demographic change and its effect on voting behavior and how campaign communications are designed to appeal to various group identities.

● Tracy Jan is a national political reporter who covered the campaign for The Boston Globe. She focused primarily on the GOP, including Christian evangelicals, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. This month, she joins The Washington Post to develop a new beat on the intersection of race and the American economy. Jan was a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

● Laura Meckler is a staff writer with The Wall Street Journal where she covered the Democratic presidential primary and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She has reported on presidential politics, the White House, changing American demographics, immigration and health care. In 1999, she received a Livingston Award for national reporting.

● Katie Zezima is a political reporter for The Washington Post where she covered the Obama White House years. She chronicled the campaigns of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Texas Senator Ted Cruz from start to finish and before switching to enterprise reporting on social issues riling the election in its final months. Zezima was a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

Jon Morgan, an editor in the Washington bureau of Bloomberg News since 2010, will serve as moderator. He was a 2001 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

The event is being presented by Wallace House and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

The Livingston Lectures with Adrian Chen

The Livingston Lectures
“Russian Trolls: Is an Underground Online
Army Manipulating U.S. Politics?”

November 30, 2016 | 7:00 PM
WGBH, Yawkey Theater
One Guest Street
Boston, MA

Event is free.
Reception with speakers following the discussion.


The Livingston Lectures present an evening with David Greene, host of NPR’s “Morning Edition;” Adrian Chen, winner of the 2016 Livingston Award for International Reporting; Vasily Gatov, media researcher and author; and Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer of PBS’s Frontline.

In 2015, journalist Adrian Chen’s New York Times Magazine story unveiled a shadowy internet trolling organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, and raised the subject of the Russian government embracing social media to influence public opinion. For that story, Chen received the 2016 Livingston Award for International Reporting. The panel will discuss Russia’s current role in the U.S. presidential election and examine how power and money work to distort social media, a presumably pro-democratic tool.

David Greene is co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Previously, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics, east to Siberia. Greene has been a Livingston Awards judge since 2013.

Adrian Chen is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Previously he wrote about the internet and technology for New York, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.

Vasily Gatov is a Russian media researcher and author based in Boston. He has more than 28 years of professional experience in domestic and international media and is currently working on a book about censorship in Russia.

Raney Aronson-Rath is the executive producer of PBS’s Frontline. Under her leadership, Frontline has won every major award in broadcast journalism. For more than a decade, she has been a Livingston Awards judge.

The event is co-sponsored by WGBH and Frontline.

Knight-Wallace Fellows Travel to South Korea

Seoul, South Korea Cityscape

The Knight-Wallace Fellows will travel to Asia for the first time since expanding our international news tours beyond North America in 2000. On December 10, our Fellows will board a flight to Seoul. They will gather knowledge of politics, economics and the present situation in South Korea, while also learning about culture and history.

Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson ‘10, who worked as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, is pleased to take the class to Korea. “Exploring journalism, politics and culture in other parts of the world is a cornerstone of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships. I am thrilled to be expanding the program’s travel into Asia. Wallace House has welcomed so many talented journalists from South Korea to Ann Arbor over the years. How wonderful that we can now take our Fellows to Seoul to connect with our accomplished alumni network there.”

Ten classes of Fellows visited Turkey under the leadership of KWF Board Member Ferhat Boratav, editor-in-chief of CNN Turk. We were planning to go to Istanbul again this December when a new travel warning was issued in early November: The State Department ordered the departure of family members of employees posted to the U.S. Consulate General in Istanbul “based on security information indicating extremist groups [were] continuing aggressive efforts to attack U.S. citizens in areas of Istanbul where they reside or frequent.” With a heavy heart and thinking of our alumni and friends in Turkey, we decided to cancel our trip.

Clemetson talked about expanding travel to Asia from the first day she arrived in Ann Arbor. But she wasn’t expecting to do it so soon. With only five weeks to departure, a trip to Korea seemed like a difficult adventure to pull off. But after current Fellow Jin Kim helped arrange a conference call with our journalism partners at Seoul’s Press Association, the Kwanhun Club, the proposal turned into a fun and exciting proposition.

We were assured that it would be possible to put together an informative and eye-opening trip for our Fellows on short notice. Kim has been working for the past month as the liaison between our Korean partners and Wallace House. And our alumni in South Korea moved into action right away, too.

“I just moved to Seoul in April for a new adventure covering the peninsula for Stars and Stripes newspaper. I am looking forward to showing KWF ’17 my new country,” said Kim Gamel ‘15, an American foreign correspondent who spent many years in Russia and the Middle East. Gamel immediately started planning our trip to the border between the two Koreas and arranged a roundtable with U.S. military stationed in South Korea.

Jaepil Noh, KWF ’16, is working tirelessly behind the scenes to schedule our week in Korea. He is trying to take the week off work to be with us. “I will show our Fellows various aspects of Korea especially focusing on its political situation. The DMZ tour will expose them to the past and the future of Korea. I will take them to historical places so they can better understand the long history of Korea. Just come and enjoy!”

Our schedule now resembles a typical Wallace House news tour:

  • Seminars about policy, politics and economics in Seoul
  • Dinner with Fellowship alumni and foreign correspondents
  • Seminar with Newstapa (the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism partnered with current Fellow Bastian Obermayer for The Panama Papers)
  • Tour and seminar at Samsung
  • Trip by express train to Gyeonju, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Silla
  • Travel to the DMZ, the Korean Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

And of course, we are keeping with our news tour traditions of going to places at the most interesting time:
Since changing our plane tickets from Istanbul to Seoul, the protests calling for the Korean President Park Geunhye to resign have grown. In the past, Fellows have experienced protests in Argentina, Brazil and Turkey. They saw the Canadian oil production tank in Alberta.

Now we will arrive in South Korea in the middle of a fascinating political crisis.

“So I plan to take you to the square where Korean people gather on Saturdays to demand that the President steps down,” said Noh. “The demonstrations are peaceful and people are enjoying them as if they were a festival. If you see them, you will see how humorous and witty and great the Korean people are.”

We are curious and excited to discover Korea, and very thankful for all the help our partners and alumni are giving us.

Here’s to new adventures with KWF ’17!

Apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship

Mosi_call to apply

Applications are open for the 2017-18 Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists, and there has never been a better time to apply. We are adapting how the fellowship works, infusing new ideas into some of the longstanding qualities that have made our program unique. And we are expanding our connections to the larger journalism world, ensuring that our programs and activities are responsive to the changing needs of news organizations and to the needs of journalists who want to build new and deeper skills.

Our goal at Wallace House is simple. We seek to sustain and enrich journalism by sustaining and enriching journalists. We believe that there is a tangible benefit to stepping away from the grind for a period of focused study and collaborative sharing of expertise. And we know that benefit extends far beyond the individual journalists chosen as Fellows. It flows back into the news organizations and broad networks from which our Fellows come.

If you’ve seen images of Wallace House, you may have felt the pull of its quaint, Craftsman charm. It is true; we have a uniquely warm and welcoming home base. But the best part of what happens here is the mischief and boundless possibility we foster inside our walls. Journalists can be creatures of habit. So our program is intentionally structured to shake up routines to challenge assumptions and to nudge people out of professional and personal ruts. We seek to unsettle, and in doing so to empower our Fellows to envision new applications for their talents.

How does it all work? Our magic happens through a mix of academic immersion, Fellowship seminars, adventurous travel and good old-fashioned down time and bonding. An average week could include:

  • An entrepreneurship class with MBA students in the Zell Lurie Institute in the Ross School of Business
  • A course in screenwriting, environmental justice or the history of Hip-Hop music and culture
  • A private workshop on encryption with experts from the School of Information
  • A storytelling seminar with a visiting journalism leader from Vox Media, The New York Times or NPR
  • A family-style dinner for 25 featuring Caribbean rice and peas, Southwestern root vegetable enchiladas or German sauerkraut and beef, all prepared in the Wallace House kitchen by your fellow Fellows.

And that is an average week on campus. On our travel weeks, we work to extend that same dynamic mix of intellectual stimulation to group trips outside of Ann Arbor. We may be exploring the burgeoning business, arts and culture scene in Detroit, or picking apples and hiking in Northern Michigan. In this 2016-17 academic year we are taking our Fellows to South Korea and Brazil where we will meet with journalists, political leaders, business executives, academic experts and cultural influencers.

If it sounds fun, it is! But don’t be fooled into thinking of it as “time off.” Yes, it is time away from your day job. But our schedule and expectations are rigorous. Fellows often find themselves overwhelmed by our plentiful offerings and exhausted by the syncopated rhythm of the days. There is a method to our approach. We believe you can absolutely hit upon a career changing idea working with a preeminent environmental scholar at the Graham Sustainability Institute. But we also believe your ah-ha moment might come while sledding down a bodacious hill with your kids in the depths of a Midwestern February, by meeting a K-Pop impresario in Seoul, or by exploring a contemporary art museum in the Brazilian rainforest.

We believe that awakening the mind and the senses produces sharper, more engaged journalists, and that sharper, more engaged journalists produce better journalism. It’s not rocket science…though our Fellows have access to plenty of those, too, through the university’s world class Aerospace Engineering Department.

Who are we looking for? Fellowship classes — like news organizations — are at their best when they contain a vibrant mix of backgrounds. Our program is designed to help Fellows learn from one another as much as from the academic and journalism experts who work with us. That means we’d like our applicant pool to include: daily reporters and bloggers; narrative and investigative reporters; web, video, audio and social media producers and editors; broadcasters and podcasters; visual and data specialists; designers and developers; engagement editors; and entrepreneurial project and product visionaries. We’re a mid-career fellowship, so you need at least five years of experience working for news organizations or as a freelancer.

If you’ve been thinking of applying, now is the time to do it. Take it seriously. We know you are journalists, and you are hard-wired to procrastinate until painfully close to our deadlines. Our international application period closed on December 1. For U.S. applicants, the deadline is February 1. Don’t wait too long. We only take a small number of Fellows each year, and the process is highly competitive.

Do your reporting. Talk to former Fellows and get working on your study plan. If you can, talk with your editor or manager about a project you could pursue that would benefit your newsroom or help your organization address a pressing challenge.

Don’t fall back on clichés and what you think the selection committee will like. Take some time to really think about your passions, your skills, and something you’d like to achieve in your career. We are enthusiastic about the role our program has to play in the future of journalism, and we are looking for people who want to get their hands in the clay.

There is no place quite like Wallace House and no program quite like the Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists.

We welcome you to apply.

Go to the Application »

Lynette Clemetson is the Charles R. Eisendrath Director of Wallace House.

Lynette Clemetson Interviews Molly Ball

lynette-molly

By Lynette Clemetson

 
Molly Ball ’10, has emerged as one of the most prominent political reporters of the 2016 election season. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, her unsparing analysis of the campaigns, keen observations of society and dry wit have made her a must-read for political junkies. They’ve also made her a favorite of cable news programs and Sunday morning political shows. In addition to following her richly textured stories from around the country and her quick takes on the news of the day, Ball’s tens of thousands of social media followers also delight in her frequent selfie posts, where she makes fun of her glamorous TV makeup then notes that it is time, once again, to “Face the Nation.”
And yet, Ball didn’t grow up watching “Face the Nation,” or any of the other political shows on which she is now a regular. Her family didn’t own a TV.

I asked her about that, as well as a few other things, when she visited Wallace House in September to deliver the 31st annual Graham Hovey Lecture. Her topic, of course: Election 2016 – The Great Disruption of American Politics.

Lynette Clemetson: Many people feel they are getting to know you this election cycle through your television appearances, as much as through your writing. And yet you have a very distant relationship with TV. What’s the importance of television for you as a journalist?

Molly Ball: My parents are retired college professors. My mother felt very strongly that television rots children’s brains. So I was the freak in school who didn’t know what any of the television shows were. The downside of that is that to this day I am culturally illiterate. I’ve never seen an episode of “Happy Days” or “Saved by the Bell.” But the upside is that my consciousness of stories and of narrative was formed by reading books.

Television is not my job. I don’t get paid for it. I just want to have interesting conversations with people. I’m just trying to get my head around what’s happening in this country. America is a puzzle that I’m always trying to solve. I do that by flying around the country and talking to people and seeing things happen, by being a witness to events and then trying to tell that story to other people in a way that makes them think or sheds light on things. The medium really doesn’t matter when that’s what you’re trying to achieve. It can be Twitter, it can be TheAtlantic.com, it can be “Meet the Press” or it can be an article in a print magazine. Which does still exist.

Clemetson: Speaking of print, you have different audiences with different habits there, too. Do you approach the print and digital versions of The Atlantic differently?

Ball: I think I write in the same voice in both publications. What I love about The Atlantic is that since it was founded in the 1850s, it’s been the magazine of the American idea. I like stories that are about ideas, not just about personalities or events. Not “This happened and that happened,” but “What does it mean? Why is it happening? What’s the context, the history, and what does it tell us about the bigger picture?”

Inside The Atlantic, we refer to things as “Atlantic-y.” You know it when you see it. It’s that combination of smart and fun, high and low, in a way that is both enlightening and shareable, which has the great virtue of working really well in our current online marketplace. It doesn’t matter if the thing is a listicle or a photo meme or a 300-word blog post or a 3,000-word story. It’s just about having that sensibility.

Clemetson: How did the Knight-Wallace Fellowship help shape your career?

Ball: The fellowship changed my life. I was stuck. Stuck in a newspaper business that no longer had any sort of upward mobility, at least not for me. I had been banging my head against the wall trying to move up for so long. I thought maybe I should take the hint the world was trying to give me and just get out of journalism altogether, which would have been both heartbreaking and difficult, since I didn’t know how to do anything else. This has been the only thing I knew how to do since I was 12 years old and started a newspaper in my neighborhood in Colorado.

The journalism business had been saying no to me for years and years. And suddenly, at Wallace House, I was in this place where the answer to everything was yes. And it absolutely restored my soul and showed me there was a path forward in journalism.

Clemetson: Was that path immediately clear for you?

Ball: I still didn’t know what that path was when I left the fellowship. Nine months after I left Las Vegas and moved to Ann Arbor, I still didn’t have a job anywhere. But the fellowship restored my sense of possibility and my confidence that I belonged.

My husband and I moved to Washington, D.C., in June 2010 with no jobs, an infant, and a small amount of savings. Politico hired me in late September. I was dying to cover the midterms because I knew the Harry Reid race backwards and forwards. The Atlantic hired me a year later.

Clemetson: Has this election cycle revealed anything to you about yourself as a writer, and as an observer of people?

Ball: There have been times in this campaign when I’ve actually felt that my reporting skills were atrophying because to write an amazing story about what’s happening right now in American politics you don’t need any kind of clever angle. All you have to do is point and go, “Holy crap, look at this.” But it’s a great story. And I feel like I’m learning a lot about America – not all of it happy. Those are the best stories, the ones that make you rethink your assumptions and question all you thought you knew about how this thing works. And having the tools and the confidence and the support to just go out and tell the story the way it needs to be told is an incredible privilege at a time like this.

Clemetson: Campaigns can make journalists cynical. You actually seem excited.

Ball: I’m more excited about journalism than I’ve been in a long time because the election is such a great story. There’s so much texture to it. There will be so many aftershocks. There are so many strands to pull out and explore. And they are going to last for so long after this election.

Four years ago, I was trying to find interesting angles on Mitt Romney, which was sometimes a challenge. I was looking ahead to the rest of my career, thinking, “Am I just going to be writing the same stories every four years until I die?”

But no, because it turns out this thing is always changing. And that’s really exciting and cool. The story most people want to read about an election is who’s going to win. But most of the time that’s the least interesting story. The more interesting story is what is happening out there in America. Who are these voters? What are they thinking? What does it reveal about our national character and society? And the extent of the disruption in this campaign makes me think that we are really at a turning point in American political history, and I don’t think any of us know where it’s going to end.

31st Graham Hovey Lecture

Molly Ball31st Graham Hovey Lecture with political reporter Molly Ball ’10

 

“Election 2016: The Great Disruption of American Politics”

September 12, 2016

Watch the video recording.

 

A prominent voice from the campaign trail, Molly Ball appears regularly as an analyst on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” PBS’s “Washington Week,” CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR. She is the recipient of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism and the Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis for her coverage of political campaigns. The lecture addresses the upheaval of the U.S. political establishment and examine whether this is a fleeting or enduring phenomenon.

Ball previously was a staff reporter for Politico, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun and The Cambodia Daily. She began her journalism career working for newspapers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

She earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yale University. As a Knight-Wallace Fellow at Michigan, 2009-2010, she studied economic policy, government spending and taxation in Nevada and the effects of rapid population growth.

The annual lecture honors Knight-Wallace alumni whose subsequent careers exemplify the benefits of sabbatical studies at U-M. It is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980-1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.

Watch the video recording.

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The 31st Graham Hovey Lecture

Molly Ball

The Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists present the 31st Graham Hovey Lecture

Molly Ball ‘10 of The Atlantic
“Election 2016: The Great Disruption of American Politics”

Wallace House Gardens

Special remarks by Mark S. Schlissel, President, University of Michigan
Hosted by Lynette Clemetson, The Charles R. Eisendrath Director of Wallace House

A prominent voice from the campaign trail, Ball appears regularly as an analyst on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” PBS’s “Washington Week,” CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR. She is the recipient of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism and the Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis for her coverage of political campaigns.

Ball previously was a staff reporter for Politico, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun and The Cambodia Daily. She began her journalism career working for newspapers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

She earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yale University. As a Knight-Wallace Fellow at Michigan, 2009-2010, she studied economic policy, government spending and taxation in Nevada and the effects of rapid population growth.

The annual lecture honors Knight-Wallace alumni whose subsequent careers exemplify the benefits of sabbatical studies at U-M. It is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980-1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.

The Hovey Lecture is free and open to the public. A reception follows the lecture.

A live webcast will be available here. Video will be posted after the event.

For more information and to RSVP, call (734) 998-7666.

 

Knight-Wallace Fellows Class of 2016-2017 Named

Ann Arbor, MI – The Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship program at the University of Michigan has named 13 American and nine international journalists for the academic year 2016-2017. The group is the 43rd to be offered fellowships by the University.

2016-2017 Fellows

“There is a 28-year age span between the Fellows in the class of 2017, touching the extremes of what we mean by mid-career fellowship,” Director Charles Eisendrath notes. “But above all we look for capacity for personal and professional growth regardless of age, and the successful candidates share it equally.”

While on leave from regular duties, Knight-Wallace Fellows pursue customized studies and attend twice-weekly seminars. Headquarters of the program is Wallace House, a gift from the late newsman Mike Wallace and his wife, Mary. The program at Wallace House includes training in narrative writing and multi-platform journalism. International news tours to Turkey and Brazil are also an integral part of the program.

Knight-Wallace Fellows receive a stipend of $70,000 for the eight-month academic year plus full tuition and health insurance. The program is entirely funded through endowment gifts by foundations, news organizations and individuals committed to improving the quality of information reaching the public.

Fellows and their study projects are:

Fernando Canzian Da Silva, reporter, Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). Enhancing methods of print journalism with video and graphics

Anna Clark, freelance writer, Detroit, Mich. Common Good: How chronic underfunding of American cities imperil residents

Nicholas Deshais, staff writer and city hall reporter, The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington). How driving less will change our cities

Deirdre Falvey, senior features commissioning editor, The Irish Times. Blending oral history and art for long-form journalism

John Goetz, editor and investigator, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, NDR (Berlin). How racism laid the groundwork for establishing the “new” Germany in the early 1990s

Sonya Green, news and public affairs director, 91.3 KBCS (Seattle, Washington). The impact of white privilege on how news is covered

Leana Hosea, reporter and producer, BBC. Clean water issues in the US: Comparing the African American and Native American experience

Dina Ibrahim, senior journalist, Al Arabiya English, (United Arab Emirates). Impact of the rise of the Islamic State on Iraq’s modern state national identity

Michael Kessler, freelance writer, (Los Angeles magazine). Media and police bias in missing-persons cases

Jin Kim, staff writer, Chosun Ilbo (Seoul). The past, present and future of the global automobile industry

Arno Kopecky, freelance writer and author, Vancouver, Canada. Re-imagining growth for a finite planet

Josh Kramer, freelance cartoonist. Creating a style guide for journalistic and nonfiction comics

Amy Maestas, senior editor, The Durango Herald. The future for hyper-local newspapers

Brian Mockenhaupt, contributing editor, Outside Magazine. Veterans’ alienation and the struggle to re-assimilate after war

Bastian Obermayer, deputy head of the investigative unit, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich). Understanding the global menace from tax havens

Gustavo Patu, business reporter, Folha de São Paulo. Tax systems and budgetary processes in developing countries

Austin Ramzy, Asia correspondent, International New York Times. Myanmar’s dramatic democratization in an increasingly authoritarian Southeast Asia

Laurent Richard, investigative reporter, Premières Lignes Télévision (Paris). Defeating censorship with collaborative journalism

Stephen Sawchuk, associate editor, Education Week. How policy contributes to K-12 educational inequality

Delece Smith-Barrow, reporter, U.S. News &World Report. Why few underrepresented minorities thrive as professors

Erica Westly, freelance writer and author (Reuters). The history of swimming instruction and drowning prevention

James Wright, deputy editor for metro and business news, The Las Vegas Review-Journal. How mega-donors in U.S. politics influence U.S. foreign policy

The selection committee included outgoing Director Charles Eisendrath ‘75 and incoming Director Lynette Clemetson ‘10, John Costa ‘93 (president, Western Communications, and editor-in-chief, The Bulletin, Bend, ORE.), Ford Fessenden ‘90 (graphics editor, The New York Times), Kate Linebaugh ‘08 (reporter, The Wall Street Journal), Bobbi Low (professor, UM), Birgit Rieck (associate director, KWF), Carl Simon (professor, UM), Yvonne Simons ‘03 (assistant news director at CBS 13, Sacramento), and Doug Tribou ‘16, (reporter and producer at “Only a Game,” NPR/WBUR).

Livingston Judges Present “Beyond America: The Case for Foreign News”

David Greene, NPR; Christiane Amanpour, CNN; Dean Baquet, The New York Times; John Harris, POLITICO
Dean Baquet, The New York Times; Christiane Amanpour, CNN; John Harris, POLITICO; David Greene, NPR

By STEVE FRIESS ’12

Pushing back against those who insist that the media and its American audiences are unserious and myopic, four of journalism’s top leaders used an April 15 forum honoring outgoing Wallace House Director Charles Eisendrath to insist foreign news has actually never been so relevant, popular or well-executed.

Practices are evolving as new technology provides opportunities for traditional print, TV and radio outlets to learn and deploy one another’s disciplines, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet acknowledged to an audience of nearly 1,000 at Rackham Auditorium and those watching online. Despite the cutbacks, the result of that transformation is that “foreign reporting is far better today than it’s ever been.”

“I walk into a newsroom every day that not only has the great foreign correspondents but also has a huge video unit that thinks about things differently,” Baquet said emphatically. “There is so much immediacy now. After the Paris attacks, I’m competing not only with my traditional competitors like CNN but with The Guardian. I’m competing minute-by-minute with the European papers in the countries that are under attack. For all the difficulties, it’s better than it ever was.”

Baquet sat beside CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour and POLITICO’s co-founder and editor-in-chief John Harris as NPR’s “Morning Edition” co-host David Greene moderated the 90-minute discussion titled “Beyond America: The Case for Foreign News.” University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel introduced the quartet, all of whom are Livingston Award judges.

Before turning the stage over to the speakers, Schlissel paused to recognize Eisendrath for his four decades of contributions to the university and to the profession of journalism.

“We are able to celebrate this afternoon among so many top journalists and supporters because of Charles’ singular determination,” Schlissel said. “One of Charles’ great talents is his ability to see the university holistically and as such has had an incredible knack for finding those experiences that would enrich the Fellows’ time with us. Charles is also always willing to share his own expertise and he’s a wonderful ambassador for the university.”

As the discussion ensued, the panelists began assessing the state of affairs for international coverage. Harris, whose company last year launched POLITICO Europe and won praise for its coverage of the Brussels terror attacks in March, questioned the premise of the event’s title and, in fact, what precisely qualifies as “foreign news.”

“There is no important issue domestically that doesn’t have an international dimension,” Harris said. “If there was an attack on midtown Manhattan or Washington D.C. of the sort that happened in Brussels … is that an international story or a local story?”

Christiane Amanpounr
Livingston Judge Christiane Amanpour of CNN

That’s not to say there aren’t problems and concerns. Amanpour, who came to prominence after covering the Persian Gulf War and whose work covering the Bosnian War earned a Livingston Award in 1992, expressed frustration with major news outlets slashing budgets for overseas reporting and bemoaned the fact that the areas on the globe where journalistic attention is most needed are also where it is most difficult to find out what’s happening.

The backlash, she said, proves that “foreign news is so important that very important people want to shut us up. So, ISIS is cutting our throats. Governments don’t give us visas to go in. Militias make reporting difficult. Other governments shut us out by drumming up false charges or putting us in prison. We have to double down on foreign coverage and sending people out there.”

It’s not just foreign governments. Baquet pointed out that because even the United States now wages war using drones, illegal prisons and undercover operations, “We know much less about where the United States is engaged than we have in recent memory.”

Still, Baquet insisted, the public thirsts for the insights and information that outlets spend millions of dollars gathering and presenting. Long-form pieces and reports from such places as Europe and the Middle East are often the best-read Times articles, he said. “The dirty secret is that people always wanted foreign news,” he said. Alluding to the forum’s title, he continued, “I don’t actually think there’s much of a debate anymore. It’s the most important public-service oriented news we cover.”

Even so, Greene noted that as news organizations have closed their foreign bureaus over the two past decades, Harris is expanding POLITICO in Europe. POLITICO’s audience, Harris reasoned, “knows that the world is closer and has said ‘if you do something in Europe, count us in.'”

Some audience members, however, challenged the panel’s sunny view of the state of foreign news and Americans’ appetite for it. During a Q-and-A period, KWF ’12 Aisha Sultan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked the group why the U.S. media seems to go to saturation coverage for terror attacks that occur in Europe but not, for instance, Pakistan.

Amanpour admitted that this troubles her as well: “We don’t have the resources to do that kind of wall-to-wall coverage everywhere these things happen. But then, should we be doing that kind of wall-to-wall coverage anywhere on just one story? It does raise quite a lot of issues.”

Greene and Baquet noted that part of the issue is how newsworthy the incidents are – attacks in Pakistan are very common but quite rare in France or Belgium – and what sort of access is even possible. The Times, Baquet said, has been kicked out of Pakistan but has dozens of reporters across Europe able to pivot to a major story there.

“We covered the Paris attacks by sending our entire show there and hosting it there for an entire week,” Greene recalled. “We couldn’t do that in Islamabad.”

That train of thought also led to one of the most amusing exchanges. Amanpour recalled how, in 1997, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died within days of one another. Guilt over how intensely the death of the glamorous British royal figure was covered led many Western media outlets to give the funeral of the elderly Nobel-winning nun a lot more attention than she might have received absent the Diana mania.

Dean Baquet
After the panel discussion, Michigan students had a chance to talk with Dean Baquet.

Baquet acknowledged that this was true, but then quipped: “Princess Diana was young and killed in an accident. Mother Teresa was very old. There was not a shock that she died. If Mother Teresa had died speeding down a highway in Paris being chased by paparazzi, we would have gone nuts covering that, too!”

The panelists were generally hopeful, noting that their perches as Livingston judges give them a sense of the immense young talent continually joining the profession. These upbeat observations seemed to delight viewers on social media, as when Amanpour noted that “longform is actually getting a new life” and Harris observed that more substantive pieces break through the clutter because “you’re never going to be faster than Twitter.” Dozens of people, of course, tweeted these lines.

This event was co-sponsored by Michigan Radio.

Watch the video recording.