The Tossed Shoe Award

"Businesses
exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end.
It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare.
When a business fails to serve the general welfare, it forfeits its
right to exist."

Do Adam
Smith's famously forgotten words of caution for capitalists apply to
journalism? Is this why, when I go to the newsstand these days, I see
my city's two great newspapers sitting there like twin anorexics,
panhandling (I mean pandering) for quarters?

Taking my
inspiration from University of Texas journalism professor Robert
Jensen, who has written a manifesto challenging J-schools to become
relevant again, I see that the time has come to engage in the
envisioning of the future of my beloved, gasping profession.

What kind
of newspapers will, or should, rise from the wreckage of today's
collapsing empires? What principles should they embody that incorporate
the best of the old tradition - fairness, accuracy, jargon-free
language, fearlessness in seeking the truth wherever it may lead - and
at the same time move beyond that tradition and establish crucial,
indeed, spiritual relevance to today's far more dangerous and complex
world?

No small
task - moving these great entities away from their cynical certainties
and commitment to the special interests of money and power. How do
newspapers begin serving the general welfare more effectively than they
do now? It will take courage from journalists at every level: beat
reporters, editors, executives.

"The
best traditions of journalism are based in resistance to the
illegitimate structures of authority at the heart of our problems,"
Jensen writes at Common Dreams.org ("Can Journalism Schools Be Relevant in
a World on the Brink?"). ". . . the most revered journalists have had
the courage to take a stand for ordinary people and against arrogant
concentrations of power."

And the Tossed Shoe Award goes to . . .

Jensen's
words made me think immediately of Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the reporter for
Al-Baghdadiya TV who threw his shoes at George Bush at a press
conference during the president's final visit to Iraq last December.
Al-Zeidi, released from prison a few days ago, declared: "Here I am,
free, but my country remains captive."

I guess,
technically, hurled shoes don't count as journalism, but they set a
standard for courage in speaking truth to power. Men and women of the
press, go out and do that with your laptops and your cameras! Those
flying shoes certainly stand in contrast to the timidity of mainstream
reporters over here on the power side of the war equation, who, with a
few notable exceptions, exercised no independence from the Bush White
House and the lies that made the war on terror, and the ensuing
suffering of Afghans and Iraqis, a done deal.

But courage
and passion are only the starting place if we are to rebuild -
re-envision - the media. Here are a few more principles that I believe
are crucial for a revitalized media to embrace:

1. As
Jensen notes, journalism's great heroes and role models took a stand
for ordinary people. I would push this thought further: This is not
merely a political matter, a demand for justice or redress. To take a
stand for "ordinary people" means, first of all, to listen to them - to
dig, in one's reporting, for the soul of their hopes - and to celebrate
their lives. When I began my career as a reporter, my first big
surprise was the rush of gratitude I felt from people simply because I
had listened to them.

2. A
re-envisioned media must learn how to tell complex stories, simply and
compellingly. This requires a reorientation toward truth and away from
lowest-common-denominator journalism: fear-mongering, celebrity fawning
and other forms of know-nothingism that have only gotten worse in
recent years, as the reeling media empires grow ever more desperate for
quick, cheap profits.

3. The
media must grow up. Reporters must stop flailing the good-vs.-evil,
winner-vs.-loser narrative, which explains nothing, justifies
everything and only fuels the moneyed status quo. My friend Jake Lynch,
an Australian journalist and director of the Centre for Peace and
Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, talks about "peace
journalism": journalism that looks at all sides of a conflict, examines
all consequences of military violence, and pursues the "why" of a story
beyond the official sources (usually anonymous) who turn most war
reportage into propaganda.

4. The
media must expand their horizons and find an intelligence independent
of the "experts" they so often quote to avoid saying anything. They
must try to understand and learn to write about the real news people
crave, sometimes unknowingly. This is the news about social and
environmental healing. Right now, the media doesn't even recognize
healing as news, yet without it we have no future.