Edited Transcript of Remarks by Helena Cobban
'For the Record' No. 284 (2 August 2007)

In the final lecture of the 2007 Palestine Center Summer Intern series, 'The Future of Arab-Israeli Peace: Challenges and Perceptions,' Helena Cobban, writer and internationally syndicated columnist on global affairs, explained the intricacies of journalism, both within and outside the Middle East. She addressed her personal experiences in the field and analyzed a number of factors that affect how journalism is produced, including the stresses of deadlines, editors and length restrictions.  She explained how a journalist must address their personal viewpoints, and how readers should understand that no person can be totally objective and value free and must understand journalism through this lens.

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
17 July 2007


Helena Cobban:

Well it's nice to be back in Washington.  My husband and I left in 1997 because he got a job at UVA [University of Virginia] and it was a nice place to finish raising our kids, but the kids are all raised now.  And so, we now have a little apartment in DC, and we are going to be spending a lot more time here. Me, in particular, because I have this position as 'Friend in Washington' with the Friend's Committee on National Legislation. So, I figured I'd better be in Washington a little bit.

My two years, as member of the International Quaker Working Party on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, were pretty interesting.  I did a lot of writing and published four books, including When the Rain Returns: Towards Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel.  I would urge you to read it if you haven't because it's the result of a lot of work by thirteen fellow Quakers and myself.  We made an extended visit to Israel and Palestine and some of the neighboring countries back in 2002. And then we went through a very 'Quakerly' process of discernment, by which I mean lengthy and in depth, very lengthy and in depth, and the book is a result of this process.  I think and hope you will find it readable and informative and clarifying.

So, the interns requested that I talk about the media, and here goes!  It's quite interesting actually.  Palestinians often complain that they get a bad rap in the U.S. media. And if you think about it, this narrows the way that the Bush administration and [U.S. Secretary of State] Condi Rice and others feel about the media in the Arab world and the rest of the world in general.  So, there is an issue here; how much is it faulty or biased in the conveying of message or how much is it faulty or biased content of the policy that is the issue?  And this is some that we can discuss more.  So, I will talk later about some of the tone issues, and I will give some contrasts with the situation in Britain because I did grow up there and I had some good relationships with British media outlets as well over the years.  So, I will try to pick out the best things I can tell you in half an hour.

I should note that, presently, I work on the opinion side, and for all of you who are at all familiar with U.S. media, there is really a fairly strong row between the news side and the opinion side. And I have worked on the news side in the past.  News coverage has specific requirements, and there are norms. I don't mean to say that the goal of perfect objectivity can ever be attained.  There is this myth in journalism, as in many social sciences in the West, that it is possible to adopt a totally objective, value free perspective and then survey the world from that perspective.  In my experience, one always goes into a situation with assumptions, and it is better to really examine yourself and figure out and surface those assumptions rather than say, 'I am the totally objective observer.'  If everyone believes him or herself to be the perfectly objective observer, then human dialogue would be effectively impossible.  If I am open to the idea that I have assumptions and that I am prepared to discuss my assumptions with you, then that makes for a much stronger and more rooted form of communication.  I've worked, over the years, on trying to clarify my assumptions a lot. 

As I came to Quakerism, becoming a pacifist was a big challenge, a big step, for me, and at some point, I was able to very strongly embrace it.  Being a Quaker involves a very deep and radical commitment to human equality, and I think that is where I start.  As the Quakers say, 'There is that of God in everyone.'  I don't want everyone here to become a Quaker. I'm not doing this to be evangelizing, but I want to show you the process that I went through in trying to clarify my assumptions.

Working with the human rights movement has been a very important part of this because this movement also says that human rights are universal; everybody has them.  It doesn't matter if you are black, brown, speak English, don't speak English, live in an igloo, live in a mud hut, live in some 'McMansion' out in Mclean, Virginia, you have equal rights.  This is very constant with me being a Quaker, in a sense, the idea that rights are for everybody, and they include the whole panoply of not just civil and political rights, which are the ones that are stressed and prioritized in most western discourse for historical reasons, but also economic and social rights, in every one of God's children.  This means those questions about sanctions, whether against the Iraqi people or against the Palestinian people of Gaza, are deeply of concern to me, not just the right of freedom of association or freedom of the press or other items on the civil and political rights agenda.   

I think it is important that everyone who is doing media work, whether you are talking about Wolf Blitzer or somebody just starting out as a cover reporter on the San Antonio Herald Tribune, should really be encouraged to be quite frank about his or her assumptions, basic personal principles because we are people.  We are not just automata.  We bring to journalism all the passions of regular people.  Without the people in journalism, there would be no journalism.  When you get a person, you want to have the whole person; you don't want to have someone pretend to be objective, as if they were having an out of body type of experience. 

So what kind of assumptions do we find embedded in the way that news is generally covered in our media?  Here I will engage in many broad generalizations and give some shining counterexamples.  Most recently, I would say that the reporting in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine by Steve Erlanger about Hamas, Fateh and the situation in Gaza is a really shining counterexample of what can be written and can be published in a major western media.  It wasn't perfect. But it was extremely informative, and he really tells us a lot about why people act as they do in Gaza and in Israel as well'but more in Gaza, which is a sign that people don't really understand too much in this country. 

Journalism is also an extremely taxing profession for the people who publish it.  You are very nearly always operating under tough guidelines, both time and length.  You have to make snap judgments.  It is particularly important to be grounded as a person.  If you are writing a Ph.D. dissertation on a topic, you can sit for years and years to formulate the perfect chapter, and in the course of that, you will learn a lot about yourself and the world.  But when you do journalism, you have to perform to a deadline, which means your gut instinct, which we've been hearing quite a lot about recently, is very important as a journalist because that is how you act under pressure. 

There is a constant conflict between simplicity and complexity in the work of journalism.  When I am writing an 800 word column in the Christian Science Monitor (CSM), it's a wonderful discipline; I love doing it.  When I write on my blog, I meander on and on and explore ideas, and it is a very different form of writing. But composing to a set length is a great discipline because you really have to get your ideas across by making sure you are clear in what you want to say.  Writing to a time deadline is equally a great discipline.  When I worked for Reuters during the Lebanese Civil War, I would produce three day leads in a single day.  You get such an adrenaline buzz from that.  Journalism is like the adrenaline junkies job of choice.  Sometimes you get your name on the front page and all that exciting stuff'a fabulous, fabulous career.  But writing to these very tight formulas limit ideas because you have to put labels on things.  You cannot put footnotes.  For example, you cannot say, 'What we call the leftist coalition from the Lebanese Civil War actually contains many people who are not leftists. Although we call it the leftist Muslim Coalition, there are elements that contain many Christians.'  There is no opportunity for clarification or footnotes in a news report.  You have to stick a label on something and then use it.  And that label helps the reader to get through your article and understand something.  However, what they understand will necessarily always be partial because of the partial nature of those chosen labels.  Most recently, for example, the president tells us that we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq, and that is his label. 

I've done a little bit of writing in my blog about the ways the administration tries to frame these issues.  The framing mechanism du jour is 'moderates' vs. 'extremists.'  This is a very handy framing device because it has no content whatsoever.  Everybody on our side is a moderate; everybody on their side is an extremist.  You can change them by the week, saying this week that the 20 June Brigades are moderates but last week they were extremists.  It doesn't correlate to anything.  But it's a handy framing device.  One of the most powerful framing devices that the government has systematically tried to use has been that of 'terrorism'/'anti-terrorism.'  And this is also a very handy and powerful label, and we have to understand why it's so powerful for so many of our fellow Americans.  There are genuine fears and concerns at issue here about terrorism.  We can also remember that during the days of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The ANC [African National Congress] and all the people challenging the apartheid paradigm were routinely labeled as terrorists, not just by the regime but also by such western luminaries as [former British Prime Minister Margaret] Mrs. Thatcher and other lovers of democracy and freedom.  It's just a label, and people find it very handy.  I grew up in England, and I went through this whole process of seeing these organizations that had previously been marginalized labeled as 'terrorists' one week, and the next week you would find the local British High Commissioner at a ceremony with a flagpole and the Union Jack would be hauled down and the flag of, say, Nigeria, would be hauled back up or any other 'independent country X' in the 1950s and 1960s.  And thank God that happened.  Look at Britain now.  It's booming.  Post-imperialism is a fine place to be, and I am hoping to be able to persuade more Americans that it's a fine place to be as well.  However, in the course of this, there were these horrible counterinsurgency struggles that the British, French, Portuguese and all those colonial powers waged very hard against the national liberation movements.  In every single one of them, the discourse of terrorism was used.  It is not a new thing, and the question is, 'How do you deal with that?'  The media have played a better role over the last few years.  I think the mainstream media, and I am generalizing grossly, was in a sort of trauma after 9/11.  I would say for about two or three years, along with the whole of the Washington political elite. 

In 2002, during October and November, America still had the aftershocks of 9/11'in a country that hasn't had an attack on the homeland since 1812 when my other country, Britain, sailed up the Potomac and shelled the White House.  People were traumatized because they believed that they were secure and safe behind these massive oceans, and then they discovered that they are not.  It challenged people's basic assumptions of what it is to be a safe American.  And it was in the fall of 2002 that Washington, D.C. had the anthrax scare and the Washington area sniper.  It was a time of massive trauma, and they were making all these decisions, such as allowing the president to go to war against Iraq under these circumstances'circumstances in which you shouldn't expect anybody to make rational decisions. They basically needed hot compresses and lots of TLC.  Anyway, a few years later, here we are and things are getting better.  That's the good news.

I've done a lot of visiting, covering, research and writing about areas of violence and conflict.  I have to say that my work in Africa has been extremely important for me to understand a lot of these issues more clearly'working in Rwanda, Mozambique, South Africa and Uganda.  People are dieing in their millions in, for example, eastern Congo or northern Uganda and other countries in Africa today'many more than are dieing in Israel or Palestine.  Yet you guys get all the media.  If you approach this with the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then maybe Palestinians should feel bad because Palestinians do get some bad publicity.  But at least they get the opportunity to have their voice heard much more than the people of eastern DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] or those of northern Uganda who are dieing unheard in their millions.

I think it's really important for people who write about conflict or violence to have a very robust view of what violence is.  It is the meat and potatoes of American journalism, which is quite violence obsessed. The whole of American media is violence obsessed. Look, for example, at Hollywood. The American public discourse is violence obsessed.  The definition of violence is, again, one of those inner assumptions that needs to be surfaced and is too frequently not.  In this country, the view of violence is a very childish view.  Good vs. evil.  This is on a conceptual level with the moderates vs. the extremists, with the additional value added of 'good' vs. 'evil.'  Sometimes you need to have the 'evil' ones in order to make you feel good.  There is a great quote from [Anglo-Dutch writer and academic] Ian Buruma about growing up Dutch in the post-WWII era when he said, about the Dutch views of Germans, 'They were bad, therefore we were good.'  Look at that 'therefore.'  It's a very true comment'that you need to have somebody that you are battling against in order for you to feel good.  It's very interesting stuff going on there.

Working in Africa, I developed a much more complex view of the nature of evil and violence interviewing with survivors of the Rwandan genocide and perpetrators, participants in the genocide, survivors of apartheid and participants in apartheid.  Violence is not just a very simple question of those individual people as 'unredeemably evil' and therefore we are 'absolutely good.'  I think all of us have the capacity to do terrible harm to other people. And people that have done terrible acts also have the capacity to be reintegrated into society.  I have seen wonderful stories about that from Mozambique'you can buy my book actually, Amnesty after Atrocity.

Again, here is a case where a journalist has to write a lead story with a tight length constraint and a tight time deadline. How do you write about what happened in Gaza three weeks ago?  I think Steve Erlanger did a really good job in writing about it, but it's a very long format that he was writing to. And I think it would be just about impossible to condense that into a 1200 word news report because there was so much happening.  When you do tease it out in the way that he did, the 'good' vs. 'evil' template just doesn't fit at all.  And that is good.  I have found while writing longer pieces for Boston Review, such as the first piece I wrote for them'which was the longest piece they had ever published (14,000 words about Rwanda and genocide)'that it is a fabulous format.  But it is not what people consider when they talk about journalism because 'journalism' is all supposed to consist of sound bites.  So, there are some sad things that happen when those locations for longer, more reflective articles dry up.  But then you also have the web, and I've gotten a lot of real value out of writing my blog and interacting with people through my web writing. 

Ok, to get on quickly to the differences between U.S. and European journalism, I'll notice that there are differences in the structure of the industry between the two sides of the Atlantic and differences in the structure of the profession.  The industry'the journalism and media industry'in this country is obviously huge and consolidated.  For example, Clear Channel Media or Fox or a lot of these big conglomerates make the real decision making about resources very distant from the line editor, who is actually deploying correspondents for international issues.  Thus, we find the phenomenon that every major media outlet in this country, barring one or two, has been closing foreign bureaus at a massive rate for the past ten years because the bean counters in the corporate head office don't see the point of having 'our correspondent' in Tokyo when news can be pulled off the wires or form CNN.  They do not see the point of the Atlanta Journal Constitution or another fine mid-sized paper having their own person in various capitals around the world.  NPR has been increasing their foreign bureaus and that is great news.  The LA Times are now contracting. But they did have a period of big expansion, and they are now contracting, which is a pity.  There is a much greater reliance on predigested news, by which I mean what is available on the news wires.  And I don't' mean to knock news wires. I worked for Reuters for a while, and I loved it and thought that Reuters was a great employer, but I am sure it's very different now.  A newspaper has a sort of a personality that is a combination of many things.  This is a little bit painful for me to talk about because the Christian Science Monitor has just terminated its practice of having any regular columnists at all, and I think this is just disastrous because I think the flavor of a newspaper is derived from, among other things, the regular columnists whom you can find on the page.  In the morning, I make my decision whether to read the New York Times or the Washington Post from who wrote an article that day'such as saying, 'Oh yeah, Maureen Dowd wrote an article today, so I must read the Times.'  The character of a newspaper is derived also from decisions about foreign coverage and how foreign coverage is done.  CSM is really unique, I think, though I am still deeply shocked and pained over their stupid decision regarding columnists, but that's ok. I'm going to set that aside.

When I was working as a young reporter for the Monitor back in the seventies, I had fabulous editors, and they always said, 'You cannot compete with the NYT or the Washington Post on the breaking news.'  And this concedes that the NYT will be a newspaper of record, and that in any 24-hour period, they will be able to cover anything that is of note in that period, and this is a real conceit because often one doesn't know until far after a certain 24-hour period that it was of real import.  You don't understand these things, and they don't become clear until later quite frequently, in my opinion.  My editors at CSM used say, 'Helena, you're not competing with them on the breaking news, but what you are supposed to do is find the story behind the story and really just write for us what this story means.'  And it was great. That really empowered me as a writer, and they were great editors to work with.

The structure of the industry in Europe is a little different, and the structure of the profession is notably different than in the U.S.  By and large, in the U.S., a person goes to journalism school and is then a journalist and can cover city hall politics, corruption in the fire department, Hurricane Katrina, the stock market crash in Tokyo or the Israel-Palestine conflict, depending on where the editor deploys him or her. The journalist has to be a complete generalist, and then the assigning editors send you for six months here or two years there. And the journalist is supposed to parachute in, pull out their laptop and their satellite phone and be on top of the story.  People try to do this.  There is something to be said about getting a fresh eye on a situation at times, but that shouldn't be the meat and potatoes of the coverage.  I was in Beirut for seven years, five of them I was working for CSM and the Sunday Times. I had some fabulous colleagues who would come in from covering city hall and downtown Boston, stay and do some really fresh coverage and then leave.  Or they would stay and then really learn about Lebanon.  The Europeans, by and large, don't have this idea that you can just go to journalism school and become a journalist.  You go to college to learn something: content, substance.  Then you go out and you learn journalism on the job through a sort of apprenticeship system.  To get your card in the National Union of Journalists in England, which of course has a far stronger role for unions than that in the U.S., you get a job as a journalist and you prove yourself and finally after two or three years you can move to London if you are good enough.  In the meantime, going overseas, you find people like David Hearst or Robert Fisk, who have spent decades now in the Middle East.  There are pluses and minuses to this but mainly pluses.  You have people who really understand the nuance and the depth and the history.  I think, ever since the day of Columbus, Americans have liked to discover things, such as Americans 'discovered' that the Iraqis have been dealing with foreign occupation and intervention in their affairs for some 80 years now and have been dealing with it in some cases effectively and in some cases not effectively.  But this is a 'discovery' because we only just 'discovered' Iraq a few years ago.  The European approach is less 'gee-whiz' and much more deeply rooted and that makes for a definitive difference in coverage.  Also, interestingly, in Europe, there is not nearly such a sharp line between the news side and the opinion side.  I'm constantly, now that I have American eyes, reading the BBC, which will end with a quote such as 'So we all hope that the conflict in Kurdistan can be resolved soon''a piece of editorial commentary that now seems completely out of place to me.  You can also find similar anecdotes in Le Monde where what passes for news coverage is laden with opinion, which is fine.  It's just a different way of presenting the news.  It looks strange to Americans.

As I said, there are fabulous opportunities right now.  The first once is the Iraq issue for Americans and the fact that it has so many parallels with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.  In the old days, I would talk about Palestinian problems with 'occupation' and either people's eyes would glaze over or they would say, 'Isn't it a good thing for everybody to have an occupation or a job?'  There was no real understanding of what military occupation is.  I think Americans have a much more robust understanding of basic facts of life like that, tragically, thanks to Iraq.  Now we have this new institution in journalism called 'ombudspeople,' people whom I think can make a real difference.  Again, the New York Times has a representative who, a couple of weeks ago, said that the news coverage from Iraq is all just about the Americans fighting al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda.  But actually, experts tell us that that is not what is happening.  Publicly, the ombudsman was criticizing the journalists saying that they've got to do better, which I think is great. I think that their coverage has gotten better since then.  These ombudspeople can be a really good force.  I think people who deal with journalists trying to get a message out need to always assume that news workers are well-intentioned.  I don't think there is a conspiracy by the media to suppress the Palestinian story or anything like that.  But there are some very well-organized lobbies on the other side who want to suppress open discussion of Palestinian issues.  I have certainly been the target of FLAME [Facts & Logic About the Middle East], CAMERA [Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America] and the like.  I think that you need to assume that people in the journalism business by and large are well-intentioned, doing a difficult job under tough circumstances.  If you can engage constructively with them and understand the kind of pressures they are under'commercial, time, profitability'as well as understanding the norms of journalism, such as the fairness norm and interrogating the fairness norm (what does it mean to be fair), I think that this is something always worth doing. 

As a final note, as much as you can do great media outreach work, it's going to be really difficult if your message is based on unclear policies.  That is something that I learned from my work and doing research into the ANC, and it's very interesting and inspiring history.  First of all, the ANC made a strategic choice in the 1950s and 1960s to hold up a vision of their free South Africa that would include the white folks.  That gave them a very strong position to do outreach to their white compatriots and to the western audiences.  That was a very clear and difficult decision for them to make, but it gave them a wonderful moral position.  They were not seeking, like the Algerians, to kick out the colonists.  Just after the ANC made its strategic change, the Portuguese empire fell apart calamitously in 1974-75.  Hundreds of thousands, millions, of Portuguese settlers had to leave Mozambique and Angola.  The ANC had this very visionary policy, very inclusive and morally clear.  It had internal discipline.  It had a very sound strategy that included both the military wing and the mass organizing civilian wing.  On the basis of that, they did fabulous outreach in the West'if you see, for example, their series of posters that anybody could put up, such as a poster display in someone's church hall supporting South Africa solidarity.  You don't see any of the Palestinians either having the clarity or the moral integrity or the internal organizational integrity'except perhaps Hamas'to be able to have that kind of effective outreach, which also includes work with the media.  As I have said, it's not just fashioning the message. It's also about really trying to make sure the content of your policy has integrity and moral validity.

Ms. Helena Cobban is a writer and internationally syndicated columnist on global affairs. She contributed a regular column on global affairs to the Christian Science Monitor and worked as a journalist in the Middle East, including five years as a Beirut-based correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the Sunday Times of London.