Web Excursions 2022-03-05
Journalists leave a bad impression with the public when they call themselves “storytellers,” a new study finds.
roughly 80% of the U.S.-based Twitter biographies that included “storyteller” belonged to journalists or former journalists
most of the journalists using the “storyteller” identifier in their bio have an affiliation, either past or present, with television news
It’s a term meant to reflect the very real and creative process journalists go through in relating information to the public
Its widespread use seems to assume the public views the ‘storyteller’ label as a title or attribute deserving public trust and respect
Participants who were told the reporter identified as a “storyteller” were more likely to agree
that the news story was biased;
that the news site sensationalized the story, trivialized aspects of the story, and failed to portray everyone fairly; and
that the reporter himself was biased.
Democrats are just as likely to offer a negative view of the term.
Participants were asked, “When you see the term ‘storyteller’ used to describe a journalist, what comes to your mind?” and they did not hold back.
Of 1,733 responses, 67% were negative or extremely negative,
while less than 13% were positive or extremely positive.
journalists are thinking
first and foremost about personal branding and others in media,
rather than members of the public,
when they label themselves “storytellers” online.
no one in the industry stopped to reflect on the dynamic the term sets up for a public conditioned to call any reporting they don’t like ‘fake news.'
This might be an example where industry groupthink ran afoul of dictionary-based reality
Think carefully about how the public might perceive professional self-descriptors.
The TV news industry might suspend disbelief in terms of the denotative meaning of ‘storyteller,’
but don’t assume the public goes along with that insider view
This is especially true for anyone getting anywhere near political coverage.
Can Russia’s Press Ever Be Free?
Under Muratov’s leadership, Novaya Gazeta has survived for nearly thirty years, longer than virtually any other independent media outlet in Russia.
The newspaper and its staff operate in a near-constant state of emergency, always under threat and often on the verge of folding.
If one imagines a future in which Russia enjoys democracy and lasting peace, then Muratov, who has maintained a fragile sort of peace for a community that exercises freedom of expression in a profoundly unfree country, embodies the precondition for such a future.
In the Soviet Union of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the past didn’t exist, because no one talked about it. The future didn’t exist, because nothing ever changed. Time stood still. Life was preordained. Boys went to school for eight years, then to trade school, then to the military, and then they had dull jobs and drank a lot.
He secured passes for his students to the local spetskhran, or “special collection,” where the state kept banned books. (In Kuybyshev, the spetskhran was situated in the attic of the opera theatre.) On his first visit, Muratov tried reading Freud. He was unimpressed. The book seemed to say that the world ran on sex; Muratov had already concluded that the world ran on joy.
Muratov recognized two men who were waiting for elevators at either end of the hallway: Yaroslav Golovanov, a legendary journalist who wrote about space exploration, and Leonid Repin, a famed travel writer.
Golovanov shouted to Repin, past Muratov, in a high voice, almost a falsetto, “Lyonechka! I am going to Paris. What shall I bring back for you?”
“Slava, bring me some condoms!” Repin shouted back. Condoms were in short supply in the U.S.S.R., and both men had proud reputations as womanizers.
“What color condoms would you like, Lyonya?” Golovanov shouted.
“Green!”
“You are right, Lyonya,” Golovanov shouted. “Green makes you look younger.”
It was the most worldly conversation Muratov had ever heard.Novaya Gazeta also carries on a peculiar Soviet tradition: the newspaper as a court of justice. The Soviet citizen lived surrounded by impenetrable walls of bureaucracy—there was no recourse for injustices big or small, except when a letter to a newspaper got a reporter’s attention and didn’t elicit the censor’s objections. A story could lead to change: an abusive teacher would get fired, for example, or an unsafe building would get repaired. At Novaya Gazeta, such stories are mainstays.
In 2002, when a group of Chechens took more than nine hundred people hostage in a Moscow theatre, Politkovskaya went in as a negotiator and persuaded the hostage takers to allow water and juice to be delivered to their captives
Unlike most publications, in Russia and elsewhere, Novaya Gazeta does not belong to a wealthy individual, a corporation, or a foundation; it is owned collectively by its staff.
One early supporter, Gorbachev, bought some computers for the paper; legend has it, he drew the funds from his own Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 1990.
Novaya Gazeta’s tolerance for internal dissent meant that even its most celebrated reporter, Politkovskaya, faced skepticism from her colleagues.
“No one ever fears getting fired here—everyone threatens to quit,” Milashina told me. In twenty-four years at the paper, she has quit too many times to count, usually because Muratov kept asking her to stop reporting on Chechnya. He ripped up her letters of resignation; once, Milashina ripped up her Novaya Gazeta press card. She still works there, and still reports on Chechnya.
But other articles are too long, meandering, overinterpreted, and underreported, and some are deeply flawed.
Novaya Gazeta is an erratic publication. Some of its projects are stunningly ambitious and inventive
This kind of sleuthing is too much for Muratov. “I won’t delve into people’s private lives,” he said. “Because I am not without sin myself. I have no mercy for a politician, but, when it comes to their family members, their wives, children, and the women they love, I draw the line. When they want to write about Putin’s daughter, I ask myself, ‘Do I want someone writing about mine?’ ”
Muratov never talks about his family. (One of his children, a journalist in the United States, declined to speak to me, citing safety concerns.)
With age, your risk tolerance naturally wanes, until you realize that no story is worth risking one hair on a staff member’s head.
To keep his colleagues safe, Muratov has struck many fraught bargains. In 2009, after one of Novaya Gazeta’s correspondents in Chechnya, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and killed, Muratov learned that a second reporter who wrote about Chechnya was in imminent danger. Through a government official, he made an offer: in exchange for the second reporter’s safety, Novaya Gazeta would refrain from covering Chechnya for a year.
In 2018, the paper launched a crowdfunding platform, which has become a primary source of support. A yellow button on the Web site invites visitors to “become a co-conspirator”; more than a hundred thousand people have done so.
He resents being asked how he has managed to secure the paper’s survival for so long.
“I engage in secret diplomacy. And I’m not going to tell you anything about it.”
The secret of Muratov’s diplomacy may be simple: he knows many of the men who, through the years, have wielded power in Russia. He met some of them in the nineties, when they were beginning their careers and he was an upstart newspaperman. A few even worked alongside him at Komsomolskaya Pravda. Other opposition journalists are an abstracted enemy to these men, but not Muratov—he drinks with them.