the morningside post

A Ring Too Far: Selling China's Dictatorship

By Tom Lansner

Tom Lansner is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in international media and communications. He covered conflicts in many countries over a decade as correspondent for the London Observer and other publications. His three-part e-seminar on war reporting is available at Columbia Interactive.

News that China’s communist rulers are reaching out to British and American PR agencies to help defuse global dismay over ongoing repression in Tibet should be surprising only in that it has taken so long for Beijing’s senior leadership to buy mercenary marketing skills so clearly superior to their own. But trying to sell China’s dictatorship as a regime of reason at home and a good global citizen abroad may be reaching for a ring too far.

PARIS & THE “PLIGHT OF THE PACHYDERMS”

Our Modern Media World

Paris & the “Plight of the Pachyderms”

Don’t believe Ms Hilton's Animal Magnetism rules here; Trees fall, unheard

Comment by Tom Lansner

Tom Lansner is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in international media and communications. He covered conflicts in many countries over a decade as correspondent for the London Observer and other publications. His three-part e-seminar on war reporting is available at Columbia Interactive.

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HAVE we finally seen the perfect media storm? The Mid-November's teacup tempest blew away many other stories, and then became more complex as a torrent of denials and clouds of obfuscation buried a genuinely important story.

In a nutshell, an AP stringer in Gauhauti, the biggest city in Northeast India, filed on 13 November describing local reaction to Paris Hilton’s reported concern over elephants that died in an electrocution accident after sucking down stores of local famers’ rice beer. Paris’s “publicist couldn’t immediately be reached for comment,” AP waved as due diligence. After all, the source was an entertainment website that said it saw the piece in a British tabloid. This story was obviously too good to hold for verification. Hit “send” immediately!

Today, anything Paris Hilton — or Britney, etc.— does (or even doesn’t really do, in this case, as we soon see) is major news for even many of our allegedly most serious news outlets.

AP ran it hard. Pravda picked it up. YahooNews and the Hindustan Times got excited. The Critternews blog commented.  The Orange Country Register in California even elevated Paris’s conjured quote to a headline screamer: “Don't give booze to elephants, sobs Paris Hilton”.

War Reporting Scenario: Another note on "What Orwell Didn’t Know"

Comment by Tom Lansner

Tom Lansner is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in international media and communications. He covered conflicts in many countries over a decade as correspondent for the London Observer and other publications. His three-part e-seminar on war reporting is available at Columbia Interactive.

In another essay in What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi  writes in “Lessons from the War Zone,” of her famous “private” email expressing her “anger and frustration at the disastrous situation in Iraq” which “concluded that Iraq was beyond salvation” — and was circulated far beyond the list of friends to whom she broadcast it. She argues that her reporting in the Wall Street Journal showed no “bias,” despite the “personal” view expressed so forcefully and eloquently in her email. The reader is of course left to wonder why her published reports did not much more reflect the conclusions of a reporter who was on the ground and daily risking life and limb to gather the information that convinced her — privately — of the war’s futility.

Fassihi also mentions her training at Columbia’s Journalism School, and in particular a scenario-based

America, Orwell, Iraq: Michael Massing’s “Thought Police” in the new book, What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics

Comment by Tom Lansner

Tom Lansner is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in international media and communications. He covered conflicts in many countries over a decade as correspondent for the London Observer and other publications. His three-part e-seminar on war reporting is available at Columbia Interactive.

Americans are killing many, many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Does that resonate anywhere? It is a reality that most of the world, outside the United States, recognizes and finds repugnant. But it is a fact little mentioned by most American media, or covered too lightly to move the issue from the dust of the public record into a debate on the public agenda.

Are these killings accidental or unintentional or mistaken or avoidable, or simply murderous? Are they “un-American?”

Words do matter, of course. George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” still commands our attention in its lucid warning that language can corrupt as much as enlighten political discourse. What we call something shapes our perception of it. And the battle for perceptions is keenest in times of violent conflict, where public support for spending [especially our own] blood and treasure can easily wane if reasoned arguments are unconvincing — or emotional appeals insufficiently compelling.

Theater: Corresponding Addictions

Tom Lansner is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in international media and communications. He covered conflicts in many countries over a decade as correspondent for the London Observer and other publications. His three-part e-seminar on war reporting is available at Columbia Interactive.

 "Burn, Crave, Hold: The James Wilde Project"
Reviewed by Tom Lansner

Long-time international correspondent James Wilde is today alive and well, seemingly quite miraculously, a near-octogenarian who has survived addictions to alcohol, to violent conflict, and to his own apparently out-sized ego — none of which are strangers to people who choose to report on wars.

"Burn, Crave, Hold: The James Wilde Project," is wonderfully innovative theater. Well Off-Broadway, it is fueled by the imagination of playwright Matthew Opatrny, who met Wilde in Istanbul in 2003, so taken by the reporter’s tales over a bleary-eyed breakfast that he immediately knew “we had to make a play about him”.

The performance is fired by an enthusiastic ensemble whose members alternately portray the protagonist in voice and song and energetic dance and movement directed by Damen Scranton and choreographed by Kelly Hayes —aided by a large and marvelously utilized blue tarp that is the show's central and almost only prop.

SIPA Alum Founds Open-Source Think Tank

Dear Morningside Post reader,

I'm writing this post to invite you to visit and contribute your work to NationandState.org, an open-source foreign policy think tank. NationandState.org is a place where academics, students, practitioners and other foreign policy enthusiasts can share their articles and working papers, and provide feedback on cutting edge ideas.

NS.org was created as a vehicle for honest, nuanced debate that is free of a corporate or ideological agenda. The point of NS.org is to find solutions to the foreign policy challenges of our time without looking to score points for one party or another.

Currently, you can view an article by fellow NS.org editorial board member (and fellow SIPA classmate) J. Quinn Martin, which he co-authored with Professor Edward Beliaev of Columbia University. "Going Ballistic," which deals with recent Cold War-like posturing on the part of Russia, has appeared in Foreign Policy magazine and Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie. I have also authored other pieces that appear on the site, including a paper I wrote for a class at SIPA. I hope you enjoy our work, and feel free to post comments.

In the coming weeks, we'll be promoting NationandState.org to a wider audience. If you have ideas about how we can make the world a better place, or if you have a paper that you would like to post, please send your work to: info at nationandstate.org.

I look forward to seeing you guys online and getting some of your work.

Regards,

Nathan Gonzalez
MIA 2007

Nathan Gonzalez is founder and editorial board member of NationandState.org, and author of the upcoming book Engaging Iran: The Rise of a Middle East Powerhouse and America's Strategic Choice

SIPA's Office Antics Get Noticed

It seems that the video produced for Follies that was a parody of The Office has been picked up on Ivygate, which says:

This time the story is set at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, an institution that we imagine buys red tape by the mile. These are students training to be parts of bureaucratic machinery. Navigating the school's rigid hierarchy, financial aid office, and shoddy advising system -- that's just part of your education! At the very least, a few students saw enough similarity between their school and the existential mudpit of The Office to write and shoot their own remarkably faithful remake. It's got the same characters as the NBC version, only everyone is Columbia-fied: Michael Scott burns time surfing J Date. Dwight denies students financial aid. The deans award fellowships by picking out the cutest applicants' photos and throwing darts at the finalists to determine the winner. It's worth a gander, but you'll have to fill out a permission request first.

You can see the video parody in its entirety below.

Part I

Part II

An Un-objective Look at the West Bank

Chaim Yavin: Israel's Walter Cronkite
By Erica Hagen 

Chaim Yavin, 40-year veteran anchorman of Israeli television, downplays the nearly career-destroying move that he made three years ago when he went on a personal mission to make a documentary about the West Bank.

"I am already old, so if they had fired me it would not have mattered very much," he joked recently at a discussion with students at Columbia's School of Journalism.

But Yavin's five-part documentary series, "The Land of the Settlers," which first aired in Israel in 2003, did more than put his job at state-sponsored Channel One in jeopardy. The film, a disturbing look at Israeli settlements in the West Bank territories, stirred up a host of sentiments about the Israel-Palestine conflict and sparked a debate over objectivity in journalism.

Soon after the documentary aired, there were calls for Yavin to be fired from his position at the station he helped found, based on claims that he had "lost his objectivity."

Let’s All Watch Saddam Die: Glories and Ghettos of Mass Information

01 March 2007

By Thomas R Lansner, Adjunct associate professor in media and communications, Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs

Saddam Hussein's long-foretold execution as 2006 drifted into history was predestined as a rallying cry for those claiming the fallen tyrant as victim to American imperialism or Shiite sectarianism. But it was the video of his last moments — recorded as amateurishly as the hanging itself was conducted — that raised the deposed dictator to his desired "martyrdom".

The ghoulish gallows scene captured on one of Saddam's jailers' camera phones almost instantly ranked among history's most "viral" videos, spreading across the Internet and viewed by scores of millions around the world. Taunted even as his noose was tightened, Saddam was denied the "dignified" exit he had planned.

So we could all watch Saddam die. But what does this imply? Absent the grainy video - recorded by what some commentators might too glibly describe as a "citizen journalist" - details of Saddam's death would have remained unknown or forever contested. And the almost instantaneous, global and nearly cost-free dissemination of the images via the Internet allowed this moment of truth to reach a critical mass of viewers and significantly shape public opinion. The chaotic scene as Saddam was killed convinced many that they were watching vengeance rather than justice. For relatively small but strategic audiences, the video bore enormous import. But for many others who sought it out on YouTube or a plethora of other outlets, the viewing was surely little more than a voyeuristic diversion.

Davos Day 1: A Little Town with an Important Meeting

Mention "Davos" and the image of a group of suited, global leaders making speeches comes to mind. (Just what the Davos definition of "leader" is seems a little expansive to me in light of reports on Sharon Stone's antics there last year. But, hey, at least she was read y to do more than just set the global agenda, as the World Economic Forum says it's meeting there to do.) This year's theme is "The Shifting Power Equation" and Angela Merkel -- who has done a bit of power shifting in Europe of late -- got the chance today to make the first grand address of the five-day event.

But to many who go there, the real value of Davos is apparently found in having the kind of life-changing bull sessions many of us had for the first time in college.

In fact, Gillian Caldwell of WITNESS, an organization founded by Peter Gabriel that trains human rights defenders to use video to expose abuses and a place where many SIPA students and alums have worked, writes that WITNESS's newest project was first contemplated at Davos. And she's used this year's meeting to speak with the CEO of Skype about the ways in which the project -- a YouTube-like host site for human rights abuses that have been caught on tape -- can best ensure  the safety of people who upload content.

And while Joseph Nye, who is blogging from the forum at the Davos Conversation website, described this first day as having "too many people and too many topics crowded into too little space and time," he suggested he's already learned a lot from the behind-the-scenes chatter. And for this expert on America's soft power, the lesson was in what the US has lost -- and where it still remains potent:   

... my strongest take-away of the day was a seasoned Asian diplomat telling me that in all his travels, he has never seen American soft power at such a low ebb. In his words, only the Israelis, Indians, and Vietnamese have a positive view of the U.S.  Then he added, "and Iran, if you look only at the people, not the government."  But there is much speculation that the Administration will change that for the worse.

Of the 2,400 people attending Davos, we know that there are some SIPA-ites in the crowd. We'd like to invite them to add their comments about what's really being said, going on and making an impression at this most global of world events.