Journalists reflect
By Sean McLachlan Posted Sat, Jan 1 2000
Ask some of the world’s best journalists what 10 stories of the second millennium they would have liked to cover and you get levity or philosophy in response.
Levity from the likes of Bill Kelley, writer for “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.” He said there are three criteria to look for in picking the stories: “1. Does it contain a car chase? 2. Does a reporter say anything along the lines of, ‘Let’s go to Captain Ernie in our Eye in the Sky chopper.’ 3. Does it easily segue into another story, ‘Speaking of world famine, after the midwinter meeting in Florida, the Yankees are still hungry for left-handed pitching.’”
You get philosophy from Max Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former editor of The New York Times. He wrote: “Let me object that journalists are somehow similar to historians. We’re not. We report on events around us without much talent for digging into the past and without ever knowing what will turn out to be ultimately more influential or powerful in effect. The word journalist comes from ‘diurnal,’ meaning we record daily, day by day; that is all we are capable of, and all we should aspire to be. It’s a hard enough job as it is.”
In sum, we wrangled responses from 26 journalists throughout the world. They did not look for Ernies-in-the-sky or think of the diurnal, but they did give us their top 10 choices.
1. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and movable type. “Without it there would be many tales but no stories,” said Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation in New York. And what a running story it would have been. Gutenberg, a craftsman in Strassburg, Germany, (now Strasbourg, France) spent the better part of two decades trying to raise money to finance printing’s development and fighting lawsuits of disappointed partners. Finally, going it alone in 1454, he printed the 42-line Bible that led to books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and all other printing as we know it. His printing process spread comparatively as rapidly in the 15th century as the Internet today. By 1500, six million books had been printed. 2. World War II. The second story on the list is one hundreds of journalists still alive actually covered. Those mentioning it achieved no consensus on particular events. Russell Carollo, a reporter for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, chose the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, saying, “This single event thrust the United States into World War II and possibly changed the course of the war, a war that forever changed the world.” 3. Columbus’ discovery of the New World. “Nothing would ever be the same in the Old World, and developments in the Americas would dominate the following 500 years,” wrote Norman Webster, IPI board member, columnist and former editor of the Gazette in Montreal. The reporter filing that story for a Spanish newspaper would have had the journalistic pleasure of stepping onto the New World in Santo Domingo, thinking he was in the East Indies and describing the exotic scene, complete with quotes from the great Genoan. Years later, Enrico Fermi would send a message from Chicago to Washington announcing “the Italian navigator has reached the New World,” to report the world’s first nuclear chain reaction. What did the Italian navigator himself say in 1492? A reporter could have told us. 4. The invention and development of the computer. The abacus, invented by the medieval Chinese, is the computer’s forerunner. Essentially, scientists and technicians such as those at IBM took the beads of the abacus, changed them to electronic matter and moved them through vacuum tubes. Transistors and even faster electronic chips sped up the process from seconds per computation to nanoseconds per billions of computations. Electronics upgraded simple numerical counting to sophisticated data management, and voila!, there was the modern data processor. Modern journalists did cover the story of the computer’s development from the vacuum tube and punch card phase of World War II to today’s micromachines. Richard Tait, IPI Board member and editor-in-chief of London’s television news organization ITN credits the computer with “the emergence in the 1980s of the Internet, which is transforming the whole world.” 5. World War I. The first story on the list makes keeping a good record for the masses of history possible. One of the stories the masses would rather forget: how 9 million died in the world’s first modern war, and how the failure to heal those war wounds led to World War II. Several journalists mentioned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo as the dramatic event that touched off the powder keg of Europe. 6. The Industrial Revolution starting in 18th Century Europe. Bernard Wouts, chairman of Le Point in Paris, wrote, “It changed humanity. It made manual labor easier and allowed us more ability to invent.” Is there a journalist who would have captured the industrial revolution the way poet William Blake did in his poem “The Tyger”: What the hammer? What the chain?/In what furnace was thy brain?What the anvil? What dread grasp/Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 7. The Civil Rights Movement in the last half of the 20th Century. Some mentioned Mohandas K. Gandhi’s non-violent movement that won freedom for India in 1947, others the feminist movement. But most focused on Martin Luther King Jr. leading the start of the black civil rights movement in the United States. Michael Schudson, professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, said King made the United States Constitution “a reality.” 8. The space program and man’s landing on the moon. Again a story thousands of journalists actually did cover. The first steps by man onto another heavenly body 31 years ago was the high point of the space program. Some reporters mentioned the benefits of satellite technology for their own work. Harry Lockefeer, IPI board member and professor of journalism at Groningen University in The Netherlands, said that journalists can now bring instant reports to the public, making them better able to influence their government. 9. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. That event was considered more important than its rise 74 years earlier and not just because the superpowers’ Cold War ended. Rose Lukalo, co-founder of the African Women and Child Feature Service said, “It snowballed the whole globalization process … Africa had always been a football, a power play between superpowers. Once it was over it was ‘OK, you’re not important anymore.’” 10. The Protestant Reformation’s appearance in the list, along with Columbus’ discovery and the invention of printing, makes the 102 years from 1454 to 1556 second to the 20th Century in the number of events deemed eminently coverable by correspondents. Byron Acohido of The Seattle Times said he would have liked to cover Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. “It was such a major shift back to the original concept of Christianity and away from where it had drifted with liberal Catholicism and the Popes … That would have been great to do a big Sunday takeout.” If only there had been a reporter there to cover Luther for a journal printed on one of the new Gutenberg presses. We might know for certain whether the man who started the Protestant Reformation actually did hammer the document onto the church door. “The first known reference to the posting story was made by Philipp Melanchthon in 1546, and Luther never mentioned the posting of his theses on the church door,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. The encyclopedia says a modern day historian, Erwin Iserloh, wrote in “The Theses Were Not Posted,” published in English in 1968, that “the best historical evidence” suggests “that Luther wrote to the bishops on Oct. 31, 1517.” He did not receive an answer. Sometimes it can take 400 years to set the record straight.Readers finishing this list may say that such lists are indeed fatuous. Think of all the people the list ignores: Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton among scientists; Genghis Khan among military leaders; Jeanne d’Arc, also a military leader; Thomas Jefferson among political philosophers, Peter the Great among charismatic nation builders; Louis and Marie Pasteur among healers; Shakespeare; Beethoven among composers, and many other historic notables. How many lives — Mayans, aboriginals, the founders of ancient empires — have flickered in the past 1,000 years? Perhaps the fabric of the past millennium was woven more by these anonymous billions than by the well-known names here. But then, that would make a much longer list.
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List of Contributers
BYRON ACOHIDO, Reporter, The Seattle Times, Seattle Wash., USA. Won 1997 Pulitzer for beat reporting. Won 1998 Pulitzer for investigative reporting.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, Chief International Correspondent, CNN, and co-anchor for CNN’s “The World Today,” London, UK.
BEN BAGDIKIAN, Professor emeritus and dean, University of California Graduate School of Journalism, Berkeley, Calif., USA. Former assistant managing editor for national news at The Washington Post.
COLE CAMPBELL, Editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis, Mo., USA.
RUSSELL CAROLLO, Special projects reporter, Dayton Daily News, Dayton, Ohio, USA. Won Pulitzer in 1998 for national reporting.
GARY COHN, Reporter, The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore, Md., USA. Won Pulitzer in 1996 for investigative
reporting.
MAX FRANKEL, Former editor of The New York Times. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, New York, N.Y., USA.
H.D.S. GREENWAY, Editorial Page Editor, The Boston Globe, Boston, Mass., USA; IPI board member.
ANGELO HENDERSON, Senior Special Writer for Page 1, The Wall Street Journal, New York N.Y., USA. Won Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for feature writing.
OWEN JOHNSON, Professor of journalism and adjunct
professor of history, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., USA.
ROBERT KEELER, Religion writer, Newsday, Long Island, N.Y., USA. Won Pulitzer in 1996 for beat reporting.
BILL KELLEY, Writer for “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher,” ABC-TV, Los Angeles, Calif., USA.
GEORGE KUSER, Bazzano Superiore, Spoleto, Italy. Nephew of Jim Kearney, editor, Trenton (NJ) Times and a founder of IPI.
HARRY LOCKEFEER, Professor of journalism, Groningen University, Bussum, Nether-lands. IPI board member.
ROSE LUKALO-OWINO, Co-founder, Africa Women and Child Feature Service, Nairobi, Kenya.
HANS ERIK MATRE, Managing editor, Schibsted ASA, Oslo, Norway. IPI board member.
JOHN MERRILL, Professor emeritus, Editorial Depart-ment, University of Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, Mo., USA.
VICTOR NAVASKY, Publisher and Editorial Director, The Nation, New York, N.Y., USA.
PAUL SALOPEK, Foreign
correspondent, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Ill., USA. Won Pulitzer in 1998 for explanatory journalism.
STEPHANIE SAUL, National
correspondent, Newsday, Long Island, N.Y., USA. Won Pulitzer in 1995 for investigative reporting.
MICHAEL SCHUDSON, Professor of communication, University of California, San Diego, Calif., USA.
SREENATH SREENIVASAN, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, N.Y., USA. Co-founder of South Asian Journalists Association.
RICHARD TAIT, Editor-in-chief, ITN, London, UK. IPI board member.
LYLE TURNBULL, President of Commonwealth Press Union, Portsea VIC, Australia. IPI board member.
NORMAN WEBSTER, Columnist and former editor of the Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. IPI board member.
BERNARD WOUTS, Chairman and CEO, Le Point, Paris, France. IPI board member.