Category Archives: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

RIP David Carr

We have lost an extraordinary talent tonight, with David Carr’s death, far too soon.

My own little piece of this widely shared awareness began in 1997. Carr had barely arrived in DC from Minneapolis when he wrote (in the Washington City Paper) a little something more perceptive about my time as Washington Post ombudsman than I could have conjured up myself.  I chafed at his “prairie marm” reference, given my many previous hometowns.  But his eye was a keen one, and I’ve been relying on it ever since:

“Geneva Overholser, ombudsman for the Post, was elected chairwoman of the Pulitzer Prize board last month. Ombudsmanship is usually a one-way ticket to obscurity, but Overholser, the former editor of the Des Moines Register, is making a name for herself by taking on some of the paper’s most hallowed names. Last Sunday, she chided her employer for its cheesy “Issue Forum” special advertising sections, which look like news but aren’t. And she took on Bob Woodward—something that hasn’t happened since he was canonized back in the ’70s—for his use of unnamed sources in his takedown of Al Gore’s fund-raising activities. Managing editor Bob Kaiser felt compelled to respond to her critique in print, which suggests that she’s getting under somebody’s skin. Overholser’s ascension to the chair of the Pulitzers isn’t going to get any seconds in the Post newsroom, where Beltway provincialists view her as a prairie marm who just doesn’t know how business gets done in the big city.”

Carr, for so many perceptive and thoughtful and illuminating pieces, we’ll miss you sorely.

 

 

Leadership, Newspapers, Uncategorized

Rape and anonymity: A fateful pairing

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Nancy Ziegenmeyer identifies the man who raped her. By David Peterson, from the 1989 series
Nancy Ziegenmeyer identifies the man who raped her. By David Peterson, from the 1990 series

The Rolling Stone’s indefensible University of Virginia gang-rape story felt like a punch in the gut to anyone feeling hopeful about progress against sexual assault. But hopeful I remain. This fight is (finally) too vigorous to be stopped by flawed journalism.

News and social-media coverage over recent weeks, from the serial rape allegations against Bill Cosby to reports of sexual assault in the military and on campuses across the nation, would indicate that rape is at last being recognized — as an unacceptable reality that we have accepted for far too long. A lot of people seem to have decided no longer to acquiesce in the notion that rape and silence go hand in hand.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of folks poised to seize on any sign that a rape claim might be false. Rolling Stone gave these folks a huge assist: A spectacular gang-rape story, almost entirely free of attribution, quickly collapsing under its own weight. Continue reading Rape and anonymity: A fateful pairing →

Yet this problematic journalistic practice is nothing new; anonymity has been central to rape coverage for decades. (I first wrote about this in 1989. ) The common editorial practice of shielding rape victims by not naming them – unlike the journalistic commitment to naming names in all other crimes involving adults – is a particular slice of silence that I believe has consistently undermined society’s attempts to deal effectively with rape.

How do you size up a problem that’s largely hidden? There is plenty of talk about rape, but little of it is anchored by fact. As Vice President Biden said last January, in releasing the White House Report on sexual assault on campus, “The first step in solving a problem is to name it and know the extent of it.”

We know (vaguely) that the problem is huge. Looking at campuses only, the most widely agreed upon figure is that one in five U.S. college women will be raped during her college years. It’s hard to be sure because, as criminal justice experts agree, sexual assault is one of the nation’s most underreported crimes. The most reliable estimates indicate that some 15 percent of college students who have been raped report the crime. See more information here.

Without data and transparency, the issue has had a hard time gaining footing against administrators’ desire to keep rape statistics quiet. (The Center for Public Integrity has done powerful work on this topic. ) When the crime is not reported, and no one is named, how do you get the data?

One of many reasons that rape victims (or more accurately those who bring charges of rape) do not report it is that those who do are often subjected not only to disbelief, but also to humiliation, shame, and worse. This is abundantly clear in the military’s abysmal record on sexual assault. A recent Pentagon study said that nearly two-thirds of those who did report encountered retaliation of some sort. As a recent New York Times editorial noted, “That is the same as the previous year, despite a new law making retaliation a punishable offense.”

No surprise then, that for so many years, newspaper editors have agreed to “protect” rape victims by refusing to name them. So why hasn’t this helped correct the underreporting and reduce the retaliation? Maybe because the anonymity, rather than being part of an effective solution to an unacceptable reality, contributes to its prolongation. In other words, it does more harm than good.

You don’t have to believe that there are many women bringing false charges of rape (I don’t) to understand that a fundamental unfairness lies waiting to be exploited when one person is named and another is not, particularly in a crime as inevitably private as rape.

And exploited, it regularly is, as we see again and again — vividly in the case of those bringing allegations against Cosby, and in the appalling New York Times magazine story on sexual assault in the military  People react angrily to the woman who “takes down” a beloved old comedian, a talented airman, a great football player – or just a cool frat guy.

If anonymity’s silencing keeps the crime’s dimensions hidden, and its unfairness feeds the fires of those disinclined to hear victims’ truths, anonymity has yet another worrisome trait: It  prevents the public from fully engaging with the problem. As journalists well know (but choose distressingly often to ignore) nothing affects public opinion like real stories with real faces and names attached. Attribution brings accountability,  a climate within which both empathy and credibility flourish.

Young women today seem to understand all this better than journalists do. Harvard alumna Rory Gerberg is a founder of a coalition of students to address the university’s sexual assault policy. Her view is emblematic: “Our task is to give voice to the daily forms of violence we too often accept as inevitable. This is precisely why student activism is so important. Since I’ve become a campus advocate numerous students have approached me with their stories.”

When real people are credibly seen as having experienced something that we’d rather not acknowledge: That is when we believe at last in a problem’s existence. Thus it was with Anita Hill and sexual harassment. Thus it may well be with Janay Rice and domestic violence (whatever her disinclination to embrace the issue, there is surely no anonymity in that video.)

So, is this that sort of moment for sexual assault? You might say that the past weeks’ stories are as likely to be just another turn of the news cycle as they are to be a tipping point. But I’d say that legacy media are no longer the primary determinant of whether the issue moves forward. Women are now making their voices heard in a way they haven’t been able to before, from Cosby’s alleged victims to  college women speaking out on campuses across the country.

Latoya Peterson, in a recent New York Times book review, quoted feminist scholar Donna Haraway regarding “the power to survive… on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”  Many women are experiencing that power.  While the use of social media has its downsides, for sure, this seems unlikely to stop them. For one thing, social media are aiding them not only by giving them a platform, but also by winning them wide support. This includes support from men who have previously acquiesced in the silence, a huge factor in the Cosby story, which David Carr sums up here.

Sen. Claire McCaskill may have a misplaced confidence in the military’s ability to deal with sexual assault, but this she gets exactly right: “What you’re seeing with Cosby and college campuses and the military is that victims are gaining strength by seeing the courage of other victims,” she said. “I have seen this incredible increase in the number of people who have come out and are saying, ‘I want people to know that this happened to me.’ ”

The longstanding nudge (by journalists and others) toward anonymity that women who have been raped have been experiencing has no doubt comforted some, at least for a period. But, increasingly, the underside of this approach even for the individual is  acknowledged. Painful as the truth can be, absorbing the notion that you can’t tell it can be worse. As Times columnist Charles Blow wrote of having buried his own experience as a child with sexual assault: “I had done what the world signaled I must: hidden the thorn in my flesh.” What he discovered, he said, was that “concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.”

Journalists are avidly tearing apart the Rolling Stone for its appalling dereliction of duty, and rightfully so. But all who have shared in this idea of anonymity as a protection of rape victims have played a role in bringing us to this moment. We have been participants in the notion that rape and silence go hand in hand. It’s a notion outmoded at last, and those who pursue it become more and more irrelevant.

 

 

__________________________________________________

 

The column linked above from 1989 was printed not only in the new York Times, but also  in The Des Moines Register, where I was editor at the time. When she read it, a very brave Iowan named Nancy Ziegenmeyer called me to ask that her story be told, on-the-record and with her photographs. The resulting series won a Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.   Ever since that time, when rape rears its head as an issue of particular public concern (or a journalism student decides it’s a good project topic) I get calls and emails asking me if I “still feel” that rape victims should be named. So I have written and spoken on the issue from time to time. Links to a few of those  columns and conversations are below.

“Name the Accuser and the Accused” from 2003, which included this quote: “Certainly, in the past dozen years, we have made progress in reporting on, and understanding, the crime of rape. I am certain that this is in large part due to the courage of women who were willing to come forward and tell their stories. I also wonder if the unfairness of naming the accused and not the accuser has given platform to those who make outsized claims about the number of false charges of rape. And I wonder if shielding the accuser does not inflame still further the cruel search for dirt about her.”

This response to the Kobe Bryant case in 2004

A reaction to the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn case

And this more recent Nieman Reports piece

 

 

Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Uncategorized

Hey, Silicon Valley: You oughta have old journalists (like me) on your boards!

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I loved doing this interview with the wicked-smart and delightful Ruben Sanchez, just out in Skyword.com’s Innovator Series.  Reading it over, I realized that one of the ideas I mentioned to Ruben is something I wanted to develop a bit, so here goes:

In all immodesty, the cool, bristling-with-ideas folks planning startups are overlooking an opportunity:  They should be putting old journalists (yes, like me) on their boards. Google “why startups fail,” (see here, here and here for just the first three examples I saw) and you’ll get my point.  Veteran journalists have skills that counter common startup plagues.

Take the single-minded commitment of one leader: It may be a criticall thing for a startup, as far as it goes.  But listening mostly to yourself is a problem.  Run your thoughts past folks who have served the public interests in many different ways over a long period of time, and everyone is likely to learn something.   Same with one very narrow idea — enrich it by regularly subjecting it to discussions with those who have long experience with life, and enhance its staying power.

Management weaknesses are another challenge.  Anyone new to this arena could benefit from the counsel of those who have found solutions over years of management challenges.

Veteran journalists know how to picture the people they are trying to reach.  They know how communities function and what strengthens or weakens democracy. They know how to write, edit, verify, curate. And, stubborn and passionate as we are, old journalists can help by bolstering your tenacity and passion when those are flagging.

Silicon Valley is famous for its lack of gender and ethnic diversity. Both of these lamentable facts decrease startups’ chances of success in our ever more diverse society. Here’s another lack that weakens them. Journalism has made plenty of mistakes over the past few years. Why not benefit from what we’ve learned from them?

 

 

Leadership, Newspapers, Uncategorized

An Early Read on Baquet as New York Times Leader

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In the swirl of the Jill Abramson firing, a couple of things being said about the new executive editor, Dean Baquet, didn’t sync with my impression of him. I looked back at this video of a forum I hosted at USC Annenberg with Baquet when he had just become managing editor of The New York Times, and saw why

What I had found most worrisome was Glenn Greenwald’s charge that Baquet has “a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American national security state.”  When I looked back at the video of Baquet at the USC Director’s Forum on Oct. 27, 2011, I was struck by the fact that he had opened the session with an impassioned call for national-security reporting.

He talked about a call he got, when he was executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, from George Tenet, then director of the CIA. Tenet asked him to hold a story about the CIA, which was spying on the Iranian community in the U.S. Baquet told us that he held the story for a day so as to be able to review it, then called Tenet back and said he’d be running it.

Baquet talked to the gathering of students and faculty about other such stories, as well, including the New York Times reporting on National Security Agency surveillance. He noted that he had had conversations with folks in both the Obama and the Bush administrations on national-security issues, “and the argument is always the same.”

“But so far, not a single bit of evidence — even in the case of Wikileaks, which I edited – has emerged to prove that any of these stories has threatened national security. I’d argue that, in each case, it’s the newspaper that’s being the patriot.” Continue reading An Early Read on Baquet as New York Times Leader →

Like most editors I know, Baquet has indeed presided over decisions not to print. But his remarks at the forum speak to a strength of conviction that I found reassuring. (More reassuring than Baquet’s retort to Richard Prince, calling Greenwald “idiotic” for making the charge.)

The second striking thing in the video was what Baquet had to say about Jill Abramson’s hiring as editor.

A piece about Abramson by Ken Auletta had just run in the New Yorker when the USC forum occurred. I asked Baquet about the notion in that story that, in the end, Arthur Sulzberger’s choice had come down to Jill or Dean, and if the publisher had chosen Dean, he would have lost Jill. In picking Jill, he got both of them. Baquet nodded, adding: “I actually think…Arthur made the right decision. “

“I think that Jill had a lot going for her. She had worked in that newsroom.” (Baquet had been running the New York Times Washington bureau). “She’s a terrific editor.” The Auletta piece “didn’t capture some of the things she had done,” he added, saying it should have been “more about the journalism.”

Baquet continued: “When Arthur called me, I thought, ‘terrific!’ “ (He also noted that he’d been a managing editor twice, and executive editor once. “Being managing editor is about a billion times more fun. Like being coach versus being general manager: You get to hang out with the players.”

As for some of the things Auletta reported about Jill’s leadership style, “I do think that when women in leadership – the tradition of this sort of a cantankerous editor is a much more acceptable tradition for male editors than it is for women who become editor.”

Referring to the infamously difficult Times editor Abe Rosenthal, Baquet said: “In her defense…Abe is portrayed by history as a tyrant. I don’t think that’s Jill. That’s not Jill at all.”

One other thing worth noting about the forum is that Baquet speaks at length about his great enthusiasm for journalism’s new tools. Given that his supposed relative lack of passion — and relative inexperience – on the digital side of things was another concern voiced in the wake of Abramson’s firing, the eagerness with which he talked to students on this topic is noteworthy.

Commencement speeches, Leadership, Uncategorized

It’s commencement season, and this was my message: “LEAD your own life.”

 

(This is a slightly edited version of the address I had the honor of delivering at North Carolina’s St. Andrews University.)

 

Good morning.

I want to thank President Baldasare for having me here today.

I want to add my thanks, too, to the faculty and administration of this wonderful university, who have made the fine education that we celebrate today possible. I want to salute the parents and grandparents, the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and dear friends who are here to witness this momentous occasion. And, finally, the most important thing I have to say:

CONGRATULATIONS to all you freshly minted graduates of St. Andrews University! Hooray!!! Job well done! You’ve done so much hard work to get to the place where you sit today.

This is a very moving moment for me. I find myself these days in the midst of milestones: our younger daughter got married two weeks ago today. We will be celebrating my mother-in-law’s 90th birthday next month, in Charlotte. And our older daughter is due to deliver our first grandchild in July.

Equally moving to me is this: I am here, on this beautiful campus, where both of my parents taught. I got to party last night with friends I first made half a

LHS66

century ago, friends with whom I graduated from Laurinburg High School. On this campus, my brother taught me to drive a stick shift, bucking around the parking lot that was then behind the Vardell Building. And it was in that building, by the way, that I took piano lessons. (I became a pretty good driver, but not much of a pianist.)

So, this is a very powerful place for me. And today is a very powerful moment. I was deeply honored to be invited to give your commencement address, and I wanted very much to find something real and meaningful to say to you. So, amidst all these milestones, I’ve been thinking a lot about life, and how it is shaped, and what shapes it. And that’s what I want to talk to you about: The role you play in shaping your life.

In other words, I want to talk to you about LEADING your life. You know, much of the time, life leads YOU. And this is truer now than ever. My field, journalism, has surely shown me that. The constant wealth of information available, whenever and wherever you are, is an addictive distraction. Virtually every field is like journalism, in that change is coming unbelievably quickly – technological change, social change. All our lives, now, are affected by fast-paced change, happening constantly all around us.

It’s easy to get carried along in the rapids.

Continue reading It’s commencement season, and this was my message: “LEAD your own life.” →

Now, please don’t mistake me. I am not griping about change, and I don’t fear it. I think this is, for the most part, an enormously promising and hopeful period. This moment, when you are coming of age and launching into adulthood, is a wonderfully interesting one. Along with unsettlement, it offers boundless promise for a better, more just, more richly connected, world.

So when I say I want you to LEAD your life, rather than have it lead you, I don’t for a moment mean that you shouldn’t expect change, or embrace the unknown, that you shouldn’t be open to serendipity, or be light on your feet. The connections that social media allow us are so rich. Today’s entertainment menu is so remarkably fresh and diverse. Sure, we all need to be smart about the choices we make. But WHAT a wondrous world this is, one that we should embrace with gusto.

Still, amidst all this stimulation, amidst all of these ways that life is leading US, what I want you to think about – no, what I want you to commit to here today — is this: To establish some goals, to set some parameters, for how you want to lead your life. When YOU look back in fifty years, what do you want to see? When you reach my ripe age, what is it that you hope gives you reason to say: “I did that well.”

Certain things in life need attending to. This requires conscious decisions. This demands stepping occasionally out of the maelstrom to be MINDFUL about how you are spending your time. It is having goals in mind that keeps your life pointed in the direction you want it to go. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I think he put it this way – talking specifically about the long arc – in order to acknowledge the many, many injustices along the way, while stressing that what matters is what happens over the broad sweep of time. That is how life works: It is the arc, over the long term, that determines the shape of your life, more even than the dramatic twists and turns that life takes along the way.

Every life has its ups and downs, its tragedies and joys, its obstacles and serendipities. My message is surely not that you can CONTROL your life. But you can shape it. And in order to shape it, (in order to LEAD it), you have to DECIDE where you want it to go. And to keep it headed there, you have to check in with yourself, now and then, to see if you’re living up to your commitment to yourself.

So, let me ask you graduates two things. Can you identify your priorities? And, if so, are you are in fact investing your time, your energy and your emotions IN those priorities?

Most of us would say that love is a priority. Is it for you? Are you paying attention to those you love? Are you thinking about what your family members need — or simply would dearly love to have — from you? What your friends are hoping for? Are you making powerful commitments to those whom you love most? Loving people well takes time, and energy and thought.

Or, how about your goals as a citizen, a member of society? Do you, for example, hope to make community a central commitment? Are you aiming to do what you can to make this nation more just? To make your local schools better? To make the streets safer?

Or maybe it’s environmental concerns that drive you. Food safety, or climate change; energy self-sufficiency or water scarcity. Whatever your passion as a citizen of this fast-changing world, note it, and commit to it, and check in regularly to see whether you are following through.

Another commitment to consider is keeping your spirit healthy. Are you being true to your faith, whatever it may be? Are you taking time out to pray, or to meditate, to relish the outdoors, or whatever it is that nourishes YOUR spirit and makes you a kinder, more loving person, one who awakens happiness in others through smiles or small courtesies? Do you take time to laugh, to read a poem, to dance?

And how about your physical well-being? Are you eating right, and feeding your loves ones well? Are you exercising, sleeping, avoiding excesses, caring for yourself?

And then of course there is your work, an essential part of life in so many ways, and hugely time-consuming. How will you determine if what you are doing is right for you? What kind of contribution do you most want to make? Are you doing the best you can at whatever it is that you HAVE to do – because, of course, we don’t always get to choose.

Your touchstones may be different – no they WILL be different — from mine. That’s as it should be. But whatever they are, your last St. Andrews assignment is to think about what’s important to you. Determine the goals that will enable you to LEAD your life. Write them down. Commit them to memory. And then commit to checking in with yourself regularly to see how you’re doing.

Now, I imagine that, to some of you at least, this may seem unnecessarily prescriptive. You don’t HAVE to do it, of course. Your life will unspool without it. You’ll be happy and sad, you’ll fail and succeed. But in the absence of clear goals and a commitment to head toward them, the arc of your life will be directed more and more by happenstance, determined more and more by other people. There will be a widening divergence between where you had hoped to go – if you had thought about it – and where your unexamined actions are taking you.

You’ve got this one lovely chance to do it right. Why not be the leader in your own life?

Of course there’s no test on this last lesson at your beloved alma mater, no exam to determine how well you’ve done it. Life provides the test. And if you are conscious of how you want yours to look, if you are intentional about the direction in which you are moving, if you are mindful about monitoring how it’s going – well, I promise you this: You’ll end up being amazed at how many of your hopes have been realized.

I am grateful, for so many reasons, to be here with you on this memorable day. And prime among those reasons is this: In crafting my message to you, I have reminded myself of what I think is important. Like you, I’m beginning a new stage of life, stepping out on unfamiliar terrain. I’m brand new at not working full-time. Come to think of it: This is the first day of the rest of my life! (a statement required at all commencement ceremonies). So excuse me while I go figure out what my new markers are, and how I’m going to ensure that my commitments to myself come true. So that when I really grow old, I can look back and say: That’s the kind of life I hoped to live.

So, now: Congratulations to you all! And remember: the future IS in your hands!