Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Most contemporary media criticism comes down to some variant on ‘your story doesn’t jibe with my belief system.’ There are elaborate and even lovely variations on this theme, but it deliberately shuns that journalists strive to capture the truth. Note the small ‘t’ on truth. We have our blind spots. We make mistakes, but the motivation is not, with some exceptions, to jam a belief system down the audience’s throat.

Or so I think.

We had a great speaker at Lippmann House recently (these things are all off the record so I won’t say whom) who cracked about the role of techno-determinism in the press coverage of the revolution in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. “You can just see the New York Times looking for the white person behind the revolutions” was more or less his comment. I’m putting more of my time into “Paradise Lost” than the daily news, but I had to laugh, because writing about techno-determinism is more or less what I do for a living, and there is a lot of it in the media.

Then we Niemans were challenged with what seemed a difficult question: why aren’t the Western media covering the protests in Gabon and Cameroon?  In these countries protests receive almost no attention in the Western media, our speaker claimed. These ripple revolts are suppressed, and should not be.

I happen to know some people from the Cameroon who would be likely to tell me about things back home, and I was mystified that I knew nothing of what was happening there. it was absolutely true that there was nothing on Cameroon’s revolution in the press — Google News turned up one reference to the organization of a protest, and no follow-up.

I made some phone calls. The most politically connected of my Cameroonian friends said there was a protest in its largest city, Douala, on February 24th, and that the military crushed it and beat some people and jailed them, including a candidate in the presidential elections slated for this fall.

My friend noted that the Francophone president of Cameroon has been there for nearly 30 years, and it was interesting that the protest took place in Douala, because it’s a Francophone city, so in addition to disaffected and oppressed members of the Anglophone minority, many of the protestors must have been French speakers. That intrigued me, and I started poking around on these demonstrations.

I found only this: Cameroon: The will for change

Two pieces of video were included: the brutal beatdown of a single demonstrator by police, and a longer clip of what might be the whole event (see below).

My friend felt that many people in Cameroon want to see a new president — Paul Bila has been in the job for 28 years, after all. But there is apathy because of his perceived control of the country’s institutions and military.

You look at the video above. Tell me if you think this was more than a very small protest, quickly brushed aside.  It was small enough that were I an editor, a demonstration that small and that quickly dispersed would not incline me to dedicate resources to cover it. It looks suspiciously like a publicity stunt for a politician. That politician, Kah Walla, claims she was beaten, though that does not appear on camera.

I don’t doubt there is real desire for change in Cameroon, but it was not evident in what I saw here. The same event in a U.S. city would be unlikely to draw more than local coverage, if that, and it would probably focus on the man being beaten. Would the attention of the press spark a surge of protesters in the Cameroon? Maybe, if you believe the news media affects people like it does in Tom Wolfe’s famously cynical protest scene in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” I thought, perhaps naively, that was an almost unbelievable scene even in a work of fiction. Maybe on a slow news day.

Have I hit my blind spot? Was our speaker talking against my own belief system? Or am I right, that it’s hard to give serious coverage to a couple of dozen people disrupting traffic, however courageously, when you’re comparing it to tens and hundreds of thousands of people turning out elsewhere? Look at the video below and tell me what you think.

I’ve spent almost every waking hour for the last 17 days being part of the Harvard Negotiation Workshop’s January term. I’ve read most or all of five books on negotiation, prepared for and negotiated 13 formal scenarios and at least half-a-dozen impromptu ones, and written 13,000 words in a journal devoted to what I was learning (not all of which I liked). Yesterday was dinner out with my family and then running over to the Grafton St. Pub for an impromptu ‘bar review’ with a chunk of my section, the two dozen people I’ve spent my days with. I had fun learning things about people besides their negotiation style.

Today is the shopping day at The Kennedy School. But the kids are home from their school, and I need to get ready for course shopping at Harvard itself. I was more or less set on what I wanted to do first term.  This term is different. I’m pretty set on Psychology and Economics, taught by David Laibson and Andrei Shleifer. After that, I’m auditioning teachers and topics.

I’m looking at Technology in the Social World, because of high marks for the professor, Adelheid Voskuhl. The Bible and English Authors, because it looks in-depth at Paradise Lost and Moby Dick, which I’ve read in isolation and feel like I missed out on much of their power. The American Novel since 1900, because I now want to understand how we get to “Gravity’s Rainbow” and perhaps see what kind of impact electronic media and digital technology have had on how we tell stories. The History of Modern Science and Technology in East Asia because I’m interested in economic development in non-Western societies (and I’m intrigued that the teacher wants students to submit podcasts and a multimedia presentation).  The Coming of Managerial Capitalism at the Business School, though that one has a 200+person waiting list. Political Economy after the Crisis, to help me think about some likely future directions of economic behavior.  Innovation and Innovation Policy at the Kennedy School, for similar reasons. Poems, Poets and Poetry because of the professor, Helen Vendler, and just because. The Ethics of Atheism or The Rome of Augustus, because who doesn’t want to know about these things? Plus, there’s a class on Media Entrepreneurship at MIT that I have my eye on.
Oh yeah, I’m only going to take three of them. I have to gear up for returning to the real world of freelancing at some point during the spring term.

The Nieman Holiday Card. Cool to be on it! And wonderful to see the names of so many new friends.

The Business School at Harvard goes a week longer than the college, so I just finished the last session of my last class, Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism. I’m sad about that – I have come to really love this course and how it engages us and forces us to wrestle with the difficulties of everyday business decision-making. At the business school, the professor uses Socratic method to navigate the students in a public discussion, hearkening back to Plato and his dialogues. Our professor, Geoff Jones, was a worthy successor to Plato. Without seeming to do more than touch the rudder now and again, he took us towards his goal, to understand that history matters and that history is complex, its lessons not clearcut. I think we got that.

The world is globalizing again, though it is not yet as global as it was in the 19^th century, and today’s globalization bears far different effects. In the 1800s, entrepreneurs from the West made almost all the rules, not governments and certainly not the locals being co-opted into the world economy. That’s no longer the case.  We’ve seen that globalization can fall apart, that the world has more friction, and that government matters a lot more to the way businesses form and function than it once did.  We’ve also seen that great entrepreneurs often build companies that succeed financially but destroy or degrade the society they operate in. The company and entrepreneur often move on, but the system is affected. Capitalists say nothing to Hitler and capitalism carries a stain, making Communism more attractive, especially to countries already feeling exploited by their encounter with capitalists. Capitalists use slave or bonded labor and overthrow governments for acting in the best interests of their citizens, and capitalism becomes viewed as exploitative and evil system to an entire continent.

I thought entrepreneurs were important when I started this class, but largely abstracted from society. I now see that entrepreneurs are amazingly creative forces for society, artists of a sort, who motivate themselves and others to build something that has tangible effects on their community and greater society, much as an artist marshals colors and materials into something grander than its mere components. But entrepreneurs are not separate from society and cannot myopically focus on their business. At the start of the course, I was constantly frustrated by a subset of my classmates who refused to look beyond the balance sheet, who denied entrepreneurs having a role beyond their business operations, beyond profits. That changed during the course – even the most die-hard of these students became more nuanced in their arguments (I like to think I did, too). I found myself sometimes wondering what specific students thought about an issue that would come up in class, but they hadn’t addressed. More importantly, I also found myself thinking that I should go talk with someone I usually disagree with, to get their perspective and better understand it.

Geoff put up three quotes at the start of today’s class:

• What’s past is prologue (Shakespeare, The Tempest)
• We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future (F.W. Maitland)
• History never repeats itself but it rhymes, Mark Twayne (Geoff’s misspelling, which may be deliberate. The quote is attributed to Twain, but appears to in fact come from a poem by John Robert Colombo, who wrote “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, said Mark Twain”)

I’m with Shakespeare – I think the past influences and affects the present.  I don’t think it repeats itself exactly but we see where it might go by what has gone before.

Today’s class debated whether the world was flat or spiky.  Of course, it’s both. It’s flat in many ways, thanks to technology both digital and mechanical. But it isn’t flat everywhere, even where there’s Internet access and widespread mobile phone use. Oddly, as we learned in the course, the more digital (flatter) we get, the more we see business cluster into specific geographic areas (spikier). During the debate, I made notes to myself about how even within societies there are spikes and flats. I mapped out a version of his course in novels I’ve read. His first module, the first Global Economy, was Dickens (”Hard Times,” “Great Expectations”) and Sinclair (”The Jungle”). The Second module, the collapse of the world economy, was Dos Passos (”U.S.A.”) and Lewis (”Babbitt”). The Third module, the rebuilding of the global economy, was Pynchon (”Gravity’s Rainbow”) and Marques (”Love in the Time of Cholera”), Puig (”Kiss of the Spider Woman”) and McInerney (”Bright Lights, Big City”). The fourth, the second Global Economy, seemed to map well with my friend Joel Deane’s bitter novel of the Australian service economy “Another,” and with Franzen’s “The Corrections.” All of them show people within a society, some within the circles of money and power, others not, and how whimsical, thoughtless, bad and greedy decisions especially those of the powerful, play out. We saw this in our case studies, also, most markedly in places like Argentina, Chile, Prussia, Japan, and Guatemala.

Throughout, Geoff referred to a slide with photographs of a number of the entrepreneurs we studied. At the end, he told the class to think forward to 2040, and to imagine their own pictures up there. “What will people say about you and your life?” he asked us. He hoped that this would make the class think differently about difficult and complex decisions they’ll be making. It was a great charge, and I’m excited to see where my classmates go.

I don’t know if all HBS classes end with a standing ovation for the professor, but this one did. I wish he was teaching  next term.

Paul Steiger, editor of the well-funded investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica, came by Lippmann House recently to talk to us Niemans. These sessions are all off the record, but I can note that I listened to him with ambivalence. I admire the work ProPublica is doing, but I find its very existence depressing. Why should such good work be done for free? I also really dislike that I have to compete with it for space in major magazines. Let’s say I was working on a reasonably equivalent story and could get the attention of a magazine like the Atlantic or the New York Times Magazine. To do the same story, those publications would have to pay me a substantial amount of money. They don’t have to pay ProPublica for the writing. The magazine would have to edit and then copy edit my piece, which ProPublica will already have done (though of course there will be more editing and tweaking to cater for the individual tastes of the magazine). My wife says the solution would be for me to go work for ProPublica or something like it. Perhaps she’s right. No less a literary figure than Samuel Johnson made a living not from his words but from patronage. In some ways, patronage offers a better model for writers than the one I built as a freelancer. But really, I think ProPublica should publish its own stuff, and show the market that money can be made from investigative journalism, just as 60 Minutes showed that television news can pay for itself.

The word ‘charm’ etched onto a cornice caught my eye recently on Harvard’s campus. Who carves such a light-hearted word into stone? The Harvard music department, as it happens. The full inscription is “To charm, to strengthen and to teach — these are the three great chords of might.”

The phrase comes from a Longfellow poem called “The Singers.” Apt place for it. I wonder if the musical setting plays in the lobby when one opens the door.

Only at Harvard: you attend a random cocktail party where someone says, “oh, my friend hosted Stephen Hawking last summer. It took Hawking the entire weekend to write a sentence. He can’t possibly have written that book!”

At another cocktail party, someone’s computer science professor had both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in class, and he said “Zuckerberg was an asshole. Gates was much nicer.”

Walking out of Shakespeare class, I literally bumped into Tracy Kidder, and had a nice chat with him about why neither of us much like Othello (though we both confess neither of us could write anything as good as it).

I thought this week would see me get out in front of a couple of class projects. It looked like a relatively light week, since the Statistics mid-term meant there was no class Monday and not enough new material to warrant homework. Meanwhile, the business school at Harvard shuts down for this week, as its students vie for summer jobs (plum banking jobs, from what I hear). So I have no class there this week. But things never go as planned. In Cultural Economics we’re reading six papers on various aspects on what affects social trust, and those just take a lot of time. I realized I was behind on my Statistics reading (always light). There was supplemental material on Hamlet. Plus, we had our last class on Gravity’s Rainbow, and my group had to present its final thoughts on how it deals with theology. And I was writing something that was assigned in March, but not due until now. Ugh. It all added up to no huge blocks of time with nothing to do but read and write. I’ll have to get through that extra work somehow (or remember that I’m an auditor and technically not responsible for everything).

Darcy Frey gave a great Sounding on Monday, so good it made me stop and think, ‘wait a minute, how did I get to be a Nieman along with him?’ A good seminar this afternoon, built around the new edition of “From Slavery to Freedom.” Tomorrow, we get to have Seymour Hersh as our lunch guest. I can’t complain too much about time, with stuff like that going on.

Some of the greatest expressions of human creativity come from entrepreneurs. Building even a small business requires acts of ingenuity. Creating a large business is a marvel. I thought that before I got to Harvard, and I think it moreso now, roughly halfway through the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course I’m auditing at Harvard Business School.  The course offers a thrilling tour of modern global capitalism, starting with the men who invented the first wave of global capitalism back in the mid-19th century. (And yes, they’re all men — name me a woman who was a global entrepreneur before World War II and I’ll write about her.)

While we celebrate the achievements of these early global capitalists, the course is tinged with darkness. The narrative arc is clear — these men often built great and enduring enterprises. Some of them encouraged solid institutions and better living standards where they operated. But many of them also created squalor and oppression.  We see people who might have provided the inspiration for Dickens’ Bounderby or the malevolent barons of “The Jungle.” Unable, or unwilling, to look beyond the balance sheet, they made capitalism a dirty word in much of the world.

The truth is that these businessmen, many of them creative geniuses on a par with a Shakespeare or a Mahler, also fomented the rise of socialism, the World Wars, the Cold War, the abject poverty of a quarter of the world’s population and a business-blunting distrust of markets. This narrative is clear-cut (and is reinforced by the Cultural Economics course I’m taking).

What amazes me is that halfway through the class, a vocal contingent of students continue to insist that businesses operate in isolation. They advocate profits, and profits alone, as the sole responsibility of a business.  I don’t want these people anywhere near my water supply, and I really don’t want them near the banking system. Fortunately, most of the class seems to get the challenges that face them in the business world. Indeed, some of these students make remarkable comments. Maybe in the not-so-distant future I’ll be writing about their remaking of capitalism.

Nieman Fellows spend a good chunk of our time on extra-curricular activities; to a degree, what happens outside of the classroom matters more than what happens in it. Some of our activities transcend the mere extra-curricular, including what we’re doing right now, as we discuss what journalist should get the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.

As an American journalist who has spent little time reporting from foreign countries, I find this process eye-opening. Journalists don’t get a lot of respect in America, but at worst I might get hazed, or on a good day screamed at by an angry corporate mouthpiece. Elsewhere, journalists get shot at, blown up, jailed, deprived of basic civil rights. I was aware of this in an abstract way before I became a Nieman Fellow; I spent some time a few years ago trying to help with the U.S. transition for an African journalist who was driven from his country because of his reporting.  But actually going through example after example of journalists under attack for doing their jobs shatters my abstract ideas of what it really means to be a journalist. We are sifting through data about journalists and bloggers in Azerbaijan, Burma/Myanmar, China, Colombia, Iran, Mexico and Somalia. Several of them are in jail for their reporting, some are in exile or banned from working, some still alive by what amounts to a minor miracle. It’s a stunning list, every one an intrepid human being. It’s no less enlightening to hear colleagues here at Nieman put it in context from their own experience — what happens when you’re threatened with death in a country where the government actually would be glad to see you dead? What happens when you know your phone and email are monitored, as well as all your personal interactions?

Something for me to reflect on when somebody flames me for not kowtowing to their perspective.