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RENUNGAN KEMERDEKAAN DIANTARA RETAKAN KEBHINEKAAN

Setiap tanggal 17 Agustus bangsa Indonesia selalu memperingati hari kemerdekaan yang diproklamirkan pada tahun 1945 silam. Zaman berubah, generasi berganti tetapi perayaan kemerdekaan baik di kota maupun di desa selalu meriah. Lomba olahraga di kampung-kampung sampai seremonial kenegaraan selalu digelar di hari bersejarah ini.

Anak-anak sekolah berpakaian rapi, memegang bendera dan berjalan keliling sambil berteriak “merdeka” seakan mengenang kembali para pendahulu bangsa ini ketika menyambut hari kemerdekaan. Tak ketinggalan di berbagai tempat bendera merah putih dikibarkan, umbul-umbul dipasang, gapura desa diperbaharui.dan berbagai spanduk ucapan selamat memenuhi sepanjang jalan. Lomba makan krupuk, panjat pinang, gerak jalan, panggung hiburan, karnaval sampai pentas wayang semalam suntuk digelar untuk menyambut peringatan hari kemerdekaan.

Tahun ini ada yang berbeda dalam peringatan kemerdekaan kita. Sebuah kado yang mengerikan diberikan tepat sebulan sebelum perayaan kemerdekaan. Aksi terorisme yang yang menghancurkan Hotel JW Marriot dan Ritz Carlton kembali terjadi. Tanggal  17 Juli 2009 bangsa ini harus kembali menyaksikan jatuhnya korban tak bersalah akibat ulah segelintir orang. Mayat-mayat dan potongan tubuh korban ledakan berserakan dimana-mana. Dari tayangan televisi kita saksikan kengerian, kerusakan dan korban-korban tak bersalah kembali menjadi tumbal aksi teror yang biadab. Nyawa orang-orang yang tidak tahu menahu duduk perkara harus melayang dengan demikian murahnya.

Kejadian tersebut mengungkit luka lama ketika serentetan aksi teror mengguncang negeri ini. Sabtu 1 Oktober 2005 ledakan bom kembali mengguncang Bali. Sepanjang tahun 1999-2003 saja tercatat 193 kasus bom terjadi di berbagai daerah di tanah air. Diantaranya adalah teror bom yang terjadi di Hotel JW Marriot, Kedubes Australia maupun Bom Bali I pada tahun 2002.

Aksi teror memberikan peringatan kepada kita semua bahwa kemerdekaan masih harus diperjuangkan. Kemerdekaan dari rasa takut, kemiskinan, kebebasan, ketidakadilan dan aneka belenggu lain yang masih mengikat bangsa ini.

Kini 64 tahun sudah usia bangsa ini, suatu usia yang semestinya menunjukkan kematangan, kearifan, kemapanan dalam bertindak dan tentu saja kemampuan untuk merealisasikan hakekat kemerdekaan. Namun, jika kita cermati keadaan masyarakat kita sekarang ini harapan tersebut tentunya masih jauh dari kenyataan. Krisis berkepanjangan yang dialami bangsa ini tidak saja berakibat secara ekonomi, tetapi juga semakin menjauhkan dari sikap dewasa. Berbagai konflik horizontal yang dipicu persoalan politik, ekonomi, sosial, suku, agama dan ras (SARA) mencerminkan jauhnya bangsa ini dari sikap arif dan matang dalam bertindak. Lihatlah pemilihan kepala daerah yang berdarah-darah dan penuh amuk massa, aksi tawur antar warga, maupun kekerasan dalam berbagai bentuk. Belum lagi keinginan beberapa daerah untuk merdeka yang semakin menguat. Pelaksanaan pemilu legislatif dan pemilihan presiden juga berpotensi untuk memicu perpecahan bangsa. Meski berjalan cukup aman, tetapi gesekan antar pendukung partai ataupun presiden nampak nyata di permukaan.

Kesemuanya itu memunculkan kekhawatiran ancaman perpecahan nasional akibat berbagai kasus yang tak henti-hentinya terjadi selama ini. Munculah pesimisme bahwa “persatuan dan kesatuan” yang didengungkan selama ini tampaknya tidak sekokoh yang dibayangkan. Suatu bentuk tanpa isi, karena persatuan bersifat seremonial belaka. Begitu seremoni usai, maka muncullah gejala-gejala yang mengkhawatirkan itu.

Kondisi tersebut menggambarkan bahwa persatuan dan kesatuan kita sebagai bangsa dalam ancaman serius. Indonesia yang selalu digembar-gemborkan sebagai bangsa yang bersatu ternyata begitu mudah dipecah-belah. Semangat nasionalisme yang menunjukkan loyalitas dan pengabdian terhadap bangsa dan negara semakin kabur dan hanya berhenti pada tataran seremonial belaka. Semua itu menjadi renungan bersama bangsa ini sehingga kemerdekaan tidak hanya dimaknai sebagai upacara bendera, kemeriahan atau bahkan sekedar rutinitas yang datang setiap tahun.

Belajar dari sejarah bangsa

Retakan-retakan kebhinekaan yang mulai menguat di tengah masyarakat kita semestinya mendapat perhatian serius dari semua pihak. Jika tidak kita perhatikan dengan serius maka keutuhan bangsa ini bisa jadi tinggal kenangan. Satu per satu wilayah Indonesia akan memilih untuk merdeka dan pada akhirnya Indonesia tinggal menjadi kenangan sejarah. Persoalannya bagaimanakah kita bisa mengatasi ancaman tersebut?

Jika kita mau menggali dan belajar dari sejarah perjalanan bangsa ini, maka jawaban pertanyaan tersebut bisa kita temukan. Generasi 1908 yang dipelopori Boedi Oetomo, generasi 1928 dengan Sumpah Pemuda, dan generasi 1945 yang berhasil mencetuskan proklamasi telah memberi pelajaran bagaimana persatuan dan kesatuan bangsa ini dibentuk. Kuncinya terletak pada kemauan untuk menghargai dan menerima kebhinekaan, mengikis egoisme primordial dan membangun kesadaran kebangsaan.

Kebhinekaan Indonesia itu bukan sekedar mitos, tetapi realita yang ada di depan mata kita. Harus kita sadari bahwa pola pikir dan budaya orang Jawa itu berbeda dengan orang Minang, Papua, Dayak, Sunda dan lainnya. Elite pemimpin yang berasal dari kota-kota besar dan metropolitan bisa jadi memandang Indonesia secara global akan tetapi elite pemimpin nasional dari budaya lokal tertentu memandang Indonesia berdasarkan jiwa, perasaan dan kebiasaan lokalnya. Ini saja menunjukkan kalau cara pandang kita tentang Indonesia berbeda. Jadi tanpa kemauan untuk menerima dan menghargai kebhinekaan maka sulit untuk mewujudkan persatuan dan kesatuan bangsa.

Apa yang dilakukan oleh pendahulu bangsa ini dengan membangun kesadaran kebangsaan atau nasionalisme merupakan upaya untuk menjaga loyalitas dan pengabdian terhadap bangsa. Permasalahannya, mengapa nasionalisme kita sekarang ini nampaknya tidak mampu menjaga keutuhan bangsa?. Hal tersebut tidak terlepas dari sifat nasionalisme kita yang tidak operasional atau hanya berhenti pada tataran konsep dan slogan politik.

Nasionalisme bisa berfungsi sebagai pemersatu beragam suku, tetapi perlu secara operasional sehingga mampu memenuhi kebutuhan objektif setiap warga dalam suatu negara-bangsa. Tradisi dari suatu bangsa yang gagal memenuhi fungsi pemenuhan kebutuhan hidup objektif akan kehilangan peran sebagai peneguh nasionalisme. Saat ini diperlukan tafsir baru nasionalisme sebagai kesadaran kolektif di tengah pola kehidupan baru yang mengglobal dan terbuka. Batas-batas fisik negara-bangsa yang terus mencair menyebabkan kesatuan negara kepulauan seperti Indonesia amat rentan terhadap serapan budaya global yang tidak seluruhnya sesuai tradisi negeri ini. Disamping itu realisasi otonomi daerah yang kurang tepat akan memperlemah nilai dan kesadaran kolektif kebangsaan di bawah payung nasionalisme

Menurut Profesor Abdul Munir Mulkhan, kekukuhan nasionalisme di dalam diri bangsa ditentukan posisi dan seberapa ia berakar dalam “dunia batin” warga bangsa tersebut. Nasionalisme yang sekedar konsensus politik nasional, akan mudah pudar bersama perubahan sosial yang semakin cepat di era global ini. Wawasan nasionalisme akan tetap segar jika ia juga merupakan daya spritual dan kesadaran hidup di dalam diri orang atau warga bangsa. Karena itulah nasionalisme seharusnya selalu disegarkan kembali dan didialogkan bersama seluruh warga suatu bangsa tersebut.

Nasionalisme yang berhenti sebagai doktrin ideologis kenegaraan kurang berakar dalam kesadaran hidup warga. Kesadaran nasionalisme (NKRI) tumbuh kukuh dalam diri rakyat kebanyakan yang rela berkorban bagi kepentingan nusa bangsanya, ketika mereka merasa menjadi bagian tak terpisahkan dari kehidupan kebangsaan itu. Kesadaran primordial rakyat nampak lebih kental dibanding elite yang lebih rasional. Namun ketika rakyat itu melihat praktek kekuasaan yang egois bagi kepentingan elite, muncul kritik dan pemberontakan budaya.

Inilah krisis paling serius, lebih serius daripada berbagai krisis ekonomi-politik yang dihadapi bangsa ini. Kesadaran spritual di atas penting dikembangkan sebagai basis “nasionalisme baru” berbeda dengan konsep kewilayahan di berbagai belahan dunia dan bangsa lain. Soalnya ialah bagaimana kesadaran itu berfungsi di tengah mobilitas sosial dan kesadaran rasional dalam kehidupan kenegaraan dan kebangsaan. Kesadaran kenusantaraan yang primordial tersebut nampak semakin pudar dalam lapis sosial lebih tinggi dan masyarakat yang semakin meng-kota.

Lebih dari satu dekade yang lalu, Ben Anderson melontarkan gagasannya tentang masyarakat khayalan (imagined communities). Konsep ini menarik karena Anderson, mengklaim bahwa nasionalisme berakar dari sistem budaya dalam suatu kelompok masyarakat yang saling tidak mengenal satu sama lain. Kebersamaan mereka dalam gagasan mengenai suatu bangsa dikonstruksi melalui khayalan yang menjadi materi dasar nasionalisme.

Dibayangkan karena setiap anggota dari suatu bangsa, bahkan bangsa yang terkecil sekalipun, tidak mengenal seluruh anggota dari bangsa tersebut. Nasionalisme hidup dari bayangan tentang komunitas yang senantiasa hadir di pikiran setiap anggota bangsa yang menjadi referensi identitas sosial. Pandangan yang dianut Anderson menarik karena meletakkan nasionalisme sebagai sebuah hasil imajinasi kolektif dalam membangun batas antara kita dan mereka, sebuah batas yang dikonstruksi secara budaya melalui kapitalisme percetakan, bukan semata-mata fabrikasi ideologis dari kelompok dominan. Dalam konsep Anderson, nasionalisme Indonesia terbentuk dari adanya suatu khayalan akan suatu bangsa yang mandiri dan bebas dari kekuasaan kolonial, suatu bangsa yang diikat oleh suatu kesatuan media komunikasi, yakni bahasa Indonesia.

Bhineka Tunggal Ika bukan slogan politik. Nasionalisme tidak bergantung pada mitos saja, tetapi juga harus melihat realita kebhinekaan Indonesia. Dan inilah yang selama ini diabaikan. Momentum kemerdekaan semestinya menjadi saat tepat untuk menyegarkan kembali gagasan nasionalisme tersebut. Harapannya bisa mengatasi berbagai retakan-retakan kebhinekaan yang mulai menjurus pada tindakan anarkhis yang membahayakan keutuhan bangsa. Usia bangsa ini sudah semakin bertambah, semestinya kehidupan lebih baik bisa diperoleh. Renungan kemerdekaan menjadi penting untuk memandang dengan jernih persoalan bangsa. Mewaspadai retakan-retakan kebhinekaan yang bisa mengancam keutuhan bangsa.

paradigma

PARADIGMATIC CONTROVERSIES, CONTRADICTIONS, AND EMERGING CONFLUENCES (Egon G.Guba and Yvonna S. Lincoln) OLEH: Mubarok

PROGRAM PASCASARJANA ILMU KOMUNIKASI FAKULTAS ILMU SOSIAL DAN ILMU POLITIK UNIVERSITAS DIPONEGORO SEMARANG 2009

PARADIGMATIC CONTROVERSIES, CONTRADICTIONS, AND EMERGING CONFLUENCES Pada buku Handbook of Qualitative Research edisi pertama, Guba dan Lincoln memfokuskan pada pertentangan diantara beberapa riset paradigma berkaitan dengan legitimasi dan intelektual dan hegemoni paradigma (Guba dan Lincoln,1994). Setelah lebih dari 10 tahun penerbitan buku tersebut terjadi banyak perubahan penting dalam cetak biru proses inkuiri ilmu sosial. Berkaitan dengan legitimasi, Guba dan Lincoln mengamati bahwa pembaca terbiasa dengan literature pada metode dan paradigma yang merefleksikan ketertarikan yang tinggi dalam hal ontology dan epistimologi yang berbeda dengan beberapa patokan ilmu sosial konvensional. Kedua, beberapa ahli terlatih yang sudah mapan dalam penelitian kuantitatif ilmu sosial ingin belajar lebih banyak tentang pendekatan kualitatif. Ketiga, terjadi lonjakan jumlah teks kualitatif, hasil penelitian, pelatihan, dan materi pelatihan. Dalam persoalan hegemoni atau supremasi, diantara paradigma posmoderen, semakin jelas bahwa ramalan Geertz (1988, 1993) tentang kekaburan genre semakin cepat terjadi. Inkuiri metodologi tidak dapat disajikan sebagai satu bentuk aturan atau abstraksi yang dapat diaplikasikan secara universal. Metodologi adalah jalinan tak terpisah dengan kemunculan dari sebagian disiplin ilmu (seperti sosiologi dan psikologi) dan beberapa perspektif (seperti Marxisme, feminisme dan homoseksual). MAJOR ISSUES CONFRONTING ALL PARADIGMS Di buku edisi pertamanya Guba dan Lincoln menyajikan tabel yang merangkum aksioma asli dari beberapa paradigma yaitu positivism, postpositivisme, teori kritis dan kontruksionisme. Pada edisi terbaru ini mereka mencoba untuk mereproduksi kembali paradigm-paradigma tersebut dengan menambahkan satu paradigma baru yaitu partisipatori. Guba dan Lincoln juga menghapus beberapa aspek yang semula ada di edisi pertama. Aspek-aspek tersebut adalah inquiry aim, accommodation dan hegemony. Selain itu aspek voices juga diganti dengan istilah inquirer posture. BASIC BELIEFS (METAPHYSICS) OF ALTERNATIVE INQUIRY PARADIGMS Positivisme Secara ontologis paradigma positivis meyakini adanya realitas yang naïf (benar-benar nyata) tetapi dapat ditangani . Realitas tersebut diatur oleh kaidah-kaidah tertentu yang berlaku secara universal. Secara epistimologi paradigma positivis memandang sifat hubungan antara peneliti dan ilmu adalah dualis/obyektif. Adanya realitas obyektif yang berada di luar peneliti membuat mereka harus menjaga jarak dengan obyek penelitian. Prinsip-prinsip imparsialitas harus dikedepankan ketika melakukan penelitian sehingga tidak dibenarkan mencampuradukkan penelitian dengan subjektifitas pendapat dari peneliti. Metodologi penelitian yang digunakan bersifat eksperimen/manipulatif, verifikasi hipotesis dengan metoda utama yang digunakan adalah kuantitatif. Sifat pengetahuan yang dihasilkan dari penelitian ini adalah hipotesis yang sudah diverifikasi dan ditetapkan sebagai fakta atau hukum. Sebuah penelitian dengan paradigma positivis dianggap berkualitas jika memenuhi standar obejektifitas, reliabilitas, dan validitas (internal dan eksternal). Seorang peneliti harus mengenyampingkan nilai dan moralitas individu dalam memandang obyek penelitian. Seorang peneliti yang baik adalah yang mampu menemukan realitas dengan obyektif. Postpositivisme Paradigma Postpositivis melihat realitas “nyata” tetapi tidak sempurna dan kemungkinan dapat ditangani. Realitas tersebut ada tetapi tidak dapat sepenuhnya diperoleh. Realitas dikontrol oleh hokum alam yang hanya dapat dipahami sebagian saja. Pandangan ontologis tersebut mengoreksi pendapat positivis yang melihat adanya realitas yang benar-benar utuh dan ada. Secara epistimologis paradigma ini melihat perlunya modifikasi dualis/obyektif. Obyektifitas hanya dapat diperkirakan dan bergantung pada kritik. Peneliti tetap dituntut menjaga obyektifitas sehingga hubungan dengan obyek penelitian bersifat interaktif yang netral. Metodologi penelitian yang digunakan bersifat modifikasi ekperimen/manipulatif, multiplisme kritis, falsifikasi hipotesis, dan bisa melibatkan metoda kualitatif. Hal ini sedikit berbeda dengan pendekatan positivis yang menekankan metoda utama penelitian harus bersifat kuantitatif. Sifat pengetahuan yang dihasilkan dari penelitian ini adalah hipotesis non falsifikasi yang kemungkinan jadi fakta atau hukum. Sebuah penelitian dengan paradigma postpositivis dianggap berkualitas jika memenuhi standar obejektifitas, reliabilitas, dan validitas (internal dan eksternal). Hal ini masih sama dengan pendekatan positivis. Akumulasi pengetahuan yang dihasilkan dari penelitian ini juga sama yaitu berupa upaya membangun blok-blok untuk ditambahkan pada struktur pengetahuan, generalisasi,dan hubungan sebab akibat. Kritis Paradigma kritis meyakini bahwa realitas sosial bukanlah sesuatu yang sudah ada dan tinggal mengambil begitu saja. Mereka meyakini adanya Historical realism yakni realitas yang teramati (virtual reality) sesungguhnya merupakan realitas “semu” yang telah terbentuk oleh nilai-nilai sosial, politik, budaya, ekonomi, etnik dan gender. Jadi realitas yang ditemui sebenarnya bukanlah sesuatu yang nyata dan benar-benar ada melainkan suatu yang semu dan dibentuk dan dipengaruhi oleh tarik-menarik berbagai kekuatan sosial yang ada. Oleh karena itu secara epistimologi hubungan antara peneliti dan obyek penelitian bersifat transaksional/subyektif. Hubungan tersebut dijembatani oleh nilai-nilai tertentu. Pemahaman tentang realitas merupakan value mediated findings. Metodologi penelitian yang digunakan bersifat partisipatif dengan mengutamakan dialogic/dialectical. Mengutamakan analisis komprehensif, kontekstual dan multilevel analysis yang bisa dilakukan melalui penempatan diri sebagai partisipan dalam proses transaksi sosial. Sebuah penelitian dalam paradigma kritis dianggap berkualitas jika memenuhi standar historical situatedness yakni sejauhmana penelitian memperhatikan konteks historis, sosial, budaya, ekonomi dan politik. Semakin dalam tinjauan kritis yang digunakan untuk menjelaskan obyek penelitian maka sebuah penelitian dianggap semakin bermutu. Nilai-nilai dan moralitas yang melekat pada individu peneliti sangat dianjurkan untuk melihat realitas yang ada. Hal ini tentu berbeda dengan pandangan positivis yang beranggapan bahwa nilai-nilai dan moralitas individu harus berada jauh dari obyek penelitian agar tidak melanggar prinsip obyekifitas. Seorang peneliti dalam pandangan kritis adalah seorang intelektual transformatif yang mampu menjadi penganjur atau aktivis perubahan. Konstruktivisme Secara ontologis paradigma ini memandang realitas sebagai hasil konstruksi sosial. Kebenaran suatu realitas bersifat relatif, berlaku sesuai konteks spesifik (khusus) dan lokal yang dinilali relevan oleh pelaku sosial. Sifat hubungan antara peneliti dan obyek penelitian bersifat transactional/ subjectivist. Pemahaman tentang suatu realitas atau temuan suatu penelitian merupakan produk interaksi antara peneliti dengan yang diteliti. Secara sadar dengan bekal nilai dan moralitas yang diyakini, seorang peneliti akan mendefinisikan realitas yang ia temui ketika melakukan penelitian. Metodologi penelitian yang diagunakan diantaranya adalah Hermeneutical/ dialectical. Menekankan empati dan interaksi dialektik antara peneliti dan responden untuk merekonstruksi realitas yang diteliti melalui metode kualitatif seperti participant observation. Kriteria kualitas penelitian adalah authenticity dan reflectifity. Sejauhmana temuan merupakan refleksi otentik dari realitas yang dihayati oleh para pelaku sosial. Oleh karena itu seorang peneliti perlu dibekali dengan pelatihan metoda kualitatif dan juga kuantitatif, sejarah dan upaya pemberdayaan masyarakat. Partisipatori Participative reality : realitas subyektif dan obyektif diciptakan bersama2 oleh pikiran & kosmos yg ada. Subjektivitas kritis dalam transaksi partisipatori dengan kosmos; epistemologi pengetahuan praktis, pengalaman dan proposisi, yg diperluas. Partisipasi politik dlm penelitian tindakan kolaboratif; mengutamakan praktik; menggunakan bahasa didasarkan pada konteks pengalaman yg dihayati bersama. AKSIOLOGI Paradigma positivis melihat nilai, etika dan pilihan moral harus berada di luar proses penelitian. Peneliti berperan sebagai disinterested scientist (orang yang bebas dari kepentingan dengan obyek penelitian) sehingga bisa memisahkan antara dirinya dengan obyek penelitian. Pandangan ini tidak jauh berbeda dengan kalangan Postpositivis kecuali pada peran peneliti yang ditempatkan sebagai mediator antara sikap ilmiah dengan obyek penelitian. Tujuan penelitian dari kedua paradigma ini adalah ekplanasi, prediksi dan kontrol. Paradigma Kritis dan Konstruktivis melihat bahwa nilai, etika dan pilihan moral merupakan bagian tak terpisahkan dari suatu penelitian. Dalam Paradigma Kritis peneliti menempatkan diri sebagai intelektual yang bertugas melakukan transformasi, advokasi dan menjadi aktivis perubahan. Dalam pandangan konstruktivis peneliti dipandang sebagai fasilitator yang menjembatani keragaman subjektifitas pelaku sosial. Tujuan penelitian Dalam Paradigma Kritis adalah untuk melakukan kritik sosial, transformasi,emansipasi dan sosial empowerment. Sedangkan dalam pandangan konstruktivis tujuan penelitian adalah untuk melakukan rekonstruksi realitas sosial secara dialektik antara peneliti dengan obyek penelitian. Dalam paradigma parsipatori nilai, etika dan pilihan moral berkembang dengan keseimbangan otonomi, kerjasama dan hirarki dalam sejarah. ACCOMODATION AND COMMENSURABILITY Positivis dan postpositivis berpandangan sama bahwa paradigma dapat diperbandingkan atau disepadankan untuk semua bentuk positivistik. Pandangan kritis, konstruktivis dan parsipatori melihat bahwa paradigma ini tidak dapat diperbandingkan dengan bentuk-bentuk positivistik. Beberapa paradigma dapat diperbandingkan dengan pendekatan kritis, konstruktivis dan parsipatori khususnya ketika mereka bergabung dalam pendekatan liberasionis di luar Barat. THE CALL TO ACTION Ketika penelitian terjadi maka peneliti tidak dibenarkan untuk mengambil tindakan terhadap obyek penelitian. Demikian pendapat positivis dan postpositivis yang melihat bahwa peneliti tidak bertanggungjawab terhadap obyek penelitian. Tindakan dipandang sebagai bentuk advokasi atau subjektifitas yang menjadi ancaman bagi validitas dan objektifitas penelitian. Dalam pandangan kritis justru tindakan ditemukan secara khusus dalam pemberdayaan, emansipasi yang diantisipasi dan diharapkan. Tujuan akhirnya adalah terciptanya transformasi sosial yang mengarah pada kesamaan dan keadilan di masyarakat. Tidak jauh berbeda dengan pandangan kritis, paradigma konstruktivis dan partisipatori juga melihat bahwa penelitian sering dianggap tidak lengkap tanpa tindakan sebagai bagian dari partisipasi. Formulasi konstruktivis memberi mandat pada pelatihan dalam tindakan politik jika patisipan-partisipan tidak paham sistem politik. KONTROL Dalam sebuah penelitian permasalahan kontrol juga menjadi kontoversi yang menarik untuk diperdebatkan. Pertanyaan seperti siapa yang memiliki inisiatif penelitian? Siapa yang menentukan pertanyaan apa yang penting untuk diajukan? Siapa yang menentukan penemuan apa yang akan diperoleh? Bagaimana data akan diperoleh? merupakan pertanyaan yang menarik untuk dijawab. Dalam pandangan positivis dan postpositivis kontrol sebuah penelitian semata-mata berada dalam diri peneliti. Dialah yang menentukan bagaimana penelitian akan dilakukan. Pandangan kritis melihat bahwa kontrol sering berada dalam diri intelektual transformatif dan konstruksi-konstruksi baru yang muaranya kembali kepada komunitas. Paradigma konstruktifis melihat bahwa kontrol dibagi bersama antara peneliti dan partisipan penelitian. Hal yang hampir sama dalam pandangan partisipatoris yang melihat bahwa kontrol dibagi pada beragam derajat. FOUNDATION OF TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN PARADIGMS Kebenaran dalam pandangan positivis dan postpositivis adalah di luar diri peneliti. Ada realitas nyata yang dapat didekati dengan metoda penelitian yang menjaga keterlibatan peneliti atas kebenaran tersebut. Peneliti bertugas menemukan kebenaran tersebut dalam penelitianya. Paradigma kritis melihat adanya fondasi kebenaran dalam kritik sosial. Fondasi kebenaran ada di luar sana dan terletak pada sejarah tertentu, ekonomi, rasial, ketidakadilan, marjinalisasi dan infrastruktur sosial. Seorang peneliti tidak terpisahkan dari realitas obyektif dan mungkin dia tidak menyadari adanya kebenaran. Paradigma konstruktifis melihat bahwa fondasi kebenaran terletak pada hubungan anatara partisipan-partisipan komunitas. Kebenaran dibangun dalam kesepakatan komunitas sebagai hasil negosiasi dan tidak bersifat universal. Paradigma parsipatoris melihat kebenaran sebagai suatu yang nonfondasional. VALIDITY: AN EXTENDED AGENDA Validitas tidak bisa disamakan dengan obyektifitas. Ada beberapa teori, filosofi dan rationalitas pragmatik untuk menguji konsep obyektifitas. Disisi lain validitas tidak bisa dihilangkan atau ditolak karena merupakan poin pertanyaan yang harus dijawab dalam penelitian. Salah satu isu yang menarik untuk dibicarakan terkait validitas adalah pertentangan antara metoda dan interpretasi penelitian. Dalam pandangan positivis dan postpositivis kriteria validitas suatu peneltian dapat diukur dari konstruksi validitas; rigor, dan adanya validitas internal & eksternal. Kaum kritis beranggapan bahwa validitas suatu penelitian dilihat dari adanya stimulus tindakan, transformasi sosial, kesamaan, dan keadilan sosial. Kalangan konstruksionis melihat konstruksi validitas diperluas dari sisi validitas kristalisasi, kriteria otensitas, validitas rhizomatic, catalitic, voluptuous dimana kriteria berpusat pada etika & relasi. Validitas berpusat pada determinasi komunitas. Sedangkan bagi partisipatori pertimbangan validitas diperluas sama dengan penelitian sering dianggap tidak lengkap tanpa tindakan sebagai bagian dari partisipasi. Formulasi konstruktivis memberi mandat pada pelatihan dalam tindakan politik jika patisipan-partisipan tidak paham sistem politik. VOICE, REFLEXIFITY, AND POSTMODERN TEXTUAL REPRESENTATION Ada tiga isu menarik tetapi menyakitkan untuk didiskusikan yakni terkait dengan suara, status refleksifitas dan problem representasi tekstual postmoderen. Secara prinsip paradigma positivis dan postpositivis melihat suara peneliti, dan refleksifitas menjadi masalah bagi obyektifitas penelitian. Sementara representasi tekstual tidak menjadi masalah dan dalam beberapa hal dapat dirumuskan. Kalangan kritis melihat suara sebagai campuran antara peneliti dan partisipan. Kalangan konstruktivis berpendapat bahwa suara merupakan campuran antara peneliti dengan partisipan dimana terkadang suara partisipan lebih dominan. Refleksifitas bersifat serius dan menimbulkan masalah. Representasi tekstual menjadi sebuah isu yang diperluas. Paradigma parsipatori melihat suara sebagai sebuah campuran dimana representasi tekstual jarang didiskusikan tetapi bermasalah. Refleksifitas berdasar pada subyektifitas kritis dan kesadaran diri. ,

lomba pemuda

Membangkitkan Kembali Kepemimpinan Pemuda di Indonesia

Lemparkanlah sebuah batu ke tengah danau yang airnya tenang. Selanjutnya lihatlah gelombang air yang muncul dari kecil kemudian semakin besar dan melebar mencapai semua sisi danau. Fenomena tersebut memberi pelajaran berharga bagi kita bahwa sebuah hal kecil ternyata bisa membawa dampak besar dan menyentuh semua sisi. Demikian halnya sebuah ide, penemuan, semangat atau bahkan sekedar imajinasi yang seringkali dianggap kecil ternyata bisa memberi dampak besar bagi kehidupan manusia.
Ketika para pendahulu kita mencetuskan ”Sumpah Pemuda” pada tanggal 28 Oktober 1928 maka lahirlah sebuah semangat baru yang melanda bangsa Indonesia. Melalui semboyan “satu tumpah darah, satu bangsa, dan satu bahasa” mereka berhasil mengajak bangsa kita bersatu guna mewujudkan kemerdekaan. Sebelum peristiwa tersebut beberapa mahasiswa Indonesia yang tergabung dalam Boedi Oetomo telah mulai menyemai benih persatuan bangsa melalui jalur organisasi. Mereka sadar bahwa persatuan menjadi syarat mutlak untuk mencapai kemerdekaan karena perjuangan bangsa yang tidak berdiri di atas persatuan akan mudah dipatahkan.
Dalam sejarah Indonesia, pemuda selalu memiliki peranan luar biasa sebagai “avant garde” (ujung tombak) perubahan. Berbagai perubahan di bidang sosial politik selalu menempatkan pemuda di garda depan. Semangat yang mereka tularkan tak hanya menyentuh lapisan cerdik cendekia tetapi juga merambah semua lapisan masyarakat. Tiap perubahan zaman selalu dimulai dengan barisan pemuda yang visioner, berani, pantang menyerah, dan tak hirau dengan gemerlap imbal jasa maupun popularitas. Benedict Anderson, seorang Indonesianis mengungkapkan bahwa sejarah Indonesia adalah sejarah pemudanya.
Pernyataan Ben Anderson ini tak salah apabila dikaitkan dengan sejarah panjang bangsa, dimana pemuda menjadi aktor utama dari setiap peristiwa penting yang terjadi di Indonesia. Herbert Feith, Seorang Indonesianis lainnya menyatakan bahwa pemikiran politik modern pemuda di Indonesia menjadi awal bangkitnya nasionalisme modern. Hal itu dimulai antara tahun 1900-an dan 1910-an, dengan munculnya sekelompok kecil mahasiswa dan cendikiawan muda yang memandang dunia modern sebagai tantangan terhadap masyarakat dan menganggap diri mereka sebagai pemimpin potensial di masa yang akan datang. Sejarah menulis Kebangkitan Nasional 1908, Soempah Pemoeda 1928, Kemerdekaan RI 1945, Angkatan 1966, Peristiwa Malari 1974, dan Gerakan Reformasi 1998, menjadi deretan noktah sejarah pemuda yang gemilang bagi tegaknya peradaban.
Senada dengan pernyataan keduanya, Bung Karno juga menempatkan pemuda sebagai bagian penting dari tonggak dan aktor pendorong perubahan. Bung Karno mengungkapkan kata-kata yang berbunyi “Beri aku sepuluh pemuda, maka akan kugoncangkan dunia,” guna menggambarkan kemampuan pemuda dalam mewujudkan perubahan. Dalam pikirannya, pemuda digambarkan sebagai sosok unggul, pilihan, bergairah, bergelegak dan bergelora secara fisik, psikis, intelektual, dan sikap. Pemuda digambarkan sebagai sosok superior, progresif, revolusioner dengan api berkobar-kobar, dan bara spirit yang menyala-nyala.
Saatnya Bangkit Kembali
Meski berbagai fakta telah membuktikan peran luar biasa pemuda dalam membawa perubahan dalam masyarakat, namun sampai sekarang tidak banyak pemuda yang mendapat kesempatan menjadi pemegang kendali kepemimpinan suatu negara. Di berbagai belahan dunia kepemimpinan suatu negara masih didominasi oleh generasi tua yang dianggap lebih mampu. Keberadaan pemuda seolah hanya dipergunakan sebagai ujung tombak untuk menghancurkan tembok status quo namun segera disingkirkan ketika tujuan tersebut tercapai.
Pada tahun 1998 lalu ketika para pemuda mendobrak kemapanan orde baru dan menggulirkan orde reformasi ternyata merekapun tidak memperoleh peran signifikan. Alih-alih menjadi pengganti generasi orde baru, barisan pemuda yang menelorkan perubahan tersebut justru hanya menjadi kendaraan yang mengantarkan generasi lain memegang kepemimpinan baru di Indonesia. Fakta ini menunjukkan bahwa peran pemuda yang sangat vital dalam berbagai percaturan perubahan ternyata masih dianggap sebatas pendobrak dan belum layak sebagai pemegang kendali setelah perubahan terjadi. Setelah menelorkan orde reformasi dengan berbagai pengorbanan, pemuda kembali menjadi penonton dan orang lain yang justru menikmati hasil dari kerja keras tersebut.
Keadaan itu semestinya mengundang pemikiran kita bersama mengingat laju reformasi yang didengungkan sejak beberapa waktu lalu ternyata belum banyak membawa perubahan yang lebih baik bagi masyarakat. Kemiskinan, ketidakadilan, korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme dan berbagai penyimpangan lainnya masih banyak terjadi. Perjalanan reformasi bangsa kita yang dicetuskan pada tahun 1998 lalu masih terengah-engah dan membutuhkan sosok-sosok penuh kepedulian untuk mengembalikan kondisi bangsa ini yang sudah terlanjur bobrok. Harapan tersebut sebenarnya dibebankan dipundak kalangan pemuda yang dianggap masih bisa bersikap netral dan belum terkontaminasi kepentingan politik praktis. Akan tetapi melihat kenyataan gerakan pemuda saat ini yang ternyata juga mulai dijangkiti bias orientasi tentunya harapan itu sulit terwujud. Gerakan pemuda yang diharapkan menjadi gerakan moral yang sempat membawa harapan guna pencerahan bangsa, ternyata tidak seindah yang diharapkan dan digembar-gemborkan.
Pada tahun 1998 lalu kita sempat menyaksikan bersatunya gerakan pemuda yang dipelopori para mahasiswa ketika menurunkan pemerintahan orde baru dan menggulirkan roda reformasi. Dengan persatuan dan kekompakan yang dimiliki mereka berhasil membawa perubahan yang berarti sebagai pintu gerbang untuk perbaikan kondisi bangsa ini. Namun sedikit demi sedikit mereka mulai tersisih dan tak lagi memegang kendali perubahan. Muka-muka lama yang berganti baju yang justru berhasil menikmati kerja keras para pemuda ini.
. Keberhasilan menggulingkan pemerintahan orde baru dan dilanjutkan dengan menggulirkan roda reformasi dianggap sebagai puncak pencapaian sehingga kemudian “meninabobokkan” mereka untuk tetap menjaga konsistensi gerakan. Mereka beranggapan bahwa dengan keberhasilan meruntuhkan pemerintahan orde baru maka tujuan telah tercapai. Pada kenyataanya apa yang mereka anggap sebagai tujuan akhir tersebut sesungguhnya baru merupakan awal dari perjalanan reformasi.
Sejarah gemilang para pemuda dalam percaturan perubahan di Indonesia semestinya menjadi pemicu semangat bagi generasi penerus saat ini. Kelebihan dan kekurangan yang ada di setiap generasi merupakan sarana untuk berkaca dan menimba pengalaman. Apa yang telah dilakukan oleh generasi muda sebelumnya tentu memiliki sisi positif yang harus kita ambil dan sisi negatif yang harus dibuang. Angkatan 1908, 1928, 1945 sampai dengan angkatan 1998 memiliki karakteristik berbeda sesuai dengan kondisi yang dihadapi. Dengan potensi luar biasa yang dimiliki saatnya kepemimpinan pemuda di Indonesia bangkit kembali dan mengambil peran nyata guna kepentingan bangsa dan negara.

Tantangan dan Hambatan
Kondisi bangsa yang masih carut marut merupakan tantangan yang harus segera diatasi. Pemuda sebagai agen perubahan harus segera mengambil peran nyata guna mewujudkan perubahan. Kalau sebelum kemerdekaan 1945 gerakan pemuda identik dengan perjuangan merebut kemerdekaan dari penjajahan, maka dalam konteks era reformasi yang diharapkan adalah kepemimpinan pemuda yangmampu mengawal laju reformasidemi kepentingan bangsa dan negara. Untuk bisa berperan maksimal pemuda harus siap dengan berbagai tantangan dan hambatan yang berasal dari dalam maupun dari luar pemuda sendiri.
Guna mempersiapkan kemampuan pemuda dalam menghadapi tantangan global sedianya harus datang dari kalangan pemuda itu sendiri. Pembentukan pemuda yang hatinya berkobar sebagaimana diinginkan oleh Bung Karno, harus berasal dari inisiatif dan kesadaran kalangan pemuda dan bukan berharap dari belas kasihan pihak lain. Dengan persiapan dan inisiatif tersebut diharapkan munculnya kepemimpinan pemuda yang menekankan pada karakter, sikap, visi, dan orientasi pada nilai-nilai kebangsaan dan kerakyatan.
Seorang pemimpin yang berkualitas dan tangguh dihasilkan dari proses pembelajaran yang panjang dan matang dengan lingkungan. Tidak ada seorang pemimpin yang kemudian lahir tanpa proses belajar. Mereka yang hadir sebagai pemimpin tanpa proses pembelajaran akan menghasilkan sosok pemimpin instan yang hakekatnya tidak memiliki kemampuan apapun. Kenyataan ini yang sekarang nampak pada kepemimpinan pemuda di Indonesia.
Sebagian besar generasi muda segera berambisi untuk naik menjadi pemimpin tanpa persiapan yang memadai. Akibatnya bisa dilihat ketika mereka gugup, gagap dan akhirnya gagal dalam memgemban tugas membawa perubahan. Peristiwa bergulirnya reformasi pada tahun 1998 lalu semestiya menjadi pelajaran berharga bagi pemuda di Indonesia. Karena tidak siapnya generasi muda dengan cetak biru reformasi maka setelah menggulingkan orde baru mereka tidak mampu untuk mengawal laju reformasi dengan benar.
Kegagalan tersebut semestinya menjadi pelajaran berharga bagi pemuda agar mereka menyiapkan sedini mungkin agar siap ketika mengambil peran dalam perubahan. Kemampun leadership harus senantiasa ditumbuhkan melalui berbagai aktifitas organisasi dan kemasyarakatan yang mendewasakan kerangka berfikir mereka. Dalam masyarakat yang majemuk seperti di Indonesia maka pemuda harus bisa menempatkan diri dalam pusaran kehidupan masyarakat multikultural. Pengembangan multikulturalitas kepemimpinan pemuda diharapkan dapat menghindarkan ancaman perpecahan bangsa.
Pemuda diharapkan menjadi ‘lem sosial’ yang mampu menyatukan berbagai perbedaan dan mengolahnya menjadi keunggulan bangsa yang produktif. Karena itulah persemaian kepemimpinan pemuda yang berbasis multikultural sudah semestinya makin diperkuat untuk mengatasi problem-probolem yang muncul dari heterogenitas tersebut karena pluralitas dan keanekaragaman adalah aset masyarakat Indonesia yang paling besar. Dari laborotorium masyarakat yang multikultural pemuda bisa belajar kepemimpinan sejati. Kepemimpinan sejati dimulai dari dalam hati dan kemudian bergerak ke luar untuk melayani mereka yang dipimpinnya. Disinilah pentingnya karakter dan integritas seorang pemimpin untuk menjadi pemimpin sejati dan diterima oleh rakyat yang dipimpinnya. Seorang pemimpin sejati tidak cukup hanya memiliki hati atau karakter semata, tetapi juga harus memiliki serangkaian metoda kepemimpinan agar dapat menjadi pemimpin yang efektif. Seorang pemimpin harus mampu mengimplementasikan potensi yang dimiliki guna mencapai tujuan yang dikehendaki. Proses belajar kepemimpinan sejati di tengah masyarakat multikultural seperti di Indonesia tentu sangat dibutuhkan oleh pemuda sebelum mereka terjun menjadi pemimpin sesungguhnya.
Iklim sosial politik yang kondusif bagi pemuda untuk berkiprah juga diperlukan agar regenerasi kepemimpinan dan sistem edukasi bagi generasi muda dapat berjalan secara berkelanjutan. Regenerasi kepemimpinan kaum muda dalam organisasi kepemudaan harus berpijak pada fair competition. Kesempatan harus diberikan kepada generasi muda yang memiliki kemampuan dan kapabilitas dan tidak berdasarkan senioritas. Lambatnya regenerasi akibat pola patronase dan senioritas dalam organisasi kepemudaan semestinya disingkirkan jauh-jauh. Patronase dan senioritas pada akhirnya membuahkan sikap introvert dan minder dari generasi yang jauh lebih muda karena mereka tidak memiliki ruang untuk mengekspresikan kemampuan mereka. Organisasi kepemudaan sendiri, idealnya berada pada koridor netral terhadap semua kepentingan pemerintahan dan kelompok-kelompok politik. Ini akan berpengaruh pada pembangunan sikap kritis dan konstruktif terhadap situasi yang dihadapi.
Hal terakhir yang perlu diperhatikan agar kepemimpinan pemuda bisa bangkit kembali adalah mempersiapkan pribadi pemuda yang bersih berbagai masalah-masalah sosial. Kita tidak bisa menutup mata bahwa salah satu faktor penghambat berkembangnya kepemimpinan pemuda adalah maraknya masalah-masalah sosial yang mereka hadapi. Maraknya masalah-masalah sosial di kalangan pemuda, seperti kriminalitas, sek bebas, premanisme, narkoba, dan HIV/AIDS telah melumpuhkan kemampuan mereka untuk maju.
Berdasar data temuan beberapa lembaga penelitian dan LSM, angka-angka kasus narkoba yang menjangkiti generasi muda kita sungguh mengerikan. Sebagaimana data yang dikeluarkan oleh Gerakan Nasional Anti Narkoba dan Madat (Granat, 2003), dari sekitar 2 juta pemakai narkoba pada tahun 1999, naik 100% menjadi 4 juta pemakai pada tahun 2003. Berdasarkan prediksi kenaikan angka-angka ini, maka pada tahun 2013 jumlahnya diperkirakan menjadi 10 juta orang. Ironisnya, 90 persen dari total pemakai narkoba adalah generasi muda dan pelajar, termasuk 25.000 diantaranya adalah mahasiswa.
Bagaimana mungkin kita mengharapkan pemuda mengambil peran kepemimpinan bangsa ketika mereka tidak sadar akibat pengaruh narkoba. Jangan berharap terlalu banyak kepada pemuda ketika mereka lebih senang dengan narkotika daripada berfikir untuk kemajuan bangsa dan negara. Alih-alih menjadi harapan bangsa, kondisi pemuda yang terjangkit narkoba justru menjadi beban dari bangsa dan negara. Karena itu berbagai upaya serius harus segra dilakukan untuk menyelamatkan pemuda sebagai aset bangsa dengan menjauhkan mereka dari jerat narkoba.
Ketika para pemuda bangsa ini telah mampu mengatasi berbagai masalah pribadinya dan kembali bergerak untuk kepentingan bangsa dan negara maka kita layak berharap akan terjadinya perubahan yang nyata. Kembalinya kepemimpinan pemuda di Indonesia sesungguhnya bukan sekedar kepentingan pemuda sendiri melainkan kepentingan bersama seluruh bangsa. Pemuda bersama-sama dengan dukungan dan kepercayaan rakyat akan menghasilkan buah kerja yang positif sebagai upaya memperbaiki kondisi bangsa.

Industri Seluler Menjawab Kritik dan Tantangan: Pengaruh Penurunan Tarif Seluler Bagi Kehidupan Sosial dan Ekonomi

Industri Seluler Menjawab Kritik dan Tantangan:

Pengaruh Penurunan Tarif Seluler Bagi Kehidupan Sosial dan Ekonomi

Oleh: Mubarok

Berkomunikasi tak bisa dielakkan dari kehidupan manusia. Ketika berkomunikasi telah menjadi kebutuhan dasar maka orang rela berjuang dan “mengorbankan apa saja” demi memenuhi kebutuhan tersebut. Posisinya mungkin sama dengan beras, minyak tanah, dan aneka kebutuhan pokok lainnya. Perkembangan tehnologi di bidang telekomunikasi memungkinkan semua orang untuk terhubung. Sifatnya yang tidak mengenal batas negara menjadikan tehnologi ini dapat memasuki wilayah negara manapun di dunia. Berbagai realitas inilah yang oleh Marshall Mc. Luhan disebut sebagai global village, sebuah perkampungan global yang terintegrasi melalui komunikasi. Komunikasi modern telah memberikan kesempatan kepada jutaan manusia di seluruh dunia untuk berhubungan tanpa dibatasi oleh ruang dan waktu. Suatu kondisi yang nyaris serupa dengan kehidupan di desa dimana setiap warga desa dapat saling berkomunikasi dengan mudah dalam relasi sosial. Industri telekomunikasi terutama seluler telah mengalami kemajuan pesat dalam dua dekade terakhir. Saat ini seluler digunakan oleh semua lapisan masyarakat dari rakyat jelata sampai presiden. Bahkan seorang presiden pun merasa perlu untuk membuka nomor khusus untuk menampung uneg-uneg warga. Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) memanfaatkan seluer dengan membuka layanan short message service (SMS) guna menampung aspirasi masyarakat. Melalui layanan SMS seluruh masyarakat Indonesia bisa menyampaikan uneg-unegnya kepada presiden secara langsung. Langkah Presiden SBY tersebut menunjukkan apresiasinya terhadap perkembangan industri seluler yang kini telah dinikmati semua lapisan masyarakat.

Pada penghujung 1980-an ketika telekomunikasi seluler berbasis teknologi NMT 450 dan Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) mulai diperkenalkan di Indonesia, kita tak pernah membayangkan bahwa beberapa tahun kemudian akan terjadi revolusi telekomunikasi. Waktu itu ponsel masih identik dengan kalangan orang berduit karena harga handset-nya mahal dan jangkauannya belum luas. Namun citra telekomunikasi seluler sebagai sesuatu yang mahal dan eksklusif tidak butuh waktu lama untuk terpatahkan. Dalam sekejap seluler menjelma menjadi industri yang ramah harga dan sarat tehnologi terbaru. Di Indonesia pun telepon seluler telah mengubah peta industri telekomunikasi secara radikal. Telepon yang dulunya merupakan barang mewah sekarang menjadi barang murah yang bisa terjangkau semua lapisan.

Sebelum kemunculan telepon seluler orang sulit untuk dapat melakukan komunikasi dengan orang lain karena kendala biaya mahal dan sambungan yang belum terpasang. Namun setelah kemunculan telepon seluler semua hal tersebut berubah. Tidak ada lagi alasan untuk sulit dihubungi apabila sudah memiliki telepon seluler. Dengan harga telepon dan biaya operasionalnya yang terjangkau, seluler menjadi primadona di hati masyarakat.

Kondisi ini semakin nyata ketika tarif seluler di Indonesia mengalami penurunan yang signifikan. Kebijakan pemerintah menurunkan tarif interkoneksi kemudian diikuti oleh para operator dengan menurunkan tarif seluler mereka. Sepintas lalu penurunan tarif ini akan menguntungkan pelanggan baik dari sisi ekonomi maupun sosial. Pada kenyataannya setiap perubahan pasti membawa akibat baik dan buruk, selalu melahirkan kritik pro dan kontra, bayangan optimis dan pesimis atau juga sikap apriori dan mendukung. Tulisan berikut ini bermaksud untuk mencermati kontribusi nyata penurunan tarif seluler baik dari sisi ekonomi maupun sosial bagi masyarakat Indonesia beserta tanggapan terhadap kritik yang muncul.

Penurunan tarif:konsumtif atau produktif?

Bisnis telekomunikasi terutama seluler telah menjadi ikon baru dalam sektor industri di tanah air menggeser dominasi perbankan dan transportasi. Sebagai sebuah industri yang vibran seluler berhasil menggerakkan sektor-sektor lain dan bertindak sebagai katalisator pertumbuhan ekonomi. Dukungan sarana komunikasi yang memadai membuat bisnis di sektor lain bergerak lebih cepat.

Selain memberikan kontribusi bagi pemasukan pemerintah di sektor pajak dan menghasilkan lapangan kerja formal, seluler juga menginspirasi lahirnya berbagai usaha informal di masyarakat. Kalau Bangladesh dengan sinergi pemerintah bersama Grameen Phone menghasilkan kesempatan kerja bagi banyak wanita, di Indonesia seluler juga berperan melahirkan aneka bisnis pendukung. Perkembangan seluler melahirkan bisnis counter HP, kartu isi ulang, dan aneka aksesoris yang tumbuh bak cendawan di musim hujan. Pelaku usaha telekomunikasi seluler menikmati manisnya industri ini sesuai kadar dan modalnya. Industri ini dapat dimasuki masyarakat yang berasal dari lapisan mana pun mulai dari mega investor sampai investor gurem yang bermodal ratusan ribu. Perkembangan seluler diyakini mampu merangsang pertumbuhan ekonomi secara signifikan dan menjadi salah satu faktor keberhasilan pembangunan suatu bangsa.Dengan semakin murahnya harga seluler diharapkan semua orang bisa mengakses dan menikmati kemudahan berkomunikasi.

Fenomena penurunan tarif seluler di Indonesia ditandai dengan mulai diturunkannya tarif interkoneksi oleh pemerintah. Jika di awal kemunculannya masih menjadi barang mewah, kini seluler telah menjadi komoditi terjangkau yang bisa diakses semua orang. Salah satu operator yang memelopori skema penurunan tarif adalah XL. Setelah membuat promo mengejutkan dengan tarif percakapan berbasis hitungan detik (sebelumnya sebagian operator mendasarkan perhitungan tarifnya berdasar menit) para operator selular lain berusaha merebut pasar dengan cara yang sama. XL berperan sebagai prime mover yang secara konsisten selangkah lebih maju dari para pesaingnya. Strategi perang tarif yang dilakukan XL terbukti ampuh untuk meningkatkan jumlah pelanggan, trafik percakapan, pendapatan bersih, dan EBITDA. Dibandingkan dengan semester pertama 2007, pelanggan XL paruh pertama tahun ini meningkat 2,24 kali dengan trafik 10,5 kali lebih banyak sementara pendapatan bersih naik 69% dan EBITDA melonjak sebesar 67%. Total pelanggan XL per Juli 2008 sudah mencapai 22,9 juta nomor padahal pada 2005 lalu masih 7 juta nomor. BTS XL pada Juli 2008 juga bertambah menjadi 13.408 site padahal tiga tahun lalu masih 4.324 unit.

Dengan pencapaian tersebut operator seluler berslogan ”nyambung terus”ini meyakini bahwa perang tarif justru strategi yang tepat dalam menggenjot performa perusahaan. Terlebih jika skema penarifan yang dibuat menjadi trendsetter bagi yang lainnya. Hingga saat ini XL tetap menjalankan komitmennya untuk menghadirkan telekomunikasi murah dengan kualitas yang dapat dibandingkan. Keberadaan XL diharapkan mampu memberikan kontribusi nyata dalam memajukan industri telekomunikasi di Indonesia dan mendukung pemerintah untuk memajukan daerah-daerah tertinggal melalui sarana telekomunikasi yang disediakan.

Prestasi gilang gemilang industri seluler dalam menopang perkembangan ekonomi suatu bangsa ternyata tidak selalu melahirkan pujian. Bahkan tidak sedikit yang kemudian memberikan kritik atas pencapaian tersebut. Percepatan pertumbuhan pelanggan seluler yang dipicu penurunan tarif diyakini oleh sebagian pihak akan membawa dampa negatif bagi konsumen. Penurunan tarif seluler menimbulkan consumer loss (kerugian bagi konsumen) yang ditandai kurang primanya pelayanan seperti sinyal gampang putus, suara tidak jernih, dan SMS yang tak kunjung sampai.

Adanya efisiensi cost yang dilakukan untuk menurunkan harga membuat operator juga menurunkan mutu pelayanan atau mutu produknya. Hal ini bisa kita rasakan sendiri ketika kualitas pelayanan berubah dari biasanya. Menelpon yang biasanya lancar sekarang agak tersendat, signal tiba-tiba hilang dan masih banyak gangguan lain yang membuat cost konsumen terjarah lebih banyak. Selain merugikan konsumen personal akibat tidak lancarnya komunikasi, consumer loss juga merugikan perusahaan yang memanfaatkan jasa seluler untuk bertransaksi, lobi, maupun membangun jaringan bisnis. Salah paham sangat mungkin terjadi ketika tiba-tiba telepon terputus ditengah proses komunikasi.

Kritik lain yang mencuat akibat semakin murahnya tarif seluler adalah timbulnya sifat konsumtif di masyarakat. Sebagai gambaran, ketika tarif masih mahal orang akan lebih berhitung dan berhati-hati dalam memanfaatkan pulsa. Sekarang ketika tarif semakin murah tidak berarti semakin bisa berhemat tetapi justru semakin lalai dalam penggunaan. Banyak penggunaan pulsa yang kemudian tidak efektif dan cenderung hanya menghabiskan uang. Kritik inilah yang harus dijawab oleh para pelaku industri seluler. Perlu edukasi nyata bagaimana memanfaatkan penurunan tarif tersebut menjadi sesuatu yang produktif dan bukan sekedar konsumtif belaka.

Komitmen untuk terus mengedukasi pelanggan agar memanfaatkan secara produktif merupakan wujud nyata tanggungjawab industri seluler dalam membangun ekonomi masyarakat. Perlu diingat bahwa masyarakat menengah ke bawah adalah penopang utama kelangsungan hidup seluler. Seperti halnya merokok, mengirim pesan singkat (SMS) ternyata juga menjadi konsumsi yang besar bagi kalangan rumah tangga kelompok menengah ke bawah. Dengan total pelanggan selular yang diperkirakan mencapai 125 juta pada semester 1 tahun 2008 ini, maka penetrasi pasarnya bisa dikatakan sudah mencapai 50% lebih. Sesuai dengan piramida pasar, tentunya masyarakat menengah ke bawah memang mewakili prosentase terbesar.

Kelompok ekonomi menengah ke bawah sebagian besar terlibat dalam usaha kecil dan menengah (UKM). Krisis multidimensi yang melanda Indonesia sejak 1998 lalu memberikan pelajaran yang berharga buat bangsa ini. Ekonomi sistem konglomerasi yang mengandalkan usaha-usaha besar sebagai basis ekonomi bangsa ternyata rentan terhadap goncangan. Skema trickle down effect yang menempatkan usaha konglomerasi sebagai soko guru ekonomi nasional terbukti tidak mampu menjalankan tugasnya. Sebaliknya usaha kecil dan menengah yang kurang diperhatikan ternyata mampu menjawab tantangan ditengah hancurnya usaha-usaha besar.

UKM menjawab tantangan dengan menjadi pilar ekonomi nasional yang tahan goncangan dan mampu menyerap tenaga kerja dalam jumlah besar. Karyawan perusahaan yang mengalami pemutusan hubungan kerja memandang usaha kecil sebagai peluang mendapatkan penghasilan ditengah sulitnya mencari pekerjaan. Usaha kaki lima yang sering dipandang sebelah mata tampil menyerap ribuan pengangguran. UKM telah membuktikan ketangguhannya sebagai pilar ekonomi rakyat.

Data BPS menyebutkan saat ini jumlah UKM di Indonesia tercatat sekitar 44,69 juta dan menyerap 79 juta tenaga kerja. Perkembangan UKM ke depan sangat membutuhkan dukungan dari industri lain yang bersifat vibran. Industri seluler memegang peran penting disini. Melalui skema penurunan tarif akan sangat membantu bagi usaha kecil untuk berkembang. Penurunan tarif seluler adalah kondisi yang menguntungkan bagi para pelaku industri kecil. Oleh karena itu tidak berlebihan jika kita berharap kontribusi nyata industri seluler bagi perkembangan UKM di Indonesia.

Sebagai contoh saat ini banyak usaha kecil seperti penjual mie, bakso, gorengan,dan nasi goreng memberikan layanan pesan antar laiknya usaha makanan cepat saji. Mereka mencantumkan nomor seluler sehingga memungkinkan pelanggan untuk memesan. Usaha kecil yang banyak beroperasi di sekitar kampus dan perkantoran menyadari betul pentingnya seluler untuk menunjang usaha mereka.

Dukungan industri seluler terhadap UKM akan menjadi sinergi yang saling menguntungkan. Operator memberikan bantuan baik dalam bentuk pelatihan manajemen, bantuan modal, tool promosi dan lainnya guna menunjang perkembangan UKM. Sebaliknya UKM bisa menjadi pelanggan yang potensial bagi operator. Usaha pembuatan mebel, ukiran, kerajinan tangan, dan aneka usaha kecil menengah lainnya seringkali memiliki keterbatasan dalam mempromosikan produk. Internet bisa menjadi solusi sehingga memungkinkan produk mereka dikenal lebih luas. Mengingat jangkauan fixed line yang terbatas, maka seluler memegang peran penting bagi akses internet di daerah.

Operator juga bisa memfasilitasi promosi dengan cara menyediakan wallpaper berupa gambar produk UKM di tanah air yang bisa di download pengguna seluler. Uniknya ukiran khas Papua, kain Ulos, batik Solo, dan eksotisme ukiran Jepara bisa menjadi wallpaper yang menarik. Kelezatan kuliner yang terbentang dari Sabang sampai Merauke akan sangat menggoda ketika tampir di layar handphone atau menjadi konten MMS yang dikirim kepada kerabat, teman dan rekan bisnis. Keindahan alam Indonesia juga bisa tampil di layar handphone. Keanggunan Borobudur, Danau Toba, Bunaken, dan tempat wisata lainnya bisa menjadi tambahan informasi yang menarik konsumen. Saat ini banyak pelaku pariwisata lokal yang kesulitan untuk menjual potensi keindahan alamnya karena keterbatasan kemampuan berpomosi.

Dengan sinergi ini operator seluler tidak hanya memberikan kontribusi ekonomi bagi UKM tetapi juga sekaligus membantu menjaga warisan budaya nasional. Jika mau mengeksplor lebih jauh, aneka pantun, puisi dan kesenian daerah juga bisa dimanfaatkan sebagai ringback tone. Dukungan nyata terhadap UKM diharapkan dapat mereduksi dan menjawab kritik terhadap dampak negatif perkembangan industri seluler.

Perkembangan seluler mematikan sendi-sendi sosial?

Selain kritik dibidang ekonomi, penurunan tarif seluler yang mengakibatkan meningkatnya jumlah pelanggan juga melahirkan kritik di bidang sosial. Peningkatan pengguna seluler diyakini menyebabkan semakin lunturnya nilai-nilai sosial. Banyak kalangan beranggapan dengan muncul dan berkembangnya telepon seluler membuat nilai-nilai sosial yang ada di masyarakat seperti kekeluargaan dan gotong royong menjadi luntur. Sebelum muncul telepon seluler, orang selalu melakukan komunikasi secara langsung dengan tatap muka dalam penyampaian pesan sehingga rasa kekeluargaan semakin terasa erat karena ada hubungan secara emosional. Sedangkan saat ini, untuk menghubungi tetangga yang bersebelahan rumah pun menggunakan telepon seluler.

Dengan label efektifitas membuat penggunaan telepon seluler lebih digemari oleh masyarakat. Namun disisi lain nilai-nilai sosial dan kekeluargaan semakin luntur. Pertemuan-pertemuan tatap muka menjadi semakin jarang. Secara emosional memang sudah sangat berbeda antara komunikasi secara tatap muka dengan menggunakan telepon seluler. Dengan menggunakan telepon seluler kita tidak dapat mengetahui kondisi emosional dan psikologis dari lawan bicara sehingga ketidakakuratan isi pesan pun menjadi semakin besar.

Kita tidak menutup mata dengan adanya fenomena tersebut, namun bijakkah jika seluler kemudian dijadikan kambing hitam atas semakin merosotnya sendi-sendi sosial masyarakat. Jangan-jangan kita lupa bahwa sesungguhnya kita sendirilah yang mulai abai untuk menjaga sendi-sendi tersebut. Seluler yang hadir di tengah kehidupan sosial manusia menawarkan kemudahan, efektifitas dan bantuan untuk tetap menghubungkan manusia.

Agenda sosial seperti pengajian, pertemuan RT, arisan, ronda, kerja bakti, dan rukun warga tidaklah mungkin tergantikan dengan hadirnya seluler di masing-masing tangan warga. Kegiatan tersebut tetaplah membutuhkan kehadiran secara fisik dan emosi. Seluler hanya menjembatani dan menawarkan bantuan kemudahan seperti dalam proses undangan dengan menggunakan SMS atau telepon. Dahulu setiap kegiatan perlu dilakukan dengan undangan tertulis yang diberikan ke setiap rumah atau menggunakan pengeras suara untuk mengumpulkan warga. Sekarang ketika seluler sudah marak, ia menawarkan kemudahan menghubungi orang lain sehingga mereka yang tidak terjangkau dengan pengumuman tersebut bisa tetap tahu agenda sosial di sekitarnya. Seluler yang menembus batas ruang dan waktu memungkinkan semua orang bisa dihubungi.

Di momen seperti lebaran misalnya dimana anggota keluarga berkumpul untuk bersilaturahmi, kehadiran seluler tentu bukan ditujukan untuk mencerabut sendi-sendi pertalian tersebut. Justru seluler menawarkan kemudahan dan memberi kesempatan kepada mereka yang tidak beruntung bertemu dengan keluarga di hari bahagia agar tetap menjadi bagian dari momen indah tersebut. Kita perlu sadari bahwa tidak semua orang memiliki kesempatan untuk bisa berkumpul dengan orang-orang yang dicintainya. Mereka yang bekerja di mercusuar, tentara penjaga perbatasan, pengemudi sarana transportasi dan pekerjaan yang tidak mungkin ditinggal merasakan betul manfaat seluler. Dengan telepon di tangan mereka bisa menelpon anak dan istri, sungkem kepada orang tua, dan menyapa sahabat yang jauh.

Melalui fasilitas 3 G mereka bisa melihat orang-orang yang dikasihi, menyaksikan anak-anak tumbuh besar, dan momen kebahagiaan lainnya. Jadi kehadiran seluler bukan bertujuan untuk menghancurkan sendi-sendi sosial melainkan berusaha untuk tetap menjaganya. Setiap orang tentu lebih memilih berkumpul dengan keluarga, sahabat dan lingkungan sosialnya ketika mereka bisa. Namun yang perlu disadari tidak semua orang bisa menikmatinya. Seluler hadir memberikan bantuan menjaga keberlangsungan komunikasi sehingga keharmonisan sosial tetap terjaga.

Fenomena unik dari tipologi usaha kecil di Indonesia juga menunjukkan bahwa kehadiran seluler tidak bermaksud mencerabut sendi-sendi kehidupan sosial tetapi justru memfasilitasi untuk tetap terjaga. Selain sebagai sumber penghasilan, usaha kecil di Indonesia juga berfungsi sebagai tempat berkumpulnya warga. Pedagang bakso, mie ayam, gorengan, angkringan, gerai pulsa, dan aneka usaha kecil lainnya adalah pusat aktifitas sosial bagi masyarakat. Disana mereka bisa bertemu dan membicarakan banyak hal. Sebagai contoh adalah angkringan yang tumbuh subur di Yogyakarta dan Jawa Tengah. Angkringan menjadi tempat berkumpulnya masyarakat dari berbagai lapisan. Beberapa angkringan memanfaatkan seluler untuk melayani pesanan.

Penjaga angkringan seringkali juga berperan sebagai gatekeeper bagi para pelanggannya. Ia memberikan informasi kepada pelanggan agenda apa yang sedang hangat dibicarakan di angkringannya saat ini. Acara nonton sepakbola di angkringan juga sering dilakukan meski hanya melalui TV kecil. Penjual senang karena angkringan ramai, sedangkan pelanggan puas bersosialisasi dengan pelanggan lainnya. Melalui SMS mereka bisa saling memberi kabar untuk bertemu di angkringan. Di sekitar kampus angkringan juga dimanfaatkan oleh mahasiswa untuk merencanakan agenda kegiatan, mengerjakan tugas bersama, bahkan juga mengkordinasikan aksi demo. Pendek kata kehadiran seluler di tengah masyarakat kita tidaklah dimaksudkan untuk mencabut sendi-sendi kehidupan sosial melainkan memfasilitasi agar tetap terjaga.

Berfikir positif dan terus maju

Penurunan tarif seluler yang ditandai perang tarif antaroperator mengundang reaksi beragam dari berbagai pihak. Mereka yang sepakat dengan skema ini beralasan bahwa perang tarif akan menguntungkan konsumen dengan catatan mereka menjadi konsumen yang cerdas. Kriterianya adalah dengan tetap berfikir rasional ketika menggunakan pulsa yang dimiliki serta memahami betul syarat dan ketentuan yang diberlakukan operator.

Bagi mereka yang berpendapat bahwa perang tarif justru merugikan konsumen beralasan bahwa penurunan tarif ternyata juga diikuti dengan penurunan kualitas pelayanan. Sulit untuk menelpon, SMS tak kunjung sampai, suara tidak jelas, dan terputus di tengah jalan ketika menelpon hanyalah beberapa keluhan yang diajukan semenjak penurunan tarif. Menurut Yayasan Lembaga Konsumen Indonesia (YLKI), perang tarif sama sekali tidak menguntungkan konsumen. Pasalnya penurunan tarif juga diikuti menurunnya kualitas pelayanan. Fokus para operator di mata YLKI lebih tertuju kepada bagaimana pesaing mereka beriklan bukan bagaimana meningkatkan pelayanan terhadap pelanggan.

Selain itu perang tarif yang kemudian ditandai perang iklan telah menguras energi operator sehingga mereka terhambat untuk melakukan pengembangan. Operator sendiri menyadari bahwa persaingan tarif saat ini sangat menyibukkan dan menguras energi. Padahal perang tarif adalah sesuatu yang sebenarnya tergolong jenis persaingan tingkat dasar di industri telekomunikasi global. Persaingan ideal adalah menjual layanan dan value added service. Jadi, operator berlomba-lomba memberikan tarif berdasarkan kualitas layanan sendiri, bukan sekadar merespons kompetitor.

Pro dan kontra dalam menanggapi sebuah kebijakan adalah sesuatu yang wajar. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa rakyat Indonesia sudah semakin kritis dalam menyikapi permasalahan. Demikian halnya dengan penurunan tarif telekomunikasi yang ditanggapi beragam oleh masyarakat. Satu yang pasti bahwa langkah yang telah ditempuh oleh para operator seluler tersebut merupakan upaya sumbangsih kepada bangsa ini agar semua rakyat memiliki kesempatan untuk berkomunikasi. Ketika berkomunikasi telah menjadi kebutuhan primer, maka hambatan seperti mahalnya biaya merupakan penghalang yang harus diatasi bersama.

Ketika kebijakan penurunan tarif ternyata membawa dampak yang tidak berkenan di hati sebagian pelanggan maka hal yang harus dilakukan adalah memperbaiki kekurangan tersebut. Sebagai pelanggan kita harus konstruktif memberikan masukan kepada operator untuk memperbaiki layanannya. Operator dan konsumen adalah mitra sejajar yang saling membutuhkan. Memang benar kredo bahwa pelanggan atau konsumen adalah raja tetapi seorang raja tanpa pasukan dan pelayanan adalah raja ompong yang tidak bisa berbuat apapun. Satu yang pasti bahwa operator seluler akan terus berjalan memberikan pelayanan yang terbaik. Karena mereka juga menyadari bahwa pelayanan yang prima adalah kunci untuk menjaga loyalitas konsumen.

Merujuk pada visi pemerintah dalam hal ini Departemen Komunikasi dan Informatika (Depkominfo), bisnis seluler diharapkan menjadi industri yang menyumbang banyak hal kepada bangsa ini. Ada empat paradigma bisnis selular sebagai panduan dan tanggungjawab yang harus dipikul yaitu: Communication Value, Transaction Value, Collaboration Value dan Socio-Transformation Value

Pada akhirnya ketika tarif sudah mencapai taraf terendah maka perang selanjutnya adalah perang pelayanan. Disinilah kesempatan untuk mewujudkan keempat paradigma tersebut akan diuji. Karena itu dari sekarang bisnis seluler harus mulai menata diri lebih baik sehingga bisa membantu bangsa ini menuju tranformasi sosial dan nilai yang lebih baik. Membantu bangsa ini menata kehidupan dan menuju cita-cita bangsa yang adil, makmur, sejahtera, aman dan damai. Telekomunikasi seluler sebagai industri jasa tak bisa dilepaskan dari tiga faktor yakni teknologi, produk, dan layanan. Jika operator seluler tidak mampu melakukan inovasi secara terus-menerus atas ketiga faktor tersebut, maka tinggal menunggu waktu untuk menjadi pecundang

Dengan 17.000 pulau yang membentang sepanjang lebih dari 5.000 kilometer dari Sabang sampai Merauke serta dihuni oleh lebih dari 220 juta manusia, Indonesia merupakan emerging market yang amat potensial untuk digarap. Telekomunikasi akan menjadi panglima baru dalam menyatukan wilayah dan manusia Indonesia yang tersebar di berbagai pulau. Telekomunikasi dapat dijadikan alternatif guna mempersatukan bangsa, mengembangkan potensi ekonomi dan menjaga sendi-sendi sosial tanpa harus menghilangkan keanekaragaman yang dimiliki.

Referensi

Buku

Littlejohn, Stephen W, 1996, Theories of Human Communication,Fifth Edition, Belmont California: Wadsworth Publishing Company

Mc Quail, Dennis, 2003, Teori Komunikasi Massa, Edisi Terjemahan, Jakarta: Erlangga Mulyana, Deddy, 2007, Ilmu Komunikasi,Suatu Pengantar, Bandung: Remaja Rosdakarya

Internet

Abu Bakar, Mustafa “Kebijakan Pangan, Peran Perum Bulog, dan Kesejahteraan Petani” (www.setneg.go id, 25/3/2008)

“Mendag Resmikan Festival 1000 Pedagang Mie dan Bakso di D.I. Yogyakarta” (dikutip dari situs Dinas Perindustrian dan Perdagangan DIY, 21-1-2008)

“Pembinaan Serius Pedagang Mie Bakso Bisa Perkuat Ekonomi RI” (www.plinplan.com,22/3/2008)

http://www.perangtarifseluler.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=148&Itemid=61

http://aryodiponegoro.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/industri-properti-di-tengah-ancaman-resesi/

http://maswig.blogspot.com/2008/11/dampak-resesi-dunia-terhadap-investasi.html

http://www.bangrusli.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=318&Itemid=38

artikel ini sedang diikutkan dalam Lomba XL Writing and Photo Competition 2008

SPORTS JOURNALISM

Sports journalism is a form of journalism that reports on sports topics and events. While the sports department within some newspapers has been mockingly called the toy department, because sports journalists do not concern themselves with the ’serious’ topics covered by the news desk, sports coverage has grown in importance as sport has grown in wealth, power and influence.

Sports journalism is an essential element of any news media organization. Sports journalism includes organizations devoted entirely to sports reporting — newspapers such as L’Equipe in France, La Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy, Marca in Spain, and the now defunct Sporting Life in Britain, American magazines such as Sports Illustrated and the Sporting News, all-sports talk radio stations, and television networks like ESPN.

Sports journalists’ access

Sports teams are not always very accommodating to journalists: in the United States, while they allow reporters into locker rooms for interviews and some extra information, sports teams provide extensive information support, even if reporting it is unfavorable to them. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in the coverage of soccer, the journalist’s role is often barely tolerated by the clubs and players.

Sports journalists are like any other reporters, and they must find the story rather than simply relying on information given to them by the sports team, institution or coaching staff. Sports journalists must verify facts given to them by the teams and organizations they are covering. Often, coaches, players or sports organization management rescind sports journalists’ access credentials in retaliation for printing accurate yet disparaging information about a team, player, coach or coaches, or organization.

Access for sports journalists is usually easier for professional and intercollegiate sports such as American football, ice hockey, basketball, baseball and football.

Socio-political significance

Major League Baseball gave print journalists a special role in its games: They were named official scorers and kept statistics that were considered part of the official record of the league. Active sportswriters were removed from this role in 1980. Although their statistical judgment calls could not affect the outcome of a game, there was still the perception of a conflict of interest.

Sports stories often transcend the games themselves and take on socio-political significance; Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball is an example of this. Modern controversies regarding the compensation of top athletes, the use of anabolic steroids and other, banned performance-enhancing drugs, and the cost to local and national governments to build sports venues and related infrastructure, especially for the Olympic Games, show that sports still can intrude on to the news pages.

Sportswriters face much more deadline pressure than most other reporters, because sporting events tend to occur late in the day and closer to the deadlines many organizations must observe. Yet they are expected to use the same tools as news journalists, and to uphold the same professional and ethical standards. They must take care not to show bias for any team. Sports journalists usually must also gather and use voluminous performance statistics for teams and individual athletes in most sports.

Many of the most talented and respected print journalists have been sportswriters. (See List of sports writers.)

Sports journalism in Europe

The tradition of sports reporting attracting some of the finest writers in journalism can be traced to the coverage of sport in Victorian England, where several modern sports – such as association football, cricket, athletics and rugby – were first organized and codified into something resembling what we would recognize today.

Cricket, somewhat like baseball in the United States, possibly because of its esteemed place in society, has regularly attracted the most elegant of writers. The Manchester Guardian, in the first half of the 20th Century, employed Neville Cardus as its cricket correspondent as well as its music critic. Cardus was later knighted for his services to journalism. One of his successors, John Arlott, who became a worldwide favorite because of his radio commentaries on the BBC, and was also known for his poetry.

The first London Olympic Games in 1908 attracted such widespread public interest that many newspapers assigned their very best-known writers to the event. The Daily Mail even had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the White City Stadium to cover the finish of the first ever 26-mile, 385-yard Marathon.

Such was the drama of that race, in which Dorando Pietri collapsed within sight of the finishing line when leading, that Conan Doyle led a public subscription campaign to see the gallant Italian, having been denied the gold medal through his disqualification, awarded a special silver cup, which was presented by Queen Alexandra. And the public imagination was so well caught by the event that annual races in Boston, Ma, and London, and at future Olympics, were henceforward staged over exactly the same, 26-mile, 385-yard distance, the official length of the event worldwide to this day.

The London race, called the Polytechnic Marathon and originally staged over the 1908 Olympic route from outside the royal residence at Windsor Castle to White City, was first sponsored by the Sporting Life, which in those Edwardian times was a daily newspaper which sought to cover all sporting events, rather than just a betting paper for horse racing and greyhounds that it became in the years after the Second World War.

In France, L’Auto, the predecessor of L’Equipe, had already played an equally influential part in the sporting fabric of society when it announced in 1903 that it would stage an annual bicycle race around the country. The Tour de France was born, and sports journalism’s role in its foundation is still reflected today in the leading rider wearing a yellow jersey – the color of the paper on which L’Auto was published (in Italy, the Giro d’Italia established a similar tradition, with the leading rider wearing a jersey the same pink color as the sponsoring newspaper, La Gazzetta).

Sports stars in the press box

After the Second World War, the sports sections of British national daily and Sunday newspapers continued to expand, to the point where many papers now have separate standalone sports sections; some Sunday tabloids even have sections, additional to the sports pages, devoted solely to the previous day’s football reports. In some respects, this has replaced the earlier practice of many regional newspapers which – until overtaken by the pace of modern electronic media – would produce special results editions rushed out on Saturday evenings.

Some newspapers, such as the The Sunday Times, with 1924 Olympic 100 m champion Harold Abrahams, or the London Evening News using former England cricket captain Sir Leonard Hutton, began to adopt the policy of hiring former sports stars to pen columns, which were often ghost written. Some such ghosted columns, however, did little to further the reputation of sports journalism, which is increasingly becoming the subject of academic scrutiny of its standards.

Sportswriting in Britain has attracted some of the finest journalistic talents. The Daily Mirror’s Peter Wilson, Hugh McIlvanney, first at The Observer and lately at the Sunday Times, Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail and soccer writer Brian Glanville, best known at the Sunday Times, became household names in the late 20th Century through their trenchant reporting of often earth-shattering events that have transcended the back pages and been reported on the front pages: the Massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972; Muhammad Ali’s fight career, including his 1974 title bout against George Foreman; the Heysel Stadium disaster; and the career highs and lows of the likes of George Best and Lester Piggott and other high profile stars.

McIlvanney and Wooldridge, who died in March 2007, aged 75, both enjoyed careers that saw them frequently work in television. During his career, Wooldridge became so famous that, like the sports stars he reported upon, he hired the services of IMG, the agency founded by the American businessman, Mark McCormack, to manage his affairs. And Glanville wrote several books, including novels, as well as scripting the memorable official film to the 1966 World Cup staged in England.

Specialist sports agencies

The 1950s and 1960s saw a rapid growth in sports coverage, both in print and on broadcast media. It also saw the development of specialist sports news and photographic agencies. For example, photographer Tony Duffy founded the picture agency AllSport in south London shortly after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and, through some outstanding photography (such as Duffy’s iconic image of the American long jumper Bob Beamon flying through the air towards his world record at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics) and the astute marketing of its images, saw the business grow into a multi-million pound, worldwide concern that ultimately would be bought and re-named Getty Images.

Sports books

Increasingly, sports journalists have turned to long-form writing, producing popular books on a range of sporting topics, including biographies, history and investigations.

In London, through the 1980s and 1990s, one shop on Charing Cross Road – the area known for its book shops – was entirely devoted to sport, although the growth of online book sales through websites such as Amazon eventually led to the closure of Sports Books.

This was not before, though, the establishment, through sponsorship from William Hill, the bookmakers, of an annual prize for the sports book of the year. This was first held in 1989, when Dan Topolski’s book about one of the most controversial University Boat Races was declared the winner.

The status of the awards, and of sports books generally, were enhanced greatly in 1992 when Nick Hornby’s first novel, Fever Pitch, took first prize. Both Fever Pitch and True Blue have subsequently been adapted into feature-length motion pictures. Only one author, Donald McRae, in 1996 and 2002, has won the William Hill award more than once.

Unsurprisingly, given cricket writers’ often literary aspirations and the appetite for books on cricket, the summer game has four times been the subject of the prize-winning book, the same number as football.

The award has not been without controversy in recent years. In 2000, the award went for the first time to a “ghosted” book, Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike. At the time, some also observed the irony of the award going to the American Tour de France winner, when, in 1990, Paul Kimmage’s stern critique of doping in cycling, Rough Ride, had been declared the winner.

The judges – the same panel is used each year – were also criticised in 2006 when they chose Geoffrey Ward’s Unforgivable Blackness, because it had been first published in 2004.

The 2007 winner of the award, announced at a ceremony staged at Waterstones, Piccadilly, on November 27, was Provided You Don’t Kiss Me, the account of local newspaper reporter Duncan Hamilton working with the controversial Nottingham Forest manager, Brian Clough.

Investigative journalism and sport

Since the 1990s, the growing importance of sport, its impact as a global business and the huge amounts of money involved from sponsorship and in the staging of the Olympic Games and football World Cups, has also attracted the attention of well-known investigative journalists. The sensitive nature of the relationships between sports journalists and the subjects of their reporting, as well as declining budgets experienced by most Fleet Street newspapers, has meant that such long-term projects have often emanated from television documentary makers.

Tom Bower, with his 2003 sports book of the year Broken Dreams, which analyzed British football, followed in the tradition established a decade earlier by Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson with their controversial investigation of corruption within the International Olympic Committee. Jennings and Simson’s The Lords of the Rings in many ways predicted the scandals that were to emerge around the staging of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City; Jennings would follow-up with two further books on the Olympics and one on FIFA, the world football body. Likewise, award-winning writers Duncan Mackay, of The Guardian, and Steven Downes unravelled many scandals involving doping, fixed races and bribery in international athletics in their 1996 book, Running Scared, which offered an account of the threats by a senior track official that led to the suicide of their sports journalist colleague, Cliff Temple.

But the writing of such exposes – referred to as “spitting in the soup” by Paul Kimmage, the former Tour de France professional cyclist, who now writes for the Sunday Times – often requires the view of an outsider who is not compromised by the need of day-to-day dealings with sportsmen and officials, as required by “beat” correspondents.

The stakes can be high when upsetting sport’s powers: when in 2007, the English FA opted to switch its multi-million pound contract for UK coverage rights of the FA Cup and England international matches from the BBC to rival broadcasters ITV, one of the reasons cited was that the BBC had been too critical of the performances of the England football team.

Sports journalism organizations

Most countries have their own national association of sports journalists. Many sports also have their own clubs and associations for specialist journalists. These organizations tend not to operate as trades unions, but do attempt to maintain the standard of press provision at sports venues, oversee fair accreditation procedures and to celebrate high standards of sports journalism.

In Britain, the Sports Journalists’ Association was founded in 1948. It stages two prestigious awards events, an annual Sports Awards ceremony which recognises outstanding performances by British sportsmen and women during the previous year, and the British Sports Journalism Awards, the industry’s “Oscars”, sponsored by UK Sport and presented each March.

Originally founded as the Sports Writers’ Association, following a merger with the Professional Sports Photographers’ Association in 2002 the organization changed its title to the more inclusive SJA.

Its President is the veteran broadcaster and columnist, Sir Michael Parkinson.

The SJA represents the British sports media on the British Olympic Association’s press advisory committee and acts as a consultant to organizers of major events who need guidance on media requirements as well as seeking to represent its members’ interests in a range of activities.

In March 2008, Martin Samuel, chief football correspondent of The Times, was named British Sportswriter of the Year, the first time any journalist had managed to win the award three years in succession.

At the same awards, Jeff Stelling, of Sky Sports, was named Sports Broadcaster of the Year for the third time, a prize determined by a ballot of SJA members.

The International Sports Press Association, AIPS, was founded in 1924 during the Olympic Games in Paris, at the headquarters of the Sporting Club de France, by Frantz Reichel, the press chief of the Paris Games, and the Belgian, Victor Boin.

The first statutes of AIPS mentioned these objectives:

to enhance the cooperation between its member associations in defending sport and the professional interest of their members.

to strengthen the friendship, solidarity and common interests between sports journalists of all countries.

to assure the best possible working conditions for the members.

AIPS operates through a system of continental sub-associations and national associations, and liaises closely with some of the world’s biggest sports federations, including the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, football’s world governing body and the IAAF, the international track and field body.

THE LANGUAGE OF NEWSWRITING

THE LANGUAGE OF NEWSWRITING

Written language is made up of three elements — words, sentences and paragraphs. It. is the way these elements  are  handled  that  makes  the  difference  between literary and news English. Briefly, let us look at these elements   separately.

A. WORDS

Words  are  your  basic  tools.  Like  any  skilled technician, you should be able to select the best tools to do the best job. This means you should use words that say exactly what you mean so they can be understood by  others. Every word used in a news story should add to the picture you are building in the minds of your readers. If you use an unnecessary, vague or unfamiliar word, this picture  becomes  blurred.  If  it  becomes  too  blurred,  it may give the reader a distorted picture of the facts. This is a form of inaccuracy that is just as bad as putting the wrong facts down on paper. It is an axiom of newswriting that words that do not work for you, work against you. Here are a few tips on making words work for you.

Avoid  Gobbledygook.— Gobbledygook  is confusing  writing,  often  marked  by  pseudotechnical language  that  readers  cannot  understand.  In  writing  a technical   story,   do   not   parrot   the   words   some technical-minded researcher pours out.

Simplify. Ask, “What  does  this  mean  in  everyday  English?”  Few people,   for   example,   know   what   “arteriosclerosis” means. But when you say “hardening of the arteries,” they immediately understand.

Avoid  Wordiness.— Many  nexperienced writers put unnecessary words into their news copy. Call a   spade   a   spade,   not   “a   long-handled   agricultural implement  utilized  for  the  purpose  of  dislodging  the earth’s  crust.” Short, common words are easy to understand when, in many cases, long words are not. If you must use a longer  word,  make  sure  you  are  using  it  to  convey  a special  meaning,  not  just  for  the  sake  of  using  a  big word.  Why  use  contribute if give means  the  same thing?   This   also   applies   to   veracity for  truth, monumental for big, apprehension for fear, canine for dog and  countless  others.  Practically  every  part  of speech  contains  long  words  that  may  be  replaced  by shorter and more exact ones. The same principle applies to  phrases.  Why  say  “afforded  an  opportunity”  when “flowed”  is  more  exact,  or  why  use  “due  to  the  fact that” instead of “because”?

Be  Specific.— Inexactness  is  just  as  bad  as wordiness.   Readers   want   to   know   specific   facts. Consider the following example of this

Vague: Thousands  of  fans  were  turned  away that  afternoon.

Specific: Three   thousand   fans   were   turned away before game time.

A v o i d    t r i t e    o r    h a c k n e y e d expressions.— These  are  the  mark  of  either  an amateur   or   a   lazy   writer.   Some   particularly   bad examples include the following: Cheap as dirt Smart as a whip Fat as a pig Nipped in the bud Good as gold Blushing  bride Grim reaper Wee hours Ripe old age Picture of health Crystal clear Quick as lightning Bouncing baby boy/girl

Use  Strong,  Active  Verbs.— Whenever possible, use active voice and the simple past tense. The use of these injects life, action and movement into your news stories. In using strong verbs, you will find some of the tendency for you to rely on adverbs to do the work is eliminated. In newswriting, adverbs often do nothing more  than  clutter  writing.  Consider  the ^- following example:

Weak (passive   voice):   The   visitors   were warmly received by Capt. Smith in his office.

Stronger (active  voice):  Capt.  Smith  greeted the visitors in his office.

Avoid Military Jargon.— For those in the Navy, the phrase “general quarters” is clear enough. Yet for others, the phrase may mean nothing; to some, it may seem  to  mean  the  area  where  the  general  is  housed. When you assume that all your readers know general quarters means the command to man battle stations for crew   members   aboard   ship,   you   make   a   false assumption. You do not impress your readers by using words  and  phrases  they  do  not  understand;  you  only imitate  them. For  example,  an  unidentified  Navy  official  issued  a statement  explaining  that  the  purpose  of  an  overtime policy  was  “…to  accommodate  needs  for  overtime  . which are identified as a result of the initiation of the procedures contained herein during the period of time necessary  to  institute  alternative  procedures  to  meet  the identified  need.” In some situations, it is appropriate to use common military   phrases,   such   as   “fleet   training   exercise,” “ship’s galley” and “weapons system.”

Watch Spelling And Grammar.— A JO, or a person interested in becoming a Navy journalist, should have better than average spelling ability. This person should also have a good command of the English language   as   far   as   correct   grammar   is   concerned. Therefore, no extensive lesson is given in this area of study, although some basics are presented in Chapter 6. One goal of every good writer is not to learn to spell perfectly,  but  to  learn  to  spell  well  enough  so  that  a mistake can be spotted when words are put on paper. When  in  doubt,  use  the  dictionary.  Dictionaries  are standard  stock  items  in  the  Navy,  and  every  public affairs  office  should  have  one.  (For  style,  usage  and spelling questions not covered in The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, use Webster’s New World Dictionary  of  the  American  Language,  Third  College Edition.) Additionally, keep in mind that virtually all word  processing  software  packages  contain  a  spell check  feature  that  you  should  use  at  every  opportunity.

Use A Stylebook.— In newswriting, the word style refers to the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation  and  similar  mechanical  aspects  of grammar used in preparing copy (a term used to describe all  news  manuscripts).  Most  newspapers  and  other periodicals   have   their   own   style   sheets   or   local interpretations of style rules. The important thing for you to remember about style is consistency. The  recommended  guide  for  preparing  military news  is  The  Associated   Press   Stylebook   and   Libel Manual. However, any locally prepared style guide or style sheet is fine as long as it is internally consistent and is suitable for your purpose. For further information on stylebooks,   consult   Chapter   7   (Newspaper   Staff Supervision) of the JO  l &C TRAMAN.

B. SENTENCES

The second element of language is the sentence. The simple declarative sentence that consists of subject and verb,  or  subject,  verb  and  object  is  the  most  common form in normal, informal conversation. For this reason, it  is  the  best  sentence  structure  for  most  newswriting. Notice   how   the   following   sentence   becomes   more simple  sentences:

Sentence: Following  his  graduation  from  the U.S.   Naval   Academy   in   1948,   Brown   was assigned to the destroyer USS Roulston, where he served his first tour of sea duty for three years as assistant communications officer and junior watch officer.

Rewrite: Brown was graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1948. He spent his first tour of sea duty aboard the destroyer USS Roulston as assistant communications officer and junior watch  officer. Simplifying  sentences  is  not  difficult,  but  it  does take a little practice. In time, you can learn to use just the right number of words to achieve maximum clarity without destroying smoothness. There are no absolute rules, but a fair guide is to try to keep sentences to 30 words or less and to shoot for 17 to 20. Vary the length of your sentences. For example, you  might  use  a  four-word  sentence,  then  a  15-word sentence,  then  an  eight-word  sentence,  followed  by  a 30-word   sentence.   This   keeps   your   writing   from becoming singsong.

Do  Not  Clutter.— Never  crowd  too  many details  into  one  sentence.  Although  a  compound  or complex sentence may contain more than one thought, you  should,  for  the  most  part,  stick  to  sentences  that express one thought clearly and concisely. Otherwise, the  reader  is  apt  to  get  lost  in  a  mass  of  clauses  and details.

Do Not Repeat.— If you say in the lead of your story that 61 people were killed in a training accident, do not mention later in the story that 61 were killed. If the readers forget a fact, they can look back.  Newspaper space  is  valuable;  do  not  waste  it  with  redundancy. Refrain from beginning a sentence with the same word as  the  last  word  in  the  previous  sentence  and  avoid beginning consecutive sentences alike, unless you do it deliberately for emphasis.

C. PARAGRAPHS

The most general guideline for writing paragraphs is that they should be kept reasonably short. When ou use short paragraphs, you give the reader facts and ideas in smaller packages that are easier to handle. The mind can grasp a small unit of thought more easily than a large unit. Also, most news copy is set in narrow columns with only three to five words per line. This makes paragraphs of  normal  literary  length  appear  as  extremely  long, unrelieved  gray  blocks  of  body  type  (more  detail  on typography, the appearance and arrangement of printed matter  is  contained  in  Chapter  8).  These  large  gray blocks of type are monotonous to the reader’s eye and difficult  to  read. Paragraphs should be less than 60 words. Two or three sentences per paragraph are just about right, but it is   perfectly   acceptable   to   have   a   one-sentence paragraph, or even a one-word paragraph, if it expresses a  complete  thought. Yet, a succession of very short paragraphs may give a choppy effect to the writing. For best effect, alternate paragraphs  of  short  and  medium  length.  Never  begin succeeding  paragraphs  with  the  same  words  or  phrases. This, too, can cause a monotonous effect that will soon discourage  the  reader.

THE ABCs OF JOURNALISM

Some  principles  of  newswriting  you  must  apply every time you attempt to put words on paper include accuracy,  brevity,  clarity,  coherence,  emphasis, objectivity  and  unity.

ACCURACY

If a writer has to pick one principle that should never be violated, this should be the one. To fall down in this area is to discredit your entire writing effort. As a JO, you will be working with facts. These facts will involve persons,  places  and  things.  They  will  involve  names ages, titles, rank or ratings, addresses and descriptions. You  will  work  with  facts  that  are  both  familiar  and unfamiliar  to  you. You cannot afford to be casual in your approach to facts. Your readers will often judge the Navy on what you say and how you say it. An easy way to lose the public’s respect and cofidence is by being careless in your  handling  of  facts.  When  you  send  a  story  to  a newspaper, the editor depends on you for accuracy in every  fact. The  Navy  news  release  heading  that  appears  on every  story  you  distribute  means  the  information  it contains is reliable and has been approved officially by the Navy. A mistake in a news story implies that the Navy  is  careless  and  undependable.  Datelines  tell  when and where the story is written and should appear on all stories written for release. In the text of the story, when and where may refer to the dateline.

Attribution

relates to accuracy. It means that you name the person who makes any statement that may be challenged. Good quotations liven a story, give it color and aid in development of coherence. Attribution also ensures that the reader does not get the impression the statement  is  the  writer’s  personal  opinion.  However, attribution  should  never  be  used  in  a  story  merely  to flatter a person by publicizing his or her name.

BREVITY

The question is often asked, “Should I be brief in my writing or complete?” By all means, be brief, but not at the expense of completeness. The key is to boil down your writing and eliminate garbage. A compact piece of writing is frequently much stronger than a lengthy story. An  example  is  Lincoln’s  Gettysburg  Address.  This speech has outlived a flock of long harangues by later statesmen.  One  of  the  reasons  for  its  survival  is  its brevity.

CLARITY

Nothing   is   more   discouraging   than   reading   an article and then realizing that you do not know what you read. A similar frustration arises when you are trying to follow directions on assembling a toy, particularly when the  instructions  read,  “…even  a  5-year-old  can  assemble this toy,” and you cannot do it, because the directions read  as  if  they  were  written  in  a  foreign  language. Assume that if there is any chance of misunderstanding, readers  will  misunderstand.  Reread  what  you  have written  looking  for  points  that  could  lead  to  readers’ misunderstanding.

COHERENCE

An article that skips illogically from topic to topic and back again in a jumbled, befuddled manner lacks coherence. Coherence means sticking together, and that is  what  stories  and  articles  should  do.  Facts  should follow facts in some kind of reasonable order. It may be logical order, chronological order, place order or order of importance, depending on the subject, but order of one kind or another is vital. Outlining will often help.

EMPHASIS

Make sure your writing emphasizes what you want it to. You assure this in newswriting by putting the most important fact first (the lead,  discussed later). There are other types of arrangements for emphasis that are used in feature stories or in.editorials. More information will be presented on this later in this chapter.

OBJECTIVITY

To report news accurately, you must keep yourself detached   from   the   happenings   and   present   an impersonal, unbiased, unprejudiced story. This is why you  never  see  a  good  reporter  at  an  accident  running around saying, “Isn’t this horrible? I feel so sorry for the family. Why, just the other day I was talking to ol’ Jed, and  now  he  is  dead.”  These  may  very  well  be  your feelings, but you must attempt to keep aloof in order to give an objective report. It is not your job to influence people directly, but rather to tell them what is going on. You direct their thinking only to the limited extent that you  make  them  think  for  themselves  by  an  unbiased presentation of the facts.

UNITY

A news story should deal with one basic topic. There may be many facts and ins and outs to the story, but it is still  one  story.  If  you  set  out  to  write  a  story  on  the services and activities available at the enlisted club, and end up with a biography of the club manager, the story lacks unity. The simple solution frequently is to write two  stories,  rather  than  trying  to  combine  a  mass  of information into one.

WHAT IS JOURNALISM? Who is a Journalist?

What is Journalism? Who is a Journalist?

This is a summary of the first in a nationwide series of forums convened by journalists to examine the core values and responsibilities of their profession. This one, held November 6 in Chicago, Illinois, examined what is the purpose of journalism. It was co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. None of the forums is intended to be definitive but rather form a kind of coordinated reporting effort by the Committee of Concerned Journalists. The substance of the forums will be the basis of a monograph that attempts to distill what journalists can agree on as their core values and responsibilities.

The day brought together journalists from different backgrounds, from traditional community journalism at the Chicago Tribune, to the editor of Better Homes and Garden, from local TV to the internet, from opinion columnists to alternative advocacy weekly journalism and asked them all to answer the same question: what is journalism. We learned that whatever quarter they came from, including the advocacy ranks, they had certain core values in common: a commitment to accuracy, to fairness and balance, to reflecting the diversity of their readership (or community), to always approaching reporting with an open mind, to having their primary commitment to the reader–not the advertiser or shareholder. The journalist should be a provider of reliable, verified, true information–even a seeker of truth. As Patty Calhoun, editor of the alternative Denver weekly Westword, put it, “You can’t have a point of view until you’ve explored all points of view.”

We also heard a consensus that journalists are struggling because they have become isolated culturally from their readers, that their tastes and definitions of news need to broaden and become more populist. But, this balancing must occur without abdicating principles of journalism or standards of reporting, without pandering, assuming audiences are dumb or at the expense of providing people with information they need to self govern. Journalism is suffering because it is failing to find this balance. Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists that inspired these forums, began the session by explaining their purpose: “It is crucial to the survival of a journalism that truly serves the needs of a self-governing people that journalists themselves engage in a period of national conversation and reflection to clarify the common values and the common responsibilities that journalism holds.”We believe that if we cannot better articulate what those values and responsibilities mean, they will cease to mean anything.” “Each of the forums will confront and examine key questions of journalistic practices and principles. Our task here in Chicago today is to examine two fundamental questions: First, what is journalism anyway? What is the common ground between the Chicago Tribune, the local television station, service magazines and the Internet? And, second, who is a journalist today? What responsibilities, values, principles make one person a journalist, as opposed to a propagandist, or a simple communicator?” Clarence Page, the Tribune columnist who moderated the morning session, illustrated how illusory definitions of journalism have proven in the past: “Ted Koppel says our business is largely a profession of map making–trying to draw places for people to venture, to journey, to learn from. Rupert Murdoch was once questioned about practicing tabloid journalism, and he responded, ‘I prefer to call it excitement.’ Ellen Goodman, describing what we commentators do, says our business is to make sense of all that is happening in the world. Others have said journalism is a first draft or a rough draft of history, or that it is literature in a hurry. I think our most important function is that of agenda setting.”

Mark Deuze

Indiana University

The history of journalism in elective democracies around the world has been described as the emergence of a professional identity of journalists with claims to an exclusive role and status in society, based on and at times fiercely defended by their occupational ideology. Although the conceptualization of journalism as a professional ideology can be traced throughout the literature on journalism studies, scholars tend to take the building blocks of such an ideology more or less for granted. In this article the ideal-typical values of journalism’s ideology are operationalized and investigated in terms of how these values are challenged or changed in the context of current cultural and technological developments. It is argued that multiculturalism and multimedia are similar and poignant examples of such developments. If the professional identity of journalists can be seen as kept together by the social cement of an occupational ideology of journalism, the analysis in this article shows how journalism in the self-perceptions of journalists has come to mean much more than its modernist bias of telling people what they need to know.

Weblogs and Journalism in the Age of Participatory Media

for Nieman Reports; published September 2003 under the title ‘Weblogs and Journalism: Is there a connection?’

We are entering a new age of information access and dissemination. Tools that make it easy to publish to the Internet have given millions of people the equivalent of a printing press on their desks, and increasingly, in their pockets. Unless we understand the difference between amateur reporting and personal publishing and recognize weblogs as just one form these activities might take we will not be able to fully understand the implications they have for culture, journalism, and society.

Let’s start with the weblog frequently updated website, with posts arranged in reverse chronological order, so new entries are always on top. Early webloggers linked to selected news articles and webpages, usually with a concise description or comment. The creation of software that allowed users to quickly post entries into pre-designed templates led to an explosion of short-form diaries, but the reverse-chronological format has remained constant. It is this format that determines whether a webpage is a weblog.

Note that the form preceded the software. Easy-to-use software has fueled the fast adoption of the form, but weblogs may be created without it. The weblog is arguably the first form native to the Web. Its basic unit is the post, not the article or the page. Bloggers write as much or as little as they choose on a topic, and although entries are presented together on the page, each post is given a permalink, so that individual entries can be referenced separately.

Hypertext is fundamental to the practice of weblogging. When bloggers refer to material that exists online, they invariably link to it. Hypertext allows writers to summarize and contextualize complex stories with links out to numerous primary sources. Most importantly, the link provides a transparency that is impossible with paper. The link allows writers to directly reference any online resource, enabling readers to determine for themselves whether the writer has accurately represented or even understood the referenced piece. Bloggers who reference but do not link material that might, in its entirety, undermine their conclusions, are intellectually dishonest.

Are Weblogs a Form of Journalism?

The early claim ‘weblogs are a new form of journalism’ has been gradually revised to ’some weblogs are doing journalism, at least part of the time.’ As even the enthusiasts now concede, weblogs used to record memories, plan weddings, or coordinate workgroups can’t be classified as journalism by any definition. So in any discussion about weblogs and journalism, the first question to ask is: Which weblogs?

The four weblog types most frequently cited are:

· Those written by journalists.

· Those written by professionals about their industry.

· Those written by individuals at the scene of a major event.

· Those that link primarily to news about current events.

Weblogs maintained for respected news organizations will certainly qualify as journalism if they uphold the same standards as the entire organization. But some argue that independent sites maintained by journalists automatically constitute journalism, simply because their authors are journalists. A weblog written by a journalist does not necessarily qualify as journalism for the same reason a novel written by a journalist does not: it is the practice that defines the practitioner, not the other way around. The case of Jayson Blair, recently fired from ‘The New York Times’ for fabricating stories, illustrates that whatever the journalist’s reputation or affiliation, journalism is characterized by strict adherence to accepted principles and standards, not by title or professional standing.

Some advocates of weblogs as journalism point to the weblogs produced by industry insiders as the future of trade journalism. They argue that, while reporters tend to rely on only a few sources even when reporting very complex stories, weblogs written by the people working in a field will naturally convey a more complete version of the news about their profession. But those with a stake in the public perception of an issue as working professionals invariably have \are those we can rely upon least for an unbiased perspective. Their commentary, done with integrity, can be a great source of accurate information and nuanced, informed analysis, but it will never replace the journalist’s mandate to assemble a fair, accurate, and complete story that can be understood by a general audience.

Personal accounts are more problematic: Is an eyewitness account journalism, and if so, when? Depending on the event? Depending on the inability of another individual to compile a more complete version of the story? Depending on the skill or training of the person writing the account? The standards used to determine when a personal recollection becomes a journalistic report are likely to vary from case to case.

This leaves link-driven sites about current events. There are certainly similarities between the practices behind these weblogs and some of the activities required to produce a newspaper or news broadcast. Just as a newspaper editor chooses which wire stories to run, the weblog editor chooses which stories to link. But bloggers are never in a position to determine which events will be reported. And just as opinion columnists use news accounts as a springboard to present their interpretation of events, bloggers are usually very happy to tell you what they think of what they link.

But is this a new form of journalism?

Frankly, no. I’m not practicing journalism when I link to a news article reported by someone else and state what I think \I’ve been doing something similar around the water cooler for years. I’m engaged in research, not journalism, when I search the Web for supplementary information in order to make a point. Reporters might do identical research while writing, but research alone does not qualify an activity as journalism. Bloggers may point to reader comments as sources of information about the items they post, but these are equivalent to letters to the editor, not reporting. Publishing unsubstantiated (and sometimes anonymous) emails from readers is not journalism, even when it’s done by someone with journalistic credentials. Credible journalists make a point of speaking directly to witnesses and experts, an activity so rare among bloggers as to be, for all practical purposes, non-existent.

Instead of inflating the term ‘journalism’ to include everyone who writes anything about current events, I prefer the term ‘participatory media’ for the blogger’s practice of actively highlighting and framing the news that is reported by journalists, a practice potentially as important as but different from journalism.

Weblogs as Participatory Media

So, when I say weblogs and journalism are fundamentally different, one thing I mean is that the vast majority of weblogs do not provide original reporting for me, the heart of all journalism. But Joan Connell, former executive producer for opinion and communities at MSNBC, has said that she believes weblogs are journalism only when they are edited. This will be poorly received by those journalists who have embraced the form for its freedom from professional standards and processes. Of course, bloggers unaffiliated with news organizations may state their opinions quite frankly, unworried about placating editors, offending advertisers, or poisoning relationships with sources, since they have none of these.

When bloggers do report the news, the form is usually incidental to the practice. When policy analyst David Steven decided to document the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, he set up a weblog [The Daily Summit] so that he could easily post reports on each day’s events. He attended news conferences. He interviewed conference speakers. He summarized the proceedings. But this was not a triumph of the weblog form. It was made possible by the free availability of easy-to-use publishing software. That the end-product was a weblog was irrelevant to Mr. Steven’s purposes and to those of his readers. For two weeks, Mr. Steven was on the front line, reporting, editing, and publishing news from the Summit. Journalism? I believe so, though Ms. Connell might disagree.

Perhaps the biggest reason millions of amateur writers produce weblogs is that the easiest-to-use Web publishing tools produce only that format. Blogs have become the default choice for personal Web publishing to such a degree that the two ideas have become conjoined. When commentators talk about weblogs as the future of journalism, they sometimes seem to mean ‘personal publishing is the future of journalism’, or ‘amateur reporting is the future of journalism’ but neither of these need manifest in the weblog form.

Whether personal publishing and amateur reporting begin to appear in different forms will depend on the availability of tools that allow non-professionals to create and contribute to other kinds of publications. A Korean website called ‘OhMyNews’ employs more than 26,000 ‘citizen reporters’ who submit articles on everything from birthday celebrations to political events. The publication is credited with helping to elect South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who granted his first postelection interview to the site. This is amateur reporting, but it is not blogging.

I see the wide adoption of weblogs as just the first wave of an age of online personal publishing. As weblog software evolves into content management software, look for a surge of other kinds of online publications, many of which will be updated periodically instead of continually. If these publications employ a weblog, it will be as an annotated table of contents rather than as the focus of the site. Amateur reporting will become more widespread, particularly with the proliferation of mobile devices that can upload photos and text. These devices will be pervasive, but little of this content will be widely seen, partly because there will be so much to pick through. Such content will be widely distributed only when it has the import of the Rodney King video.

Weblogs will be used in mainstream journalism, without question. But the vast majority of bloggers will continue to have a very different mandate from journalists. It is unrealistic to apply the standards of journalism to bloggers who rarely have the time or resources to actually report the news. In my book, The Weblog Handbook, I deliberately reject the journalistic standards of fairness and accuracy in favor of transparency as the touchstone for ethical blogging. As media participants, we are stronger and more valuable working outside mainstream media, rather than attempting to mirror the purposes of the institution we should seek to analyze and supplement.

Is Journalism For You?

What is journalism?

Journalism is the timely reporting of events at the local, provincial, national and international levels. Reporting involves the gathering of information through interviewing and research, the results of which are turned into a fair and balanced story for publication or for television or radio broadcast.

Journalism is not just

· fact-finding

· media analysis

· opinion writing, or

· commentary

although all of those aspects can play a part at times.

What do beginning journalists do?

Journalists who are starting their careers normally do not do commentary or opinion pieces. Rather, they cover hard news stories such as community news, courts, crime and speeches by notable people. In broadcast, beginning journalists also may do pre-interviews and research for senior journalists.

An entry-level reporter often does “general assignment” stories rather than stories for a specific beat. General assignment stories are given out to reporters by the city desk or assignment editor.

academic and practical courses and offers a solid grounding in the basic tools and practices of print, broadcast and online journalism. The curriculum of the Master of Arts in Journalism program is not focused on producing graduates to work in public relations or communications positions.

Expectation of writing ability in the journalism program

It is expected that students in the MA in Journalism program have mastered basic writing skills, including grammar, syntax, and the ability to conceptualize and articulate ideas in writing. A writing competency assignment will be given at the beginning of the summer term and students with writing difficulties will be identified. Students who do not meet the expectation of writing ability will be required to seek remedial help external to the program at their own expense, if necessary. A follow-up writing competency assignment will be given towards the end of the summer term.

The Journalism Problematic

Firstly I need to stress how impossible it is to talk of journalism as a single entity. As I say at the start of my Newspapers Handbook: there are many journalisms. [1] Too often the focus within the dominant discourse (in the academy as elsewhere) is on the mainstream media sectors – with the alternative media (ethnic, religious, leftist, environmental, peace movement, feminist, community, blogging) ignored. But while I may promote the alternative media I appreciate the mainstream/alternative duality can over-simplify matters — for instance, in which camp do such hybrid publications such as Private Eye and the Big Issue fall?

The Mysteries of Media Consumption

I’m now going to do what comes natural. I’ll talk about myself as a consumer of journalisms. The growing research into audience reception of media – on the impacts, influences, effects on or uses made of mass media outputs – is fascinating. Here the focus has shifted from debates about consumption within the context of media imperialism and the erosion of natural or indigenous culture and from an emphasis on the media as part of a system of domination to an emphasis on the individual, drawing heavily on the theoretical perspectives of social psychology. But despite the vast literature on audience studies, much of it of course influenced by McQuail’s uses and gratifications model, how I or we actually consume the media remains a mystery to me.

Indeed, student consumption of media never ceases to amaze. I’m teaching a unit at the University of Lincoln titled “International Human Rights for Journalists” and once showed in a seminar a video of a Panorama programme “Deep down and dirty” which looked at the CIA’s alleged human rights abuses in central America. The programme, according to my analysis, basically spun the official CIA line: the agency had been severely compromised by a scandal in Guatemala in the mid 1990s. As a result it had been forced by what was called the “Scrub order” to clean up its act. Loads of ex-CIA blokes were on hand to say how this had destroyed the agency’s abilities to act against its enemies: hence the intelligence failure that led to 9/11. But most of my students just didn’t see it like that. For them it was a critique of the CIA totally unacceptable in the post 9/11 period of terrorist threat.

Breaking the Taboo: My Journalistic Obsessions

What is journalism? Well, for me it’s an obsession. And has been since I was around 13. It was then, in the early 60s, when I began religiously copying out reports from the Nottingham Evening Post’s Pink-Un – the football paper you could pick up in the Market Square as you walked home from the match – the production process was so rapid in those days. One team fanaticism has never afflicted me. My father had a season ticket for Nottingham Forest and I would occasionally attend their reserve games. On alternate weeks Notts County were at home so my father would take me there. I supported both Forest and Notts and always have.

I studied history at university and through that got interested in politics. At that time politics was of a very conventional kind – involving political parties and parliament and so on (politics to me now is something very different: it’s difficult to separate politics from life, in fact). I attended Nottingham Playhouse (at its peak with folk such as Judi Dench, Jonathan Pryce, John Shrapnel, Harold Innocent, Jonathan Eyre, John Neville, Barbara Jefford, Jonathan Miller passing over its stage) and became addicted to films like all youths, so came to consume the culture pages avidly. The newspaper was so symbolically powerful to me: it represented the big wide world out there beyond the narrow confines of my lower middle class life in Nottingham. I remember admiring my history teacher Mr Friar simply because he carried around a copy of a newspaper. It was proof that he was a real man of the world concerned about the important issues of the day.

At Oxford I spent time on Cherwell newspaper: I wrote features and was the resident reporter of Student Union debates for a year. And my first job in newspapers was on the Nottingham Guardian Journal, a morning paper owned by the local royalist big wig T Bailey Forman. I remain addicted to newspapers. Whenever I go anywhere, in England or abroad I always have to buy a rag. I’m fascinated by the ephemeral nature of newspaper copy. There is all that blood sweat and tears invested in the production of the beast and in the end there is this strangely static object. It should be jumping out at me I feel. It all happens so quickly. Benedict Anderson in his seminal text Imagined Communities describes the newspaper as the “one-day best-seller” [2] And Fred Inglis comments: “Nobody reads last week’s newspaper unless it is wrapped round potatoes in the kitchen. But every day it sells out in millions because it tells an intelligible story with a plot, heroes, villains, actions and direction about the way of the world. It settles us in a sufficiently ‘knowable community’ while placing those who are known in a believable nearness to those who are not.” [3]

So many important decisions (is it £2,000 pounds or £20,000?) are made in split seconds at such strange times – I used to edit The Teacher (the newspaper of the National Union of Teachers) up to 3 in the morning, for instance. And then all that work is forgotten as the concerns over the next issue take over. It is ephemeral and yet that text on the page also has an extraordinary permanence. Those words, written at such speed, can inspire, hurt, libel, move, irritate, amuse.

There is enormous pleasure in language, the sound of words, their rhythms – and in reading (I like gossip and the news media are rooted in the primitive need for gossip) But there is also anxiety. Another day comes and there is yet more reading to be done. How many hours of my life have I devoted to reading the media – and how much have I digested/retained? I might spend an hour reading everyday and then up to six hours at the weekend reading, catching up. But then I don’t just read, I cut up sections and put them on piles and eventually file them. I love my files (though they are too chaotic): on journalism ethics, of course, on the intelligence services (my thickest paradoxically!), on American military policy, on UK military policy, on Africa, on human rights, on Libya and on Chad, on George Orwell. I’ve an “Odds and Sods” file. I make notes from newspapers – preparing for the new editions of my books, for the courses I teach. But I also cut up and store, just as I keep a regular diary: to protect myself against the anxieties around the passing of time. It’s all too transient.

And is this reading all work or pleasure? Perhaps it’s best to call it “plork” But while I do so much reading I’m aware that I’m missing so much. And there is some considerable guilt attached to that. Should I be reading the finance pages? This story about AIDS in Africa? I should read it but I’ve just not the time. I’d like to spend more time in the sports pages but alas (in any case, Forest have lost again – and so too Notts, damn it). And as the old newspapers and magazines pile up at home (ready for the recyling bin) I think of all those forests destroyed.

But I consume not just the dailies (with a smattering of tabloids) and Sundays: I’ve become a big fan of Private Eye; Press Gazette is unmissable; Q News, the Muslim monthly is fascinating as is Lobster, which focuses on the intelligence services; the London Review of Books is one of the best publications around; I like the Socialist Worker; Peace News with its revolutionary pacifism, is a favourite; and I, like Orwell, find all the publications of the many left wing sects (I devour when on any demo) great reading fodder. And my reading habits change. When I’m preparing for a new edition of my handbook, for instance, I will read far more tabloids and local papers than at other times.

I explore the web sites of a range of organisations: the NUJ, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, Liberty, Privacy International, Human Rights Watch. I both read and contribute to the media monitoring websites MediaLens.com and anti-spin.com. Too much media research focuses on the mainstream. In writing on the coverage of the Middle East/Iraq I constantly refer to alternative publications such as Dissent, Lobster, Covert Action Quarterly, Middle East Report, www.counterpunch.org (the investigative website run by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair), www.dahrjamailiraq.com (excellent site of an independent journalist in Iraq), www.tomdispatch.com (website of American historian Tom Engelhardt), www.zmag.org, www.coldtype.net (a regularly updated compilation of radical writing). I don’t read the educational press, the travel sections, the personal finance sections.

There is pleasure but there is also distaste. So much of the mainstream media (even the heavies) I find slightly ridiculous, too obsessed with the trivia of consumerist society, too keen to promote the myths surrounding democracy, the free press, the public interest. Much of the red top tabloids I find insulting with their rabid sexism, jingoism, racism and militarism. Too often the mainstream media are quick to back military adventures. I contend that until the time comes when the government proposes military action and the vast bulk of Fleet Street denounces the strategy as a crime and an appalling waste of crucial human and material resources (at a time of mass global poverty and environmental degradation) then we have no right to call ourselves civilised. Within this context whenever I read something which I really admire – a piece by Arundhati Roy, a humorous piece by Mark Steel in the Independent – the pleasure is very special.

So I’ve broken the big taboo – I’ve revealed some of the intimate details about my newspaper reading habits. I wonder what yours are…

The Objective Straitjacket and the ‘Crisis of Journalism’

Moreover, the range of genres in newspapers has always intrigued me: such as hard news, soft news, features of many kinds – profiles, news features, reviews, eye-witness reportage, participatory features, investigative reports, columns, editorials, diaries, human interest and so on. I’m fascinated by the different tones, writing styles, sourcing conventions applicable to each. But the more I consider these genres the more it occurs to me that they are broadly static. Journalism as a specific literary form appears to be at some dead end. There is no sense of experimentation with the form. The New Journalism of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe was incredibly innovative in the way it transformed journalists’ relations to their sources and resorted to fictional strategies to give a heightened rendering of reality. But it never really caught on in this country.

Why is this? Could it be that journalists’ stubborn reliance on professional notions of objectivity in our postmodern era is acting as a conservative, regressive influence on the development of the genre? In all the other arts and disciplines (painting, sculpture, architecture, novels, theatre and so on) there is enormous experimentation in both form and content – and along with it the ready acceptance of a range of radical epistemologies and ideologies. And yet journalists so often remain immune to the post modernist onslaught – too obsessed with the who what where when why and the how.

Philip Schlesinger and Graham Murdoch’s Televising ‘Terrorism’: Popular Violence in Popular Culture is still relevant today in that it argues that the discourse in mainstream news and documentaries is closed around stereotypical definitions of terrorisms. [4] Yet alongside those representations they are able to show how far more open discourse on terrorism appears in drama productions which are able to explore more deeply the complexities of the issue and which can be built around even subversive frames. In other words, the dominant discourse viewed overall is complex and contradictory – yet given its proximity to political and economic power and its crucial propaganda role for the state, the news sector serves to articulate the most regressive ideological elements.

Postmodernism reflects a decline of absolutes – no longer does following the correct method guarantee true results. Instead of only one truth and one certainty, postmodernism encourages us to accept that there are many truths and that the only certainty is uncertainty. The questioning of what scientific, rigorous research is and what its effects are, is part of a contemporary condition which Habermas refers to as a “crisis of legitimation” and others have called “postmodernity”. The formerly secure foundations of knowledge and understanding are no more. We are no longer certain about our ways of knowing and what is known. What we are left with is not an alternative and more secure foundation but an awareness of the complexity, historical contingency and fragility of the practices through which knowledge is constructed about ourselves and the world.

Yet still journalists so often remain unproblematically committed to conventional notions about truth. For instance, The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (Guardian Books, 2001), has been promoted by Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, as a model primer for journalists – rather as Observer editor David Astor promoted Orwell’s Politics and the English Language as a sort of style book for his journalists. “In this life we want nothing but facts, sir, nothing but facts”, Thomas Gradgrind, described by Dickens as “a man of realities. A man of fact and calculations” storms at the start of Hard Times. And this same devotion to facts dominates The Elements. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth, they say. 100 per cent of journalists interviewed for a survey by the Pew research centre for the People and the Press and the Committee of Concerned Journalists said “getting the facts right” was journalists’ major responsibility. They speak alarmingly of “an epistemological scepticism which has pervaded every aspect of our intellectual life from art, literature, law, physics to even history.” And of a “new journalism of assertion which is overwhelming the old journalism of verification”.

Time and time again, as I invite practising journalists to give talks to my students I’m amazed at how this belief in objective fact/information is proclaimed – as a sort of professional mantra. I remember John Simpson speaking of the “pure objectivity” of the BBC. David Loyn, foreign correspondent, said he “worshipped at the altar of objectivity” in the same speech in which he denounced peace journalism as the most serious threat to media standards. Mark Nicholls, embedded with the military during the Iraq invasion, told students at Lincoln University: “Our duty as journalists is to let the facts speak for themselves.” Similarly Ian Hargreaves, formerly Independent and New Statesman editor now of Ofcom, in his somewhat disappointing Journalism: Truth or Dare? argues along with Reith lecturer Onora O’Neill that the ethic of truthfulness lies at the heart of journalism. [5] But there is a certain hesitation as he adds “even if one accepts that neither quality is capable of incontestable definition”.

Again, the US media guru Everette E Dennis, in Of Media and People expresses concern over what he describes as the traditional “just the facts ma’am” school of journalism. He wants a new emphasis on objectivity but an interpretative objectivity “in which central facts can be verified but in which matters of interpretation and analysis are identified as such and left to reader and viewer direction. There are descriptive details and facts that can be sorted out and identified in virtually every news situation ranging from a simple police matter to a complex international controversy. Events arise, people are involved and situations can be observed. This is and ought to be descriptive, verified journalism at its best.” [6]

The history of mainstream journalists’ commitment to the ideology of objectivity, a philosophical concept running through Aristotle, Plato, Locke, Bentham, John Stuart Mill that found perhaps its greatest expression in the Enlightenment project of rationality and the pursuit of scientific knowledge, has been well charted by Schudson, Stuart Allan and others. Indeed, the development of the notion of objectivity, the separation of fact from opinion, has been so central to the manufacture of mainstream journalists’ sense of professionalism.

But Can Subjectivity Offer a Solution?

Mainstream journalists’ stubborn commitment to objectivity and the belief that “fact” can be separated from “comment” not only flies in the face of the postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment dualities – which prioritised the intellect over emotion, mind over body, head over heart, the objective over the subjective. By suggesting the pursuit of information can be value-free, the ideology of objectivity also serves to marginalize the ethical and political dimensions within the dominant journalistic culture.

Significantly, some mainstream journalists become outspoken advocates of subjectivity as a way of challenging the myths of objectivity. For instance, James Cameron, the anti-nuclear peace campaigner who during the Vietnam war dared to portray the North Vietnamese as humans rather than communist monsters, commented: “It never occurred to me, in such a situation, to be other than subjective. I have always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than the truth.” But the notion of ‘subjective truth’ needs to be radically challenged too. As Myra Macdonald argues there can be both positives – such as Cameron’s reporting — and negatives in subjectivity: “Subjectivity can take very different forms, however, and some of these may aid knowledge formation. Self-reflexivity on the part of reporters and presenters enables better understanding of the discursive constitution of their account and dispels the myth of objectivity whereas a more egotistical presentation of the investigating self encourages an absorption in personality that is more akin to celebrity adulation.” [7]

She usefully suggests a discourse on tabloidisation or infotainment built around constructed oppositions between information and entertainment confuses the issues. “Because of its association with categories and forms of classification that are themselves ideologically weighted in favour of Enlightenment principles, it can blind us to problems with conventional methods of communicating information and to opportunities in some of the movements away from these. Personalisation, in particular, is worthy of closer inspection as a multi-dimensional rather than a singular process.” [8]

Thus journalists’ engagement with the issues they are confronting and their participation in the events they are recording can end up appearing self-indulgent. For instance, Donal MacIntyre’s televised investigations tended to over-glamorize his role as the “heroic, brave” celebrity sleuth and, in the process, marginalize the social issues under review. But handled sensitively and creatively (and with an awareness of the profound political and economic factors impacting on the formation of personality) journalistic reflexivity can give new meaning and authenticity to their reporting.

But while I may wince at the extravagant claims of the objectifiers, I’m not in response going to assert similar claims for subjectivity. A common theme running through the current liberal, moral panic over allegedly dumbed down mainstream media standards is a concern over the rise and rise of the New Punditry/the New Subjectifiers with their often under-researched columns mixing emotionalism, confession, extremist views, speculation, innuendo and abuse. The dumbing down argument is dubious – not least because it subtly eliminates the alternative media from the dominant discourse, fails to distinguish between spectacular emotion and authentic emotion — and at the same time prioritises moral outrage above the political problematic.

I would like to suggest we need to break away from the old Cartesian dualities: emotion and reason, objectivity and subjectivity, head and heart, thought and action, man and beast, culture and nature – and seek a new paradigm. Just as objectivity needs to be radically problematised – so too do our subjectivities.

NEW JOURMALISM

New Journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, and others.

Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Esquire Magazine, CoEvolution Quarterly, and for a short while Scanlan’s Monthly.

Characteristics

Wolfe identified the four main devices New Journalists borrowed from literary fiction:^[1]

• Telling the story using scenes rather than historical narrative as much as possible
• Dialogue in full (Conversational speech rather than quotations and statements)
• First-person point of view (present every scene through the eyes of a particular character)
• Recording everyday details such as behavior, possessions, friends and family (which indicate the “status life” of the character)

Despite these elements, New Journalism is not fiction. It maintains elements of reporting including strict adherence to factual accuracy and the writer being the primary source. To get “inside the head” of a character, the journalist asks the subject what they were thinking or how they felt.

History

Wikinews has related news:

Gay Talese on the state of journalism, Iraq and his life

Wolfe unwittingly published his first New Journalism-style article in 1963 after having trouble writing an assignment about hot rod culture and sending his editor a letter containing his thoughts on the article. The editor chose simply to remove the salutation from Wolfe’s letter and print it as received. Wolfe’s letter had the original title There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…. The title was later contracted to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and became the title of Wolfe’s first book of collected essays, published in 1965. Wolfe once proclaimed that New Journalism “would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.”^[2]

Gay Talese at the Strand Bookstore in New York City

Journalists recognized as using the style include Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Darrell Bob Houston, Truman Capote, P. J. O’Rourke, George Plimpton, Terry Southern, Richard Ben Cramer and Gay Talese. Hunter S. Thompson was a major practitioner of new journalism and gonzo journalism, his own particular style. Thompson’s first book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, is a more conventional piece, and shows the beginnings of a more memoir-based approach to reportage. Gay Talese’s 1966 article for Esquire, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, was an influential piece of new journalism that gave a detailed portrait of Frank Sinatra without ever interviewing him.

New journalism writers brought new approaches to areas already covered by the mainstream press. The psychedelic movement was something that many of the writers of the period covered, such as in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Vietnam War was another common topic, as was the political turmoil on the homefront. Terry Southern’s Grooving in Chi documented the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention for Esquire Magazine in new journalism manner. New journalism’s techniques were also applied to less obvious subjects, such as financial markets (by George Goodman under the pseudonym Adam Smith, in essays originally published in New York Magazine and later collected in a book called The Money Game.)

Some authors of conventional fiction switched to writing in the style of new journalism, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. However, neither author ever agreed to their style’s comparison to Wolfe’s school of narration, nor did many others who have been retrospectively promoted as being members and therein associated. Much to the contrary, many of these writers would deny that their work was generically relevant to other new journalists at the time. This may be because, during such a politically torn period, these authors were politically across the spectrum, from the New Left to the Old Right.

Online journalism

Online journalism is defined as the reporting of facts produced and distributed via the Internet.

An early leader was The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Steve Yelvington wrote on the Poynter Institute website about Nando, owned by The N&O, by saying “Nando evolved into the first serious, professional news site on the World Wide Web — long before CNN, MSNBC, and other followers.” It originated in the early 1990s as “NandO Land”.

Many news organizations based in other media also distribute news online, but the amount they use of the new medium varies. Some news organizations use the Web exclusively or as a secondary outlet for their content. The Online News Association is the premier organization representing online journalists, with more than 800 members.

The Internet challenges traditional news organizations in several ways. Newspapers may lose classified advertising to websites, which are often targeted by interest instead of geography. These organizations are concerned about real and perceived loss of viewers and circulation to the Internet.

And the revenue gained with advertising on news websites is sometimes too small to support the site.

Even before the Internet, technology and other factors were dividing people’s attention, leading to more – but narrower – media outlets.

Work outside traditional press

The Internet has also given rise to more participation by people who aren’t normally journalists, such as with Indy Media (Max Perez).

Bloggers write on web logs or blogs. Traditional journalists often do not consider bloggers to automatically be journalists. This has more to do with standards and professional practices than the medium. But, as of 2005, blogging has generally gained at least more attention and has led to some effects on mainstream journalism, such as exposing problems related to a television piece about President Bush’s National Guard Service.

Other significant tools of on-line journalism are Internet forums, discussion boards and chats, especially those representing the Internet version of official media. The widespread use of the Internet all over the world created a unique opportunity to create a meeting place for both sides in many conflicts, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Russian-Chechen War. Often this gives a unique chance to find new, alternative solutions to the conflict, but often the Internet is turned into the battlefield by contradicting parties creating endless “online battles.”

Most Internet users agree that on-line sources are often less biased and more informative than the official media. This claim is often backed with the belief that on-line journalists are merely volunteers and freelancers who are not paid for their activity, and therefore are free from corporate ethics. But recently many Internet forums began to moderate their boards because of threat of vandalism, which many users see as a form of censorship.

Some online journalists have an ambition to replace the mainstream media in the long run. Some independent forums and discussion boards have already achieved a level of popularity comparable to mainstream news agencies such as television stations and newspapers. Particularly interesting are About.com in the United States, Expatica in Western Europe and several others.

Internet radio and Podcasts are other growing independent media based on the Internet.

Legal issues

One emerging problem with online journalism in the United States is that, in many states, individuals who publish only on the Web do not enjoy the same First Amendment rights as reporters who work for traditional print or broadcast media. As a result, unlike a newspaper, they are much more liable for such things as libel. In California, however, protection of anonymous sources was ruled to be the same for both kinds of journalism.

In Canada there are more ambiguities, as Canadian libel law permits suits to succeed even if no false statements of fact are involved, and even if matters of public controversy are being discussed. In British Columbia, as part of “a spate of lawsuits” against online news sites, according to legal columnist Michael Geist, several cases have put key issues in online journalism up for rulings. Green Party of Canada financier Wayne Crookes filed a suit in which he alleged damages for an online news service that republished resignation letters from that party and let users summarize claims they contained. He had demanded access to all the anonymous sources confirming the insider information, which Geist believed would be extremely prejudicial to online journalism. The lawsuit, “Crookes versus openpolitics”, attracted attention from the BBC and major newspapers, perhaps because of its humorous name. Crookes had also objected to satire published on the site, including use of the name gang of Crookes for his allies.

Some experts including kumud ranjan believe that libel law is wholly incompatible with online journalism and that right of reply will eventually have to replace it. Otherwise commentary on events in places that give libel plaintiffs too many rights or powers will move to other jurisdictions and most of the comment will be made anonymous. Everyone would then lose rights and remedies, due to a few wealthy people with resources to launch libel suits on weak grounds. Jennifer Jannuska and other legal commentators have, while agreeing with strong protections for publishers who only host journalists, sometimes emphasize that the use of anonymizer technology makes even criminal abuses, not just libel, possible, and so should be avoided even if other rights are lost.

News collections

The Internet also offers options such as personalized news feeds and aggregators, which compile news from different websites into one site. One of the most popular news aggregators is Google News. Others include Newsfeedmaker.com, Topix.net, FaceofTruth, TheFreeLibrary.com, mangrova.com.

But, some people see too much personalization as detrimental. For example, some fear that people will have narrower exposure to news.

As of March 2005, Wikinews rewrites articles from other news organizations.

Gonzo journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism which is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first person narrative. The style tends to blend factual and fictional elements to emphasize an underlying message and engage the reader. The word Gonzo was first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. The term has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.

Gonzo journalism tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered. It disregards the ‘polished’ edited product favored by newspaper media and strives for the gritty factor. Use of quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and even profanity is common. The use of Gonzo journalism suggests that journalism can be truthful without striving for objectivity and is loosely equivalent to an editorial.

Science journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Science journalism is a relatively new branch of journalism, which uses the art of reporting to convey information about science topics to a public forum. The communication of scientific knowledge through mass media requires a special relationship between the world of science and news media, which is still just beginning to form.

The first task of a science journalist is to render the very detailed, specific, and often jargon-laden information produced by scientists into a form that the average media consumer can understand and appreciate, while still communicating the information accurately. Science journalists often do not have advanced training in the particular scientific disciplines that they cover — they may have been scientists or medical doctors before becoming journalists — or have at least exhibited talent in writing about science subjects.

In recent years, the amount of scientific news has grown rapidly with science playing an increasingly central role in society, and interaction between the scientific community and news media has increased. The differences between the methodologies of these two “pillars” of modern society, particularly their distinct ways of developing their realities, have led to some difficulties. Journalism tends to have a stronger bias towards truth and speculative theories than science, whereas science focuses more on fact and empirical measurement.

Science journalists regularly come under criticism for falsely reporting scientific stories. Very often, such as with climate change, this leaves the public under the false impression that the scientific community is divided, whereas science is based on weighted evidence and not beliefs.

Fashion journalism

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Fashion journalism is an umbrella term used to describe all aspects of published fashion media. Sometimes referred to as fashion writers, fashion critics or fashion reporters. The most obvious examples of fashion journalism are the fashion features in magazines and newspapers, but the term also includes books about fashion, fashion related reports on television as well as online fashion magazines, websites and blogs.

The work of a fashion journalist can be quite varied. Typical work includes writing or editing articles, or helping to formulate and style a fashion shoot. A fashion journalist typically spends a lot of time researching and/or conducting interviews and it is essential that he or she has good contacts with people in the fashion industry, including photographers, designers, and public relations specialists.

Fashion journalists are either employed full time by a publication or are employed on a freelance basis.

Fashion journalism and the internet

The first internet site related to fashion was the Fashion Net, which made its debut in January 1995.^[1] In the mid 1990s, the Internet was still largely a research network populated by academics. But the strong appeal of this entirely new medium was made evident by the pioneering efforts of fashion’s early entrants and soon both independent and established fashion publishers, designers and visual artists were online.

About half a year subsequent to Fashion Net’s launch at the outset of 1995 came New York-based Fashionmall and French ELLE. Lumiere, the first online fashion magazine, featuring photographers including Nick Knight and Jean-Baptiste Mondino, was unveiled in October 1995. Fashion Live produced Internet’s first live fashion webcast of Yves Saint Laurent’s runway show in 1996. CNN Style and Hint Magazine arrived in 1998. The following year saw the rise and fall of Boo.com as the company burned through $135 million in 18 months.^[2] SHOWstudio.com and Style.com, the online umbrella for Vogue and W, started in 2000, followed by Jason Campbell’s JC Report in 2002 and Refinery29.com in 2005. Following a tiff in 2007, W left Style.com making it the online home for Vogue alone.

Today, fashion blogs are an increasing force in the fashion industry. Against this trend in August 2006 Westfield Group the world’s largest mall and shopping centre owner has unveiled a Webzine titled What’s What identifying popular fashion trends with a view to indirectly promote the products available in their tenants stores. The financial funding for such an undertaking is unique as it does not rely on subscriptions or advertising but entirely on advertorials.

Community journalism

Community journalism is locally oriented coverage that typically focuses on city neighborhoods or individual suburbs rather than metropolitan, state, national or world news.

If it covers those topics, community journalism concentrates on their effect on local readers. Community newspapers, often but not always published weekly, also tend to cover subjects larger news media do not, such as students on the honor roll at the local high school, school sports, crimes such as vandalism, zoning issues and the other details of community life. Some dismiss these as “chicken dinner” stories, but such “hyperlocal” coverage can play a vital role in building and maintaining neighborhoods.

Leo Lerner, founder of Chicago’s erstwhile Lerner Newspapers, was one to say, “A fistfight on Clark Street is more important to our readers than a war in Europe.”

The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, which has 260 members in seven countries (U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand), encourages and promotes independent editorial comment, news content, and leadership in community newspapers throughout the world. Its purpose is to help those involved in the community press improve standards of editorial writing and news reporting and to encourage strong, independent editorial voices.

An increasing number of community newspapers are now owned by newspaper groups who realize that these papers can be quite profitable, although many rural papers are still “mom and pop” operations

Citizen journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Citizen journalism, also known as public or participatory journalism or democratic journalism^[1], is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”^[2] Citizen journalism should not be confused with civic journalism, which is practiced by professional journalists. Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content.

Mark Glasser, a longtime freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media issues, gets to the heart of it:

The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.

In a 2003 Online Journalism Review article, J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the following types: 1) Audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs, photos or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras, or local news written by residents of a community), 2) Independent news and information Websites (Consumer Reports, the Drudge Report), 3) Full-fledged participatory news sites (OhmyNews, GroundReport), 4) Collaborative and contributory media sites (Slashdot, Kuro5hin), (Newsvine), (HumanTimes), 5) Other kinds of “thin media.” (mailing lists, email newsletters), and 6) Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast sites such as (KenRadio).^[3] New media theorist Terry Flew states that there are 3 elements “critical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizen media”: open publishing, collaborative editing and distributed content.

History

The idea that average citizens can engage in the act of journalism has a long history in the United States. The modern citizen journalist movement emerged after journalists themselves began to question the predictability of their coverage of such events as the 1988 U.S. presidential election. Those journalists became part of the public, or civic, journalism movement, a countermeasure against the eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs.^[5][6][7]

Initially, discussions of public journalism focused on promoting journalism that was “for the people” by changing the way professional reporters did their work. According to Leonard Witt, however, early public journalism efforts were, “often part of ’special projects’ that were expensive, time-consuming and episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an issue and moved on. Professional journalists were driving the discussion. They would say, “Let’s do a story on welfare-to-work (or the environment, or traffic problems, or the economy),” and then they would recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle their points of view. Since not all reporters and editors bought into this form of public journalism, and some outright opposed it, reaching out to the people from the newsroom was never an easy task.” By 2003, in fact, the movement seemed to be petering out, with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism closing its doors.

With today’s technology the citizen journalist movement has found new life as the average person can capture news and distribute it globally. As Sunday Oliseh has noted, “the capacity to make meaning – to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements – and the capacity to communicate one’s meaning around the world, are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe.”^[8] Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at Boston College, notes in her article, Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege, that:^[9]

[i]n many ways, the definition of journalist has now come full circle. When the First Amendment was adopted, “freedom of the press” referred quite literally to the freedom to publish using a printing press, rather than the freedom of organized entities engaged in the publishing business. The printers of 1775 did not exclusively publish newspapers; instead, in order to survive financially they dedicated most of their efforts printing materials for paying clients. The newspapers and pamphlets of the American Revolutionary era were predominantly partisan and became even more so through the turn of the century. They engaged in little newsgathering and instead were predominantly vehicles for opinion.

The passage of the term “journalism” into common usage in the 1830s occurred at roughly the same time that newspapers, using highspeed rotary steam presses, began mass circulation throughout the eastern United States. Using the printing press, newspapers could distribute exact copies to large numbers of readers at a low incremental cost. In addition, the rapidly increasing demand for advertising for brand- name products fueled the creation of publications subsidized in large part by advertising revenue. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the concept of the “press” morphed into a description of individuals and companies engaged in an often competitive commercial media enterprise.

Birth of Blogs and the Indymedia Movement

In 1999, activists in Seattle created a response to the WTO meeting being held there. These activists understood the only way they could get into the corporate media was by blocking the streets. And then, the scant 60 seconds of coverage would show them being carted off by the police, but without any context to explain why they were protesting. They knew they had to create an alternative media model. Since then, the Indymedia movement has experienced exponential growth, and IMCs have been created in over 200 cities all over the world.

Simultaneously, journalism that was “by the people” began to flourish, enabled in part by emerging internet and networking technologies, such as weblogs, chat rooms, message boards, wikis and mobile computing. A relatively new development is the use of convergent polls, allowing editorials and opinions to be submitted and voted on. Overtime, the poll converges on the most broadly accepted editorials and opinions. In South Korea, OhmyNews became popular and commercially successful with the motto, “Every Citizen is a Reporter.” Founded by Oh Yeon-ho on February 22, 2000, it has a staff of some 40-plus traditional reporters and editors who write about 20% of its content, with the rest coming from other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens. OhmyNews now has an estimated 50,000 contributors, and has been credited with transforming South Korea’s conservative political environment.

In 2001, ThemeParkInsider.com became the first online publication to win a major journalism award for a feature that was reported and written entirely by readers, earning an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for its “Accident Watch” section, where readers tracked injury accidents at theme parks and shared accident prevention tips.

In 2004, a citizen journalism website called AssociatedContent.com was launched. The “People’s Media Company”, as they claim to be, was the first company to offer monetary compensation for their users that publish quality content in the form of articles, videos and audio clips. A few years later, WorldVoiceNews.com was launched, claiming the tagline “Honest and Unfiltered,” and paying editors and reporters a per-story fee based on the number of stories they submit and the revenue for the company each month.

During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican parties issued press credentials to citizen bloggers covering the convention, marking a new level of influence and credibility for nontraditional journalists. Some bloggers also began watchdogging the work of conventional journalists, monitoring their work for biases and inaccuracy.

A recent trend in citizen journalism has been the emergence of what blogger Jeff Jarvis terms hyperlocal journalism, as online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who often report on topics that conventional newspapers tend to ignore.^[10] “We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down,” explains Mary Lou Fulton, the publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California. “Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what’s important to them ‘isn’t news,’ we’re just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors.”^[11]

Who does citizen journalism?

According to Jay Rosen, citizen journalists “the people formerly known as the audience,” who “were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all. … The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable.”^[12]

“Doing citizen journalism right means crafting a crew of correspondents who are typically excluded from or misrepresented by local television news: low-income women, minorities and youth — the very demographic and lifestyle groups who have little access to the media and that advertisers don’t want,” says Robert Huesca, an associate professor of communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Public Journalism is now being explored via new media such as the use of mobile phones. Mobile phones have the potential to transform reporting and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public. Mobile telephony provides low-cost options for people to set up news operations. One small organization providing mobile news and exploring public journalism is Jasmine News in Sri Lanka.

In 2004, when the 9.1-magnitude underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami in Banda Aceh Indonesia, news footage from many people who experienced the tsunami was widely broadcast.

Legal implications in the United States of America

The growth of online participatory journalism gives rise to the legal question of whether bloggers who gather and disseminate “news” should be classified as journalists. In light of the proposed federal reporter-shield law, the resolution of this issue will have far reaching implications for the millions of people in this country who disseminate information via blogs. In other words, are bloggers the modern day equivalent of the revolutionary pamphleteer who passed out leaflets on the street corner? These and other issues are discussed in a recent book, We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age (Free Press 2007).

Currently, more than 30 states and the District of Columbia have enacted shield laws that allow journalists the privilege to shield their confidential sources from disclosure. These states include: Alabama, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee.

In its landmark decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972), the United States Supreme Court recognized that “the administration of a constitutional newsman’s privilege would present practical and conceptual difficulties of high order … Sooner or later it would be necessary to define those categories of newsmen who qualify for the privilege, a questionable procedure in light of the traditional doctrine that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as the larger metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods.”

The time is fast approaching when these legal lines will have to be drawn. In recent times, bloggers have broken too many stories of national interest that mainstream media either overlooked, or decided against reporting, not to be considered legitimate news gatherers and reporters. Mass Media companies found out importance of people and have opened space on their agenda, as explained by Sebastian Perez Oyarzun ([1])

Moreover, the fact that many bloggers are anonymous is of marginal importance to the question of whether they qualify as journalists. The Supreme Court has long recognized that anonymous speech is entitled to First Amendment protection. In Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960), The Supreme Court exclaimed that “[a]nonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind.” Indeed the Federalist Papers were published under the pseudonym “Publius.” Accordingly, there are times and circumstances when the authorities may not compel those engaged in the dissemination of ideas to be publicly identified for the fear of identification and reprisal might deter perfectly lawful discussions of matters of public importance. See Bates v. Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516.

The way the courts deal with the myriad issues that will arise from the use of this cyber-soapbox will determine the extent to which First Amendment freedoms will flourish in the age of Internet.

Criticisms

Citizen journalists may be activists within the communities they write about. This has drawn some criticism from traditional media institutions such as The New York Times, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of ‘objectivity’. Many traditional journalists view citizen journalism with some skepticism, believing that only trained journalists can understand the exactitude and ethics involved in reporting news. See, e.g., Nicholas Lemann, Vincent Maher, and Tom Grubisich.

A paper by Vincent Maher, the head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, outlined several weaknesses in the claims made by citizen journalists, in terms of the “three deadly E’s”, referring to ethics, economics and epistemology. This paper has itself been criticized in the press and blogosphere.^[13]

An article in 2005 by Tom Grubisich reviewed ten new citizen journalism sites and found many of them lacking in quality and content.^[14] Grubisich followed up a year later with, “Potemkin Village Redux.”^[15] He found that the best sites had improved editorially and were even nearing profitability, but only by not expensing editorial costs. Also according to the article, the sites with the weakest editorial content were able to aggressively expand because they had stronger financial resources.

Another article published on Pressthink examined Backfence, a citizen journalism site with initial three locations in the DC area, which reveals that the site has only attracted limited citizen contributions.^[16] The author concludes that, “in fact, clicking through Backfence’s pages feels like frontier land -– remote, often lonely, zoned for people but not home to any. The site recently launched for Arlington, Virginia. However, without more settlers, Backfence may wind up creating more ghost towns.”

Others criticize the formulation of the term “citizen journalism” to describe the concept, as the word “citizen” has a conterminous relation to the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship (such as refugees or immigrants without papers) limits the concept to those recognised only by governments. Additionally the global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognise national boundaries. Some additional names given to the concept based on this analysis are grassroots media, people’s media, or participatory media.

Proponents of citizen journalism

• Dan Gillmor, former technology columnist with the San Jose Mercury News, is one of the foremost proponents of citizen journalism, and founded a nonprofit, the Center for Citizen Media, to help promote it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s French-language television network has also organized a weekly public affairs program called, “5 sur 5″, which has been organizing and promoting citizen-based journalism since 2001. On the program, viewers submit questions on a wide variety of topics, and they, accompanied by staff journalists, get to interview experts to obtain answers to their questions.
• Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, was one of public journalism’s earliest proponents. From 1993 to 1997, he directed the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation and housed at NYU. He also currently runs the PressThink weblog.

Advocacy journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Advocacy journalism is a genre of journalism that intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose. Because it is intended to be factual, it is distinguished from propaganda. It is also distinct from instances of media bias and failures of objectivity in media outlets, which attempt to be—or which present themselves as—objective or neutral.

Traditionally, advocacy and criticism are restricted to editorial and op-ed pages, which are clearly distinguished in the publication and in the organization’s internal structure. News reports are intended to be objective and unbiased. In contrast, advocacy journalists have an opinion about the story they are writing. For example, that political corruption should be punished, that more environmentally friendly practices should be adopted by consumers, or that a government policy will be harmful to business interests and should not be adopted. This may be evident in small ways, such as tone or facial expression, or large ways, such as the selection of facts and opinions presented.

Some advocacy journalists reject that the traditional ideal of objectivity is possible in practice, either generally, or due to the presence of corporate sponsors in advertising. Some feel that the public interest is better served by a diversity of media outlets with a variety of transparent points of view, or that advocacy journalism serves a similar role to muckrakers or whistleblowers.

EMBEDDED JOURNALISM

Embedded journalism refers to news reporters being attached to military units involved in armed conflicts. While the term could be applied to many historical interactions between journalists and military personnel, it first came to be used in the media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States military responded to pressure from the country’s news media who were disappointed by the level of access granted during the 1991 Gulf War and in the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

At the start of the war in March 2003, as many as 775 reporters and photographers were traveling as embedded journalists. ^[1] These reporters signed contracts with the military that limited what they were allowed to report on. ^[2] When asked why the military decided to embed journalists with the troops, Lt. Col. Rick Long of the U.S. Marine Corps replied, “Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.”^[3]

Gina Cavallaro, a reporter for the Army Times, said, “They’re [the journalists] relying more on the military to get them where they want to go, and as a result, the military is getting smarter about getting its own story told.”^[4]

As an illustration of the control exerted over embedded reporters, the U.S. Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Kuwait pulled the credentials of two embedded journalists from the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, reportedly for publishing a picture of a bullet-ridden Humvee parked in a Kuwaiti camp

Criticism

The practice has been criticized as being part of a propaganda campaign and an effort to keep reporters away from civilian populations and sympathetic to invading forces; for example by the documentary film War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Some critics felt that the level of oversight was too strict and that embedded journalists would make reports that were too sympathetic to the American side of the war, leading to use of the alternate term “inbedded journalist” or “inbeds”. “Those correspondents who drive around in tanks and armored personnel carriers,” said legendary journalist Gay Talese in an interview, “who are spoon-fed what the military gives them and they become mascots for the military, these journalists. I wouldn’t have journalists embedded if I had any power!… There are stories you can do that aren’t done. I’ve said that many times.”^[5]

Joint training for war correspondents started in November 2002 in advance of the March 2003 start of the war in Iraq.

World War I

World War I (abbreviated WWI; also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars) was a global war which took place primarily in Europe from 1914 to 1918.^[2] Over 40 million casualties resulted, including approximately 20 million military and civilian deaths.^[3] Over 60 million European soldiers were mobilized from 1914 to 1918.^[4]

The act which is considered to have triggered the succession of events which led to war was the 28 June 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb citizen of Austria-Hungary and member of the Young Bosnia. The retaliation by Austria-Hungary against the Kingdom of Serbia activated a series of alliances that set off a chain reaction of war declarations. Within a month, much of Europe was in a state of open warfare.

The underlying causes of the war dated back, in part to the Unification of Germany and the changing balances of power among the European Great Powers in the early part of the 20th century. These causes included continuing French resentment over the loss of territory to Germany in the 19th century; the growing economic and military competition between Britain and Germany; and the German desire for a “place in the sun” equal to that of the more established countries of Europe.

The war was fought between two major alliances. The Entente Powers initially consisted of France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and their associated empires and dependencies. Numerous other states joined these allies, most notably Italy in April 1915, and the United States in April 1917. The Central Powers, so named because of their central location on the European continent, initially consisted of Germany and Austria-Hungary and their associated empires. The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in October 1914, followed a year later by Bulgaria. By the conclusion of the war, only The Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and the Scandinavian nations remained officially neutral among the European countries, though several of those may have provided financial and materiel support to one side or the other.

The fighting of the war mostly took place along several fronts that broadly encircled the European continent. The Western Front was marked by a system of trenches, breastworks, and fortifications separated by an area known as no man’s land.^[5] These fortifications stretched 475 miles (more than 600 kilometres)^[5] and precipitated a style of fighting known as trench warfare. On the Eastern Front, the vastness of the eastern plains and the limited railroad network prevented the stalemate of the Western Front, though the scale of the conflict was just as large. There was heavy fighting on the Balkan Front, the Middle Eastern Front and the Italian Front; there were also hostilities at sea and in the air.

The war was ended by several treaties, most notably the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, though the Allied powers had an armistice with Germany in place since 11 November 1918. One of the most striking results of the war was a large redrawing of the map of Europe. All of the Central Powers lost territory, and many new nations were created. The German Empire lost its colonial possessions and was saddled with accepting blame for the war, as well as paying punitive reparations for it. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were completely dissolved. Austria-Hungary was carved up into several successor states including Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as adding Transylvania to the Greater Romania who was allied with the victors. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and much of its non-Anatolian territory was awarded as protectorates of various Allied powers, while the remaining Turkish core was reorganized as the Republic of Turkey. The Russian Empire, which had withdrawn from the war in 1917 after the October Revolution, lost much of its western frontier as the newly independent nations of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were carved from it; Bessarabia was also re-attached to the Greater Romania as it has been a Romanian territory for more that a thousand years^{[citation needed]}. After the war, the League of Nations was created as an international organization designed to avoid future wars by giving nations a means of solving their differences diplomatically. World War I ended the world order which had existed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and was an important factor in the outbreak of World War II.

Causes

Main article: Causes of World War I

A graphic depiction of the state of international relations in pre-WWI Europe. Italy joined the Triple Entente in April 1915

On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo. Princip was a member of Young Bosnia, a group whose aims included the unification of the South Slavs and independence from Austria-Hungary. The assassination in Sarajevo set into motion a series of fast-moving events that eventually escalated into full-scale war.^[6] Austria-Hungary demanded action by Serbia to punish those responsible and, when Austria-Hungary deemed Serbia had not complied, declared war. Major European powers were at war within weeks because of overlapping agreements for collective defense and the complex nature of international alliances.

Arms race

The Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought.

The German industrial base had, by 1914, overtaken that of Britain, though Germany did not have the commercial advantages of a large empire. In the years running up to the war an increasing race to have the strongest navy arose between Britain and Germany, each country building large numbers of dreadnoughts. The naval race between Britain and Germany was intensified by the 1906 launch of HMS Dreadnought, a revolutionary craft whose size and power rendered previous battleships obsolete. Britain also maintained a large naval lead in other areas particularly over Germany and Italy. Paul Kennedy pointed out that both nations believed Alfred Thayer Mahan’s thesis of command of the sea as vital to great nation status; experience with guerre de course would prove Mahan wrong.

David Stevenson described the arms race as “a self-reinforcing cycle of heightened military preparedness.”^[7] David Herrmann viewed the shipbuilding rivalry as part of a general movement in the direction of war.^[8] The revisionist Niall Ferguson, however, argued Britain’s ability to maintain an overall lead signified this was not a factor in the oncoming conflict.^[9]

The cost of the arms race was felt in both Britain and Germany. The total arms spending by the six Great Powers (Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy) increased by 50% between 1908 and 1913.^[10]

Plans, distrust, and mobilization

Closely related is the thesis adopted by many political scientists that the mobilization plans of Germany, France and Russia automatically escalated the conflict. Fritz Fischer emphasized the inherently aggressive nature of the Schlieffen Plan, which outlined a two-front strategy. Fighting on two fronts meant Germany had to eliminate one opponent quickly before taking on the other. It called for a strong right flank attack, to seize Belgium and cripple the French army by pre-empting its mobilization. After the attack, the German army would rush east by railroad and quickly destroy the slowly mobilizing Russian forces.^[11]

France’s Plan XVII envisioned a quick thrust into the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, which would in theory cripple Germany’s ability to wage a modern war.

Russia’s Plan 19 foresaw a concurrent mobilization of its armies against Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottomans, while Plan 19 Revised saw Austria-Hungary as the main target, reducing the initial commitment of troops against East Prussia.^[12]

All three plans created an atmosphere in which speed was thought to be one of the determining factors for victory. Elaborate timetables were prepared; once mobilization had begun, there was little possibility of turning back. Diplomatic delays and poor communications exacerbated the problems.

Also, the plans of France, Germany and Russia were all biased toward the offensive, in clear conflict with the improvements of defensive firepower and entrenchment.^[13][14][15]

Militarism and autocracy

President Woodrow Wilson of the United States and others blamed the war on militarism.^[16] Some argued^{[citation needed]} that aristocrats and military élites had too much power in countries such as Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. War was thus a consequence of their desire for military power and disdain for democracy. This theme figured prominently^{[citation needed]} in anti-German propaganda. Consequently, supporters of this theory called^{[citation needed]} for the abdication of rulers such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, as well as an end to aristocracy and militarism in general. This platform provided^{[citation needed]} some justification for the American entry into the war when the Russian Empire surrendered in 1917.

The Allies consisted of Great Britain and France, both democracies, fighting the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Russia, one of the Allied Powers, was an empire until 1917, but it was opposed to the subjugation of Slavic peoples by Austro-Hungary. Against this backdrop, the view of the war as one of democracy versus dictatorship initially had some validity, but lost credibility as the conflict dragged on.

Wilson hoped the League of Nations and disarmament would secure a lasting peace. Borrowing a thesis from H. G. Wells, he described the war as a “war to end all war”. He was willing to side with France and the Britain to this end, despite their own militarism.

Fritz Fischer famously^[17] put most of the blame on Germany’s aristocratic leaders. He argued that the German leaders thought they were losing power and time was running out. The German social democratic party had won several elections, increasing their voting share and had by 1912 become the most represented party in Germany. While the elected institutions had little power compared with the Kaiser it was feared that some form of political revolution was imminent. Russia was in midst of a large scale military build-up and reform which was to be completed in 1916-17. A war would unite Germany and defeat Russia before this. In his later works Fischer went further and argued^[18] that Germany had planned the war in 1912.

Samuel R. Williamson has emphasized^[where?] the role of Austria-Hungary. Convinced Serbian nationalism and Russian Balkan ambitions were disintegrating a monarchy comprising 11 different nationalities, Austria-Hungary hoped for a limited war against Serbia and that the strong German support would force Russia to keep out of the war and weaken its Balkan prestige.

Balance of power

Political cartoon depicting the tangled web of European alliances

One of the goals of the foreign policies of the Great Powers in the pre-war years was to maintain the ‘Balance of Power’ in Europe. This evolved into an elaborate network of secret and public alliances and agreements. For example, after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), Britain seemed to favor a strong Germany, as it helped to balance its traditional enemy, France. After Germany began its naval construction plans to rival that of Britain, this stance shifted. France, looking for an ally to balance the threat created by Germany, found it in Russia. Austria-Hungary, facing a threat from Russia, sought support from Germany.

When World War I broke out, these treaties only partially determined who entered the war on which side. Britain had no treaties with France or Russia, but entered the war on their side. Italy had a treaty with both Austria-Hungary and Germany, yet did not enter the war with them; Italy later sided with the Allies. Perhaps the most significant treaty of all was the initially defensive pact between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which Germany in 1909 extended by declaring that Germany was bound to stand with Austria-Hungary even if it had started the war.^[19]

Economic imperialism

Vladimir Lenin asserted that imperialism was responsible for the war. He drew upon the economic theories of Karl Marx and English economist John A. Hobson, who predicted that unlimited competition for expanding markets would lead to a global conflict.^[20] Lenin and others pointed out that the dominant economic position of Great Britain was threatened by the rapid rise of German industry; However, Germany did not have the commercial advantages of a major empire, and was therefore inevitably going to fight Britain for more economic space for German capital. This argument was popular in the wake of the war and assisted in the rise of Communism. Lenin argued that the banking interests of various capitalist-imperialist powers orchestrated the war.^[21]

Trade barriers

Cordell Hull, American Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt, believed that trade barriers were the root cause of both World War I and World War II. In 1944, he helped design the Bretton Woods Agreements to reduce trade barriers and eliminate what he saw as the cause of the conflicts.^[22][23]

Ethnic and political rivalries

A Balkan war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia was considered inevitable, as Austria-Hungary’s influence waned and the Pan-Slavic movement grew. The rise of ethnic nationalism coincided with the growth of Serbia, where anti-Austrian sentiment was perhaps most fervent. Austria-Hungary had occupied the former Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had a large Serb population, in 1878. It was formally annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. Increasing nationalist sentiment also coincided with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Russia supported the Pan-Slavic movement, motivated by ethnic and religious loyalties and a rivalry with Austria dating back to the Crimean War. Recent events such as the failed Russian-Austrian treaty and a century-old dream of a warm water port also motivated St. Petersburg.^[24]

Myriad other geopolitical motivations existed elsewhere as well, for example France’s loss of Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War helped create a sentiment of irredentist revanchism in that country. France eventually allied itself with Russia, creating the likelihood of a two-front war for Germany.

See also: Powder keg of Europe

July crisis and declarations of war

Main article: July Ultimatum

Wilhelm’s declaration of war from the German Empire in 1914 – (text)

The Austro-Hungarian government used the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a pretext to deal with the Serbian question, supported by Germany. On 23 July 1914, an ultimatum was sent to Serbia with ten demands, some so extreme that the Serbian reply included reservations and rejected the sixth demand. The Serbians, relying on support from Russia, removed acceptance of the sixth key demand (the draft reply had accepted it), and also ordered mobilization. In response to this, Austria-Hungary issued a declaration of war on 28 July. Initially, Russia ordered partial mobilization, directed at the Austrian frontier. On 31 July, after the Russian General Staff informed the Czar that partial mobilization was logistically impossible, a full mobilization was ordered. The Schlieffen Plan, which relied on a quick strike against France, could not afford to allow the Russians to mobilize without launching an attack. Thus, the Germans declared war against Russia on 1 August and on France two days later. Germany then violated Belgium’s neutrality by the German advance through it to Paris, and this brought the British Empire into the war. With this, five of the six European powers were now involved in the largest continental European conflict since the Napoleonic Wars.^[25]

Chronology

Opening hostilities

Confusion among the Central Powers

The strategy of the Central Powers suffered from miscommunication. Germany had promised to support Austria-Hungary’s invasion of Serbia, but interpretations of what this meant differed. Austro-Hungarian leaders believed Germany would cover its northern flank against Russia. Germany, however, envisioned Austria-Hungary directing the majority of its troops against Russia, while Germany dealt with France. This confusion forced the Austro-Hungarian Army to divide its forces between the Russian and Serbian fronts.

African campaigns

Main article: African theatre of World War I

Some of the first clashes of the war involved British, French and German colonial forces in Africa. On 7 August, French and British troops invaded the German protectorate of Togoland. On 10 August German forces in South-West Africa attacked South Africa; sporadic and fierce fighting continued for the remainder of the war.

Serbian campaign

Main article: Serbian Campaign (World War I)

The Serbian army fought the Battle of Cer against the invading Austrians, beginning on 12 August, occupying defensive positions on the south side of the Drina and Sava rivers. Over the next two weeks Austrian attacks were thrown back with heavy losses, which marked the first major Allied victory of the war and dashed Austrian hopes of a swift victory. As a result, Austria had to keep sizable forces on the Serbian front, weakening their efforts against Russia.

German forces in Belgium and France

Main article: Western Front (World War I)

Initially, the Germans had great success in the Battle of the Frontiers (14 August–24 August). Russia, however, attacked in East Prussia and diverted German forces intended for the Western Front. Germany defeated Russia in a series of battles collectively known as the First Battle of Tannenberg (17 August – 2 September), but this diversion exacerbated problems of insufficient speed of advance from rail-heads not foreseen by the German General Staff. Originally, the Schlieffen Plan called for the right flank of the German advance to pass to the west of Paris. However, the capacity and low speed of horse-drawn transport hampered the German supply train, allowing French and British forces to finally halt the German advance east of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne (5 September–12 September). The Central Powers were thereby denied a quick victory and forced to fight a war on two fronts. The German army had fought its way into a good defensive position inside France and had permanently incapacitated 230,000 more French and British troops than it had lost itself. Despite this, communications problems and questionable command decisions cost Germany the chance for an early victory.

Asia and the Pacific

Main article: Asian and Pacific theatre of World War I

New Zealand occupied German Samoa (later Western Samoa) on 30 August. On 11 September the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force landed on the island of Neu Pommern (later New Britain), which formed part of German New Guinea. Japan seized Germany’s Micronesian colonies and after the Battle of Tsingtao, the German coaling port of Qingdao, in the Chinese Shandong peninsula. Within a few months, the Allied forces had seized all the German territories in the Pacific.

Early stages

Trench warfare begins

Main article: Western Front (World War I)

Military tactics before World War I had failed to keep pace with advances in technology. It demanded the building of impressive defence systems, which out-of-date tactics could not break through for most of the war. Barbed wire was a significant hindrance to massed infantry advances. Artillery, vastly more lethal than in the 1870s, coupled with machine guns, made crossing open ground very difficult. The Germans introduced poison gas; it soon became used by both sides, though it never proved decisive in winning a battle. Its effects were brutal, however, causing slow and painful death, and poison gas became one of the most-feared and best-remembered horrors of the war. Commanders on both sides failed to develop tactics for breaking through entrenched positions without heavy casualties. In time, however, technology began also to yield new offensive weapons, such as the tank. Britain and France were its primary users; the Germans employed captured Allied tanks and small numbers of their own design.

After the First Battle of the Marne, both Entente and German forces began a series of outflanking maneuvers, in the so-called ‘Race to the Sea‘. Britain and France soon found themselves facing entrenched German forces from Lorraine to Belgium’s Flemish coast. Britain and France sought to take the offensive, while Germany defended the occupied territories; consequentially, German trenches were generally much better constructed than those of their enemy. Anglo-French trenches were only intended to be ‘temporary’ before their forces broke through German defenses. Both sides attempted to break the stalemate using scientific and technological advances. In April 1915 the Germans used chlorine gas for the first time (in violation of the Hague Convention), opening a 6 kilometres (4 mi) hole in the Allied lines when British and French colonial troops retreated. Canadian soldiers closed the breach at the Second Battle of Ypres. At the Third Battle of Ypres, Canadian and ANZAC troops took the village of Passchendaele.

On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British Army endured the bloodiest day in its history, suffering 57,470 casualties and 19,240 dead. Most of the casualties occurred in the first hour of the attack. The entire offensive cost the British Army almost half a million men.^[26]

A French assault on German positions. Champagne, France, 1917

Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next two years, though protracted German action at Verdun throughout 1916, combined with the Entente’s failure at the Somme,^{[citation needed]} brought the exhausted French army to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts at frontal assault, a rigid adherence to an ineffectual method,^{[citation needed]} came at a high price for both the British and the French poilu (infantry) and led to widespread mutinies, especially during the Nivelle Offensive.

Canadian troops advancing behind a British Mark II tank at the Battle of Vimy Ridge

Throughout 1915–17, the British Empire and France suffered more casualties than Germany, due both to the strategic and tactical stances chosen by the sides. At the strategic level, while the Germans only mounted a single main offensive at Verdun, the Allies made several attempts to break through German lines. At the tactical level, the German defensive doctrine was well suited for trench warfare, with a relatively lightly defended “sacrificial” forward position,^{[citation needed]} and a more powerful main position from which an immediate and powerful counter-offensive could be launched. This combination usually was effective in pushing out attackers at a relatively low cost to the Germans.^{[citation needed]} In absolute terms, of course, the cost in lives of men for both attack and defense was astounding.

Ludendorff wrote on the fighting in 1917: “The 25th of August concluded the second phase of the Flanders battle. It had cost us heavily…. The costly August battles in Flanders and at Verdun imposed a heavy strain on the Western troops. In spite of all the concrete protection they seemed more or less powerless under the enormous weight of the enemy’s artillery. At some points they no longer displayed the firmness which I, in common with the local commanders, had hoped for. The enemy managed to adapt himself to our method of employing counter attacks… I myself was being put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings, and had exceeded all expectation.”

On the battle of the Menin Road Ridge he wrote: “Another terrific assault was made on our lines on the 20 September…. The enemy’s onslaught on the 20th was successful, which proved the superiority of the attack over the defence. Its strength did not consist in the tanks; we found them inconvenient, but put them out of action all the same. The power of the attack lay in the artillery, and in the fact that ours did not do enough damage to the hostile infantry as they were assembling, and above all, at the actual time of the assault.”^[27]

Officers and senior enlisted men of the Bermuda Militia Artillery’s Bermuda Contingent, Royal Garrison Artillery, in Europe

Around 800,000 soldiers from the British Empire were on the Western Front at any one time.^{[citation needed]} 1,000 battalions, occupying sectors of the line from the North Sea to the Orne River, operated on a month-long four-stage rotation system, unless an offensive was underway. The front contained over 9,600 kilometres (5,965 mi) of trenches. Each battalion held its sector for about a week before moving back to support lines and then further back to the reserve lines before a week out-of-line, often in the Poperinge or Amiens areas.

In the 1917 Battle of Arras the only significant British military success was the capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadian Corps under Sir Arthur Currie and Julian Byng. The assaulting troops were able for the first time to overrun, rapidly reinforce and hold the ridge defending the coal-rich Douai plain.^[28]

Naval war

Main article: Naval Warfare of World War I

At the start of the war, the German Empire had cruisers scattered across the globe, some of which were subsequently used to attack Allied merchant shipping. The British Royal Navy systematically hunted them down, though not without some embarrassment from its inability to protect Allied shipping. For example, the German detached light cruiser Emden, part of the East-Asia squadron stationed at Tsingtao, seized or destroyed 15 merchantmen, as well as sinking a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer. However, the bulk of the German East-Asia squadron—consisting of the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, light cruisers Nürnberg and Leipzig and two transport ships—did not have orders to raid shipping and was instead underway to Germany when it encountered elements of the British fleet. The German flotilla, along with Dresden, sank two armoured cruisers at the Battle of Coronel, but was almost completely destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, with only Dresden escaping.^[29]

Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, Britain initiated a naval blockade of Germany. The strategy proved effective, cutting off vital military and civilian supplies, although this blockade violated generally accepted international law codified by several international agreements of the past two centuries.^[30] Britain mined international waters to prevent any ships from entering entire sections of ocean, causing danger to even neutral ships.^[31] Since there was limited response to this tactic, Germany expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare.^[32]

The 1916 Battle of Jutland (German: Skagerrakschlacht, or “Battle of the Skagerrak”) developed into the largest naval battle of the war, the only full-scale clash of battleships during the war. It took place on 31 May–1 June 1916, in the North Sea off Jutland. The Kaiserliche Marine’s High Seas Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, squared off against the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet, led by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. The engagement was a standoff, as the Germans, outmaneuvered by the larger British fleet, managed to escape and inflicted more damage to the British fleet than they received. Strategically, however, the British asserted their control of the sea, and the bulk of the German surface fleet remained confined to port for the duration of the war.

German U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between North America and Britain.^[33] The nature of submarine warfare meant that attacks often came without warning, giving the crews of the merchant ships little hope of survival.^[34] The United States launched a protest, and Germany modified its rules of engagement. After the infamous sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania in 1915, Germany promised not to target passenger liners, while Britain armed its merchant ships. Finally, in early 1917 Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, realizing the Americans would eventually enter the war.^[35] Germany sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the U.S. could transport a large army overseas.

The U-boat threat lessened in 1917, when merchant ships entered convoys escorted by destroyers. This tactic made it difficult for U-boats to find targets, which significantly lessened losses; after the introduction of hydrophone and depth charges, accompanying destroyers might actually attack a submerged submarine with some hope of success. The convoy system slowed the flow of supplies, since ships had to wait as convoys were assembled. The solution to the delays was a massive program to build new freighters. Troop ships were too fast for the submarines and did not travel the North Atlantic in convoys.^[36][37]

The First World War also saw the first use of aircraft carriers in combat, with HMS Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a successful raid against the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in July 1918, as well as blimps for antisubmarine patrol.^[38]

Southern theatres

War in the Balkans

Main articles: Balkans Campaign (World War I), Serbian Campaign (World War I), and Macedonian front (World War I)

Faced with Russia, Austria-Hungary could spare only one third of its army to attack Serbia. After suffering heavy losses, the Austrians briefly occupied the Serbian capital, Belgrade. A Serbian counterattack in the battle of Kolubara, however, succeeded in driving them from the country by the end of 1914. For the first ten months of 1915, Austria-Hungary used most of its military reserves to fight Italy. German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats, however, scored a coup by convincing Bulgaria to join in attacking Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian provinces of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia provided troops for Austria-Hungary, invading Serbia as well as fighting Russia and Italy. Montenegro allied itself with Serbia.

Serbia was conquered in a little more than a month. The attack began in October, when the Central Powers launched an offensive from the north; four days later the Bulgarians joined the attack from the east. The Serbian army, fighting on two fronts and facing certain defeat, retreated into Albania, halting only once, to make a stand against the Bulgarians. The Serbs suffered defeat near modern day Gnjilane in Kosovo^{[citation needed]}. Montenegro covered the Serbian retreat toward the Adriatic coast in the Battle of Mojkovac in 6-7 January 1916, but ultimately the Austrians conquered Montenegro, too. Serbian forces were evacuated by ship to Greece.

In late 1915 a Franco-British force landed at Salonica in Greece, to offer assistance and to pressure the government to declare war against the Central Powers. Unfortunately for the Allies, the pro-German King Constantine I dismissed the pro-Allied government of Eleftherios Venizelos, before the Allied expeditionary force could arrive.

After conquest, Serbia was divided between Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria. Bulgarians commenced bulgarization of the Serbian population in their occupation zone, banishing Serbian Cyrillic and the Serbian Orthodox Church. After forced conscription of the Serbian population into the Bulgarian army in 1917, the Toplica Uprising began. Serbian rebels liberated for a short time the area between the Kopaonik mountains and the South Morava river. The uprising was crushed by joint efforts of Bulgarian and Austrian forces at the end of March 1917.

The Macedonian Front proved static for the most part. Serbian forces retook part of their country by liberating Bitolj on 19 November 1916. Only at the end of the conflict were the Entente powers able to break through, after most of the German and Austro-Hungarian troops had been withdrawn. The Bulgarians suffered their only defeat of the war, at the Battle of Dobro Pole, but days later, they decisively defeated British and Greek forces at the Battle of Doiran, avoiding occupation. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September 1918.

Ottoman Empire

Main article: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I

British artillery placements during the Battle of Jerusalem, 1917.

The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in the war, the secret Ottoman-German Alliance having been signed in August 1914. It threatened Russia’s Caucasian territories and Britain’s communications with India via the Suez Canal. The British and French opened overseas fronts with the Gallipoli (1915) and Mesopotamian campaigns. In Gallipoli, the Turks successfully repelled the British, French and Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs). In Mesopotamia, by contrast, after the disastrous Siege of Kut (1915–16), British Imperial forces reorganised and captured Baghdad in March 1917. Further to the west, in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, initial British setbacks were overcome when Jerusalem was captured in December 1917. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, broke the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918.

Russian armies generally had the best of it in the Caucasus. Vice-Generalissimo Enver Pasha, supreme commander of the Turkish armed forces, was ambitious and dreamed of conquering central Asia. He was, however, a poor commander.^[39] He launched an offensive against the Russians in the Caucasus in December 1914 with 100,000 troops; insisting on a frontal attack against mountainous Russian positions in winter, he lost 86% of his force at the Battle of Sarikamis.^[40]

The Russian commander from 1915 to 1916, General Yudenich, drove the Turks out of most of the southern Caucasus with a string of victories.^[40] In 1917, Russian Grand Duke Nicholas assumed command of the Caucasus front. Nicholas planned a railway from Russian Georgia to the conquered territories, so that fresh supplies could be brought up for a new offensive in 1917. However, in March 1917, (February in the pre-revolutionary Russian calendar), the Czar was overthrown in the February Revolution and the Russian Caucasus Army began to fall apart. In this situation, the army corps of Armenian volunteer units realigned themselves under the command of General Tovmas Nazarbekian, with Dro as a civilian commissioner of the Administration for Western Armenia. The front line had three main divisions: Movses Silikyan, Andranik, and Mikhail Areshian. Another regular unit was under Colonel Korganian. There were Armenian partisan guerrilla detachments (more than 40,000^[41]) accompanying these main units.

The Arab Revolt was a major cause of the Ottoman Empire’s defeat. The revolts started with the Battle of Mecca by Sherif Hussain of Mecca with the help of Britain in June 1916, and ended with the Ottoman surrender of Damascus. Fakhri Pasha the Ottoman commander of Medina showed stubborn resistance for over two and half years during the Siege of Medina.

Along the border of Italian Libya and British Egypt, the Senussi tribe, incited and armed by the Turks, waged a small-scale guerrilla war against Allied troops. According to Martin Gilbert’s The First World War, the British were forced to dispatch 12,000 troops to deal with the Senussi. Their rebellion was finally crushed in mid-1916.

Italian participation

Main article: Italian Campaign (World War I)

Italy had been allied with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires since 1882 as part of the Triple Alliance. However, the nation had its own designs on Austrian territory in Trentino, Istria and Dalmatia. Rome had a secret 1902 pact with France, effectively nullifying its alliance.^[42] At the start of hostilities, Italy refused to commit troops, arguing that the Triple Alliance was defensive in nature, and that Austria-Hungary was an aggressor. The Austro-Hungarian government began negotiations to secure Italian neutrality, offering the French colony of Tunisia in return. The Allies made a counter-offer in which Italy would receive the Alpine province of Alto Adige and territory on the Dalmatian coast after the defeat of Austria-Hungary. This was fomalised by the Treaty of London. Further encouraged by the Allied invasion of Turkey in April 1915, Italy joined the Entente and declared war on Austria-Hungary in May. Fifteen months later, it declared war on Germany.

Militarily, the Italians had numerical superiority. This advantage, however, was lost, not only because of the difficult terrain in which fighting took place, but also because of the strategies and tactics employed. Field Marshal Luigi Cadorna, a staunch proponent of the frontal assault, had dreams of breaking into the Slovenian plateau, taking Ljubljana and threatening Vienna. It was a Napoleonic plan, which had no realistic chance of success in an age of barbed wire, machine guns, and indirect artillery fire, combined with hilly and mountainous terrain.

Cadorna insisted on attacking the Isonzo front.

Further information: Battles of the Isonzo

Cadorna unleashed eleven offensives with total disregard for his men’s lives. The Italians also went on the offensive to relieve pressure on other Allied fronts. On the Trentino front, the Austro-Hungarians took advantage of the mountainous terrain, which favoured the defender. After an initial strategic retreat, the front remained largely unchanged, while Austrian Kaiserschützen and Standschützen and Italian Alpini engaged in bitter hand-to-hand combat throughout the summer. The Austro-Hungarians counter-attacked in the Altopiano of Asiago, towards Verona and Padua, in the spring of 1916 (Strafexpedition), but made little progress.

Beginning in 1915, the Italians mounted eleven offensives along the Isonzo River, north-east of Trieste. All eleven offensives were repelled by the Austro-Hungarians,^{[citation needed]} who held the higher ground. In the summer of 1916, the Italians captured the town of Gorizia. After this minor victory, the front remained static for over a year, despite several Italian offensives. In the autumn of 1917, thanks to the improving situation on the Eastern front, the Austrians received large numbers of reinforcements, including German Stormtroopers and the elite Alpenkorps. The Central Powers launched a crushing offensive on 26 October 1917, spearheaded by the Germans. They achieved a victory at Caporetto. The Italian army was routed and retreated more than 100 km (60 miles). They were able to reorganise and stabilize the front at the Piave River. Since in the Battle of Caporetto Italian Army had heavy losses, the Italian Government called to the arms the so called ‘99 Boys (Ragazzi del ‘99), that is, all males who were 18 years old. In 1918, the Austro-Hungarians failed to break through, in a series of battles on the Asiago Plateau, finally being decisively defeated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in October of that year. Austria-Hungary surrendered in early November 1918.

ENVIROMENTAL JOURNALISM

Environmental journalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Environmental journalism is the collection, verification, production, distribution and exhibition of information regarding current events, trends, issues and people that are associated with the non-human world with which humans necessarily interact. To be an environmental journalist, one must have an understanding of scientific language and practice, knowledge of historical environmental events, the ability to keep abreast of environmental policy decisions and the work of environmental organizations, a general understanding of current environmental concerns, and the ability to communicate all of that information to the public in such a way that it can be easily understood, despite its complexity.

Environmental journalism falls within the scope of environmental communication, and its roots can be traced to nature writing. One key controversy in environmental journalism is a continuing disagreement over how to distinguish it from its allied genres and discipline

History

While the practice of nature writing has a rich history that dates back at least as far as the exploration narratives of Christopher Columbus, and follows tradition up through prominent nature writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the late 19th century, John Burroughs and John Muir in the early 20th century, and Aldo Leopold in the 1940s, the field of environmental journalism did not begin to take shape until the 1960s and 1970s.

The growth of environmental journalism as a profession roughly parallels that of the environmental movement, which became a mainstream cultural movement with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and was further legitimized by the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. Grassroots environmental organizations made a booming appearance on the political scene in the 1960s and 1970s, raising public awareness of what many considered to be the “environmental crisis,” and working to influence environmental policy decisions. The mass media has followed and generated public interest on environmental issues ever since.

The field of environmental journalism was further legitimized by the creation of the Society of Environmental Journalists in 1990, whose mission “is to advance public understanding of environmental issues by improving the quality, accuracy, and visibility of environmental reporting.” Today, academic programs are offered at a number of institutions to train budding journalists in the rigors, complexity and sheer breadth of environmental journalism.

Advocacy debate

There exists a minor rift in the community of environmental journalists. Some, including those in the Society of Environmental Journalists, believe in objectively reporting environmental news, while others, like Michael Frome, a prominent figure in the field, believe that journalists should only enter the environmental side of the field if saving the planet is a personal passion, and that environmental journalists should not shy away from environmental advocacy, though not at the expense of clearly relating facts and opinions on all sides of an issue. This debate is not likely to be settled soon, but with changes in the field of journalism filtering up from new media being used by the general public to produce news, it seems likely that the field of environmental journalism will lend itself more and more toward reporting points of view akin to environmental advocacy.

Training

Donors wishing to support environmental journalism workshops need to ask whether the training they finance is done on bequest of the reporters. In a review of environmental journalism, Planeta.com concluded that there is a great deal of ‘philanthropic’ work that does not stick simply because it is not requested. <[1]>

Genres

Environmental communication is all of the forms of communication that are engaged with the social debate about environmental issues and problems.^[1]

Also within the scope of environmental communication are the genres of nature writing, science writing, environmental literature, environmental interpretation and environmental advocacy. While there is a great deal of overlap among the various genres within environmental communication, they are each deserving of their own definition.

Nature writing

Nature writing is the genre with the longest history in environmental communication. In his book, This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing, Thomas J. Lyon attempts to use a “taxonomy of nature writing” in order to define the genre. He suggests that his classifications, too, suffer a great deal of overlap and intergrading. “The literature of nature has three main dimensions to it: natural history information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature” (Lyon 20). In the natural history essay, “the main burden of the writing is to convey pointed instruction in the facts of nature,” such as with the ramble-type nature writing of John Burroughs (Lyon 21). “In essays of experience, the author’s firsthand contact with nature is the frame for the writing,” as with Edward Abbey’s contemplation of a desert sunset (Lyon 23). In the philosophical interpretation of nature, the content is similar to that of the natural history and personal experience essays, “but the mode of presentation tends to be more abstract and scholarly” (Lyon 25). The Norton Book of Nature Writing adds a few new dimensions to the genre of nature writing, including animal narratives, garden essays, farming essays, ecofeminist works, writing on environmental justice, and works advocating environmental preservation, sustainability and biological diversity. Environmental journalism pulls from the tradition and scope of nature writing.

Science writing

Science writing is writing that focuses specifically on topics of scientific study, generally translating jargon that is difficult for those outside a particular scientific field to understand into language that is easily digestible. This genre can be narrative or informative. Not all science writing falls within the bounds of environmental communication, only science writing that takes on topics relevant to the environment. Environmental journalism also pulls from the tradition and scope of science writing.

Environmental interpretation

Environmental interpretation is a particular format for the communication of relevant information. It “involves translating the technical language of a natural science or related field into terms and ideas that people who aren’t scientists can readily understand. And it involves doing it in a way that’s entertaining and interesting to these people” (Ham 3). Environmental interpretation is pleasurable (to engage an audience in the topic and inspire them to learn more about it), relevant (meaningful and personal to the audience so that they have an intrinsic reason to learn more about the topic), organized (easy to follow and structured so that main points are likely to be remembered) and thematic (the information is related to a specific, repetitious message) (Ham 8–28). While environmental journalism is not derived from environmental interpretation, it can employ interpretive techniques to explain difficult concepts to its audience.

Environmental literature

Environmental literature is writing that comments intelligently on environmental themes, particularly as applied to the relationships between man, society and the environment. Most nature writing and some science writing falls within the scope of environmental literature. Often, environmental literature is understood to espouse care and concern for the environment, thus advocating a more thoughtful and ecologically sensitive relationship of man to nature. Environmental journalism is partially derived from environmental literature

Environmental advocacy

Environmental advocacy is presenting information on nature and environmental issues that is decidedly opinionated and encourages its audience to adopt more environmentally sensitive attitudes, often more biocentric worldviews. Environmental advocacy can be present in any of the aforementioned genres of environmental communication. It is currently debated whether environmental journalism should employ techniques of environmental advocacy.

Topics

The field of environmental journalism covers a wide variety of topics. According to The Reporter’s Environmental Handbook, environmental journalists perceive water concerns as the most important environmental issue, followed by atmospheric air pollution concerns, endocrine disruptors, and waste management issues. The journalists surveyed were more likely to prioritize specific, local environmental issues than global environmental concerns.

Air pollution

Air pollution is the human introduction into the atmosphere of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or damages the environment.^[1] Air pollution causes deaths^[2] and respiratory disease.^[3] Air pollution is often identified with major stationary sources, but the greatest source of emissions is mobile sources, mainly automobiles.^[4] Gases such as carbon dioxide, which contribute to global warming, have recently gained recognition as pollutants by climate scientists, while they also recognize that carbon dioxide is essential for plant life through photosynthesis.

The atmosphere is a complex, dynamic natural gaseous system that is essential to support life on planet Earth. Stratospheric ozone depletion due to air pollution has long been recognized as a threat to human health as well as to the Earth’s ecosystems.

Pollutants

Before flue gas desulfurization was installed, the emissions from this power plant in New Mexico contained excessive amounts of sulfur dioxide.

There are many substances in the air which may impair the health of plants and animals (including humans), or reduce visibility. These arise both from natural processes and human activity. Substances not naturally found in the air or at greater concentrations or in different locations from usual are referred to as pollutants.

Pollutants can be classified as either primary or secondary. Usually, primary pollutants are substances directly emitted from a process, such as ash from a volcanic eruption, the carbon monoxide gas from a motor vehicle exhaust or sulfur dioxide released from factories.

Secondary pollutants are not emitted directly. Rather, they form in the air when primary pollutants react or interact. An important example of a secondary pollutant is ground level ozone – one of the many secondary pollutants that make up photochemical smog.

Note that some pollutants may be both primary and secondary: that is, they are both emitted directly and formed from other primary pollutants.

Major primary pollutants produced by human activity include:

• Sulfur oxides (SO_x) especially sulfur dioxide are emitted from burning of coal and oil.
• Nitrogen oxides (NO_x) especially nitrogen dioxide are emitted from high temperature combustion. Can be seen as the brown haze dome above or plume downwind of cities.
• Carbon monoxide is colourless, odourless, non-irritating but very poisonous gas. It is a product by incomplete combustion of fuel such as natural gas, coal or wood. Vehicular exhaust is a major source of carbon monoxide.
• Carbon dioxide (CO₂), a greenhouse gas emitted from combustion.
• Volatile organic compounds (VOC), such as hydrocarbon fuel vapors and solvents.
• Particulate matter (PM), measured as smoke and dust. PM₁₀ is the fraction of suspended particles 10 micrometers in diameter and smaller that will enter the nasal cavity. PM_2.5 has a maximum particle size of 2.5 µm and will enter the bronchies and lungs.
• Toxic metals, such as lead, cadmium and copper.
• Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), harmful to the ozone layer emitted from products currently banned from use.
• Ammonia (NH₃) emitted from agricultural processes.
• Odors, such as from garbage, sewage, and industrial processes
• Radioactive pollutants produced by nuclear explosions, war explosives, and natural processes such as the radioactive decay of radon.

Secondary pollutants include:

• Particulate matter formed from gaseous primary pollutants and compounds in photochemical smog, such as nitrogen dioxide.
• Ground level ozone (O₃) formed from NO_x and VOCs.
• Peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) similarly formed from NO_x and VOCs.

Minor air pollutants include:

• A large number of minor hazardous air pollutants. Some of these are regulated in USA under the Clean Air Act and in Europe under the Air Framework Directive.
• A variety of persistent organic pollutants, which can attach to particulate matter.

Sources

Main article: AP 42 Compilation of Air Pollutant Emission Factors

Controlled burning of a field outside of Statesboro, Georgia in preparation for spring planting

Puxi area of Shanghai at sunset. The sun has not actually dropped below the horizon yet, rather it has reached the smog line.

Sources of air pollution refer to the various locations, activities or factors which are responsible for the releasing of pollutants in the atmosphere. These sources can be classified into two major categories which are:

Anthropogenic sources (human activity) mostly related to burning different kinds of fuel

• “Stationary Sources” as smoke stacks of power plants, manufacturing facilities, municipal waste incinerators.
• “Mobile Sources” as motor vehicles, aircraft etc.
• Marine vessels, such as container ships or cruise ships, and related port air pollution.
• Burning wood, fireplaces, stoves, furnaces and incinerators .
• Oil refining, and industrial activity in general.
• Chemicals, dust and controlled burn practices in agriculture and forestry management, (see Dust Bowl).
• Fumes from paint, hair spray, varnish, aerosol sprays and other solvents.
• Waste deposition in landfills, which generate methane.
• Military, such as nuclear weapons, toxic gases, germ warfare and rocketry.

Natural sources

• Dust from natural sources, usually large areas of land with little or no vegetation.
• Methane, emitted by the digestion of food by animals, for example cattle.
• Radon gas from radioactive decay within the Earth’s crust.
• Smoke and carbon monoxide from wildfires.
• Volcanic activity, which produce sulfur, chlorine, and ash particulates.

Emission factors

{{main|AP 42 Compilation of Air Pollutant Emission Factors} Air pollutant emission factors are representative values that attempt to relate the quantity of a pollutant released to the ambient air with an activity associated with the release of that pollutant. These factors are usually expressed as the weight of pollutant divided by a unit weight, volume, distance, or duration of the activity emitting the pollutant (e.g., kilograms of particulate emitted per megagram of coal burned). Such factors facilitate estimation of emissions from various sources of air pollution. In most cases, these factors are simply averages of all available data of acceptable quality, and are generally assumed to be representative of long-term averages.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has published a compilation of air pollutant emission factors for a multitude of industrial sources.^[5] The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and other countries have published similar compilations, as has the European Environment Agency.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Indoor air quality (IAQ)

Main article: Indoor air quality

A lack of ventilation indoors concentrates air pollution where people often spend the majority of their time. Radon (Rn) gas, a carcinogen, is exuded from the Earth in certain locations and trapped inside houses. Building materials including carpeting and plywood emit formaldehyde (H₂CO) gas. Paint and solvents give off volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as they dry. Lead paint can degenerate into dust and be inhaled. Intentional air pollution is introduced with the use of air fresheners, incense, and other scented items. Controlled wood fires in stoves and fireplaces can add significant amounts of smoke particulates into the air, inside and out. Indoor pollution fatalities may be caused by using pesticides and other chemical sprays indoors without proper ventilation.

Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning and fatalities are often caused by faulty vents and chimneys, or by the burning of charcoal indoors. Chronic carbon monoxide poisoning can result even from poorly adjusted pilot lights. Traps are built into all domestic plumbing to keep sewer gas, hydrogen sulfide, out of interiors. Clothing emits tetrachloroethylene, or other dry cleaning fluids, for days after dry cleaning.

Though its use has now been banned in many countries, the extensive use of asbestos in industrial and domestic environments in the past has left a potentially very dangerous material in many localities. Asbestosis is a chronic inflammatory medical condition affecting the tissue of the lungs. It occurs after long-term, heavy exposure to asbestos from asbestos-containing materials in structures. Sufferers have severe dyspnea (shortness of breath) and are at an increased risk regarding several different types of lung cancer. As clear explanations are not always stressed in non-technical literature, care should be taken to distinguish between several forms of relevant diseases. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), these may defined as; asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma (generally a very rare form of cancer, when more widespread it is almost always associated with prolonged exposure to asbestos).

Biological sources of air pollution are also found indoors, as gases and airborne particulates. Pets produce dander, people produce dust from minute skin flakes and decomposed hair, dust mites in bedding, carpeting and furniture produce enzymes and micrometre-sized fecal droppings, inhabitants emit methane, mold forms in walls and generates mycotoxins and spores, air conditioning systems can incubate Legionnaires’ disease and mold, and houseplants, soil and surrounding gardens can produce pollen, dust, and mold. Indoors, the lack of air circulation allows these airborne pollutants to accumulate more than they would otherwise occur in nature.

Health effects

The World Health Organization states that 2.4 million people die each year from causes directly attributable to air pollution, with 1.5 million of these deaths attributable to indoor air pollution.^[3] “Epidemiological studies suggest that more than 500,000 Americans die each year from cardiopulmonary disease linked to breathing fine particle air pollution. . .”^[11] A study by the University of Birmingham has shown a strong correlation between pneumonia related deaths and air pollution from motor vehicles.^[12] Worldwide more deaths per year are linked to air pollution than to automobile accidents.^{[citation needed]} Published in 2005 suggests that 310,000 Europeans die from air pollution annually.^{[citation needed]} Direct causes of air pollution related deaths include aggravated asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, lung and heart diseases, and respiratory allergies.^{[citation needed]} The US EPA estimates that a proposed set of changes in diesel engine technology (Tier 2) could result in 12,000 fewer premature mortalities, 15,000 fewer heart attacks, 6,000 fewer emergency room visits by children with asthma, and 8,900 fewer respiratory-related hospital admissions each year in the United States.^{[citation needed]}

The worst short term civilian pollution crisis in India was the 1984 Bhopal Disaster.^[13] Leaked industrial vapors from the Union Carbide factory, belonging to Union Carbide, Inc., U.S.A., killed more than 2,000 people outright and injured anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 others, some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries.^{[citation needed]} The United Kingdom suffered its worst air pollution event when the December 4 Great Smog of 1952 formed over London. In six days more than 4,000 died, and 8,000 more died within the following months.^{[citation needed]} An accidental leak of anthrax spores from a biological warfare laboratory in the former USSR in 1979 near Sverdlovsk is believed to have been the cause of hundreds of civilian deaths.^{[citation needed]} The worst single incident of air pollution to occur in the United States of America occurred in Donora, Pennsylvania in late October, 1948, when 20 people died and over 7,000 were injured.^[14]

The health effects caused by air pollutants may range from subtle biochemical and physiological changes to difficulty in breathing, wheezing, coughing and aggravation of existing respiratory and cardiac conditions. These effects can result in increased medication use, increased doctor or emergency room visits, more hospital admissions and premature death. The human health effects of poor air quality are far reaching, but principally affect the body’s respiratory system and the cardiovascular system. Individual reactions to air pollutants depend on the type of pollutant a person is exposed to, the degree of exposure, the individual’s health status and genetics.^{[citation needed]}

Effects on cystic fibrosis

Main article: Cystic fibrosis

A study from 1999 to 2000 by the University of Washington showed that patients near and around particulate matter air pollution had an increased risk of pulmonary exacerbations and decrease in lung function.^[15] Patients were examined before the study for amounts of specific pollutants like Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Burkholderia cenocepacia as well as their socioeconomic standing. Participants involved in the study were located in the United States in close proximity to an Environmental Protection Agency.^[clarify] During the time of the study 117 deaths were associated with air pollution. A trend was noticed that patients living closer or in large metropolitan areas to be close to medical help also had higher level of pollutants found in their system because of more emissions in larger cities. With cystic fibrosis patients already being born with decreased lung function everyday pollutants such as smoke emissions from automobiles, tobacco smoke and improper use of indoor heating devices could add to the dissemination of lung function.^[16]

Effects on COPD

Main article: COPD

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) include diseases such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and some forms of asthma.^[17] Two researchers Holland and Reid conducted research on 293 male postal workers in London during the time of the Great Smog of 1952 incident and 477 male postal workers in the rural setting. The volume of air that could be exhaled in 1 second (FEV₁) was significantly lower in urban employees due to city pollutions such as car fumes and increased amount of cigarette exposure.^{[18][verification needed]} It is believed that much like cystic fibrosis, by living in a more urban environment serious health hazards become more apparent. Studies have shown that in urban areas patients suffer mucus hypersecretion, lower levels of lung function, and more self diagnosis of chronic bronchitis and emphysema.^[19]

The Great Smog of 1952

Main article: Great Smog of 1952

In the matter of four days a combination of dense fog and sooty black coal smoke came over the London area.^[20] The fog was so dense residents of London could not see in front of them. The extreme reduction in visibility was accompanied by an increase in criminal activity as well as transportation delays and a virtual shut down of the city. During the 4 day period of the fog 12,000 are believed to have been killed.^[21]

Effects on children

Cities around the world with high exposure to air pollutants has the possibility of children living within them to develop asthma, pneumonia and other lower respiratory infections as well as a low initial birth rate. Protective measures to ensure the youths health is being taken in cities such as New Delhi, India where buses now use compressed natural gas to help eliminate the “pea-soup” fog.^[22] Research by the World Health Organization shows there is the greatest concentration of particulate matter particles in countries with low economic world power and high poverty and population rates. Examples of these countries include Egypt, Sudan, Mongolia, and Indonesia. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, however in 2002 at least 146 million Americans were living in areas that did not meet at least one of the “criteria pollutants” laid out in the 1997 National Ambient Air Quality Standards.^[23] Those pollutants included: ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead. Because children are outdoors more and have higher minute ventilation they are more susceptible to the dangers of air pollution.

Reduction efforts

There are various air pollution control technologies and urban planning strategies available to reduce air pollution.

Efforts to reduce pollution from mobile sources includes primary regulation (many developing countries have permissive regulations),^{[citation needed]} expanding regulation to new sources (such as cruise and transport ships, farm equipment, and small gas-powered equipment such as lawn trimmers, chainsaws, and snowmobiles), increased fuel efficiency (such as through the use of hybrid vehicles), conversion to cleaner fuels (such as bioethanol, biodiesel, or conversion to electric vehicles).

Control devices

The following items are commonly used as pollution control devices by industry or transportation devices. They can either destroy contaminants or remove them from an exhaust stream before it is emitted into the atmosphere.

Legal regulations

Smog in Cairo

In general, there are two types of air quality standards. The first class of standards (such as the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards) set maximum atmospheric concentrations for specific pollutants. Environmental agencies enact regulations which are intended to result in attainment of these target levels. The second class (such as the North American Air Quality Index) take the form of a scale with various thresholds, which is used to communicate to the public the relative risk of outdoor activity. The scale may or may not distinguish between different pollutants.

Canada

In Canada, air quality is typically evaluated against standards set by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME), an inter-governmental body of federal, provincial and territorial Ministers responsible for the environment. The CCME has set Canada Wide Standards(CWS).^[24][25] These are:

• CWS for PM2.5 = 30 µg/m3 (24 hour averaging time, by year 2010, based on 98th percentile ambient measurement annually, averaged over 3 consecutive years).

• CWS for ozone = 65 ppb (8-hour averaging time, by year 2010, achievement is based on the 4th highest measurement annually, averaged over 3 consecutive years.

Note that there is no consequence in Canada to not achieving these standards. In addition, these only apply to jurisdictions with populations greater than 100,000. Further, provinces and territories may set more stringent standards than those set by the CCME.

European Union

A report from the European Environment Agency shows that road transport remains Europe’s single largest air polluter ^[26] .

National Emission Ceilings (NEC) for certain atmospheric pollutants are regulated by Directive 2001/81/EC (NECD).^[27] As part of the preparatory work associated with the revision of the NECD, the European Commission is assisted by the NECPI working group (National Emission Ceilings – Policy Instruments).^[28]

Directive 2008/50/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2008 on ambient air quality and cleaner air for Europe (the new Air Quality Directive) has entried into force 2008-06-11 ^[29].

Individual citizens can force their local councils to tackle air pollution, following an important ruling in July 2008 from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The EU’s court was asked to judge the case of a resident of Munich, Dieter Janecek, who said that under the 1996 EU Air Quality Directive (Council Directive 96/62/EC of 27 September 1996 on ambient air quality assessment and management ^[30]) the Munich authorities were obliged to take action to stop pollution exceeding specified targets. Janecek then took his case to the ECJ, whose judges said European citizens are entitled to demand air quality action plans from local authorities in situations where there is a risk that EU limits will be overshot. ^[31] .

United Kingdom

Air quality targets set by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) are mostly aimed at local government representatives responsible for the management of air quality in cities, where air quality management is the most urgent. The UK has established an air quality network where levels of the key air pollutants^[32] are published by monitoring centers.^[33] Air quality in Oxford, Bath and London^[34] is particularly poor. One controversial study^[35] performed by the Calor Gas company and published in the Guardian newspaper compared walking in Oxford on an average day to smoking over sixty light cigarettes.

More precise comparisons can be collected from the UK Air Quality Archive^[36] which allows the user to compare a cities management of pollutants against the national air quality objectives^[37] set by DEFRA in 2000.

Localized peak values are often cited, but average values are also important to human health. The UK National Air Quality Information Archive offers almost real-time monitoring of “current maximum” air pollution measurements for many UK towns and cities.^[38] This source offers a wide range of constantly updated data, including:

• Hourly Mean Ozone (µg/m³)
• Hourly Mean Nitrogen dioxide (µg/m³)
• Maximum 15-Minute Mean Sulphur dioxide (µg/m³)
• 8-Hour Mean Carbon monoxide (mg/m³)
• 24-Hour Mean PM₁₀ (µg/m³ Grav Equiv)

DEFRA acknowledges that air pollution has a significant effect on health and has produced a simple banding index system^[39] is used to create a daily warning system that is issued by the BBC Weather Service to indicate air pollution levels.^[40] DEFRA has published guidelines for people suffering from respiratory and heart diseases.^[41]

United States

Looking down from the Hollywood Hills, with Griffith Observatory on the hill in the foreground, air pollution is visible in downtown Los Angeles on a late afternoon.

In the 1960s, 70s, and 90s, the United States Congress enacted a series of Clean Air Acts which significantly strengthened regulation of air pollution. Individual U.S. states, some European nations and eventually the European Union followed these initiatives. The Clean Air Act sets numerical limits on the concentrations of a basic group of air pollutants and provide reporting and enforcement mechanisms.

In 1999, the United States EPA replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and Ozone standards.

The effects of these laws have been very positive. In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions:^[42]

• carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons
• nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons
• sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons
• particulate emissions fell by 80%
• lead emissions fell by more than 98%

In an October 2006 letter to EPA, the agency’s independent scientific advisors warned that the ozone smog standard “needs to be substantially reduced” and that there is “no scientific justification” for retaining the current, weaker standard. The scientists unanimously recommended a smog threshold of 60 to 70 ppb after they conducted an extensive review of the evidence. ^[43]

The EPA has proposed, in June 2007, a new threshold of 75 ppb. This is less strict than the scientific recommendation, but is more strict the current standard.

Some industries are lobbying to keep the current standards in place. Environmentalists and public health advocates are mobilizing to support the scientific recommendations.^{[citation needed]}

The National Ambient Air Quality Standards are pollution thresholds which trigger mandatory remediation plans by state and local governments, subject to enforcement by the EPA.

An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit, and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate. Almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast. ^[44]

Libertarians typically suggest propertarian methods of stopping pollution. They advocate strict liability which would hold accountable anyone who causes polluted air to emanate into someone else’s airspace. This offense would be considered aggression, and damages could be sought in court under the common law, possibly through class action suits.^[45] Since in a libertarian society, highways would be privatized under a system of free market roads, the highway owners would also be held liable for pollution emanating from vehicles traveling along their property. This would give them a financial incentive to keep the worst polluters off of their roads.

Statistics

Most Polluted Cities

Air pollution is usually concentrated in densely populated metropolitan areas, especially in developing countries where environmental regulations are generally relatively lax or nonexistent. However, even populated areas in developed countries attain unhealthy levels of pollution.

Atmospheric dispersion

Main article: Atmospheric dispersion modeling

The basic technology for analyzing air pollution is through the use of a variety of mathematical models for predicting the transport of air pollutants in the lower atmosphere. The principal methodologies are:

• Point source dispersion, used for industrial sources.
• Line source dispersion, used for airport and roadway air dispersion modeling
• Area source dispersion, used for forest fires or duststorms
• Photochemical models, used to analyze reactive pollutants that form smog

Visualization of a buoyant Gaussian air pollution dispersion plume as used in many atmospheric dispersion models

The point source problem is the best understood, since it involves simpler mathematics and has been studied for a long period of time, dating back to about the year 1900. It uses a Gaussian dispersion model for buoyant pollution plumes to forecast the air pollution isopleths, with consideration given to wind velocity, stack height, emission rate and stability class (a measure of atmospheric turbulence).^[48][49] This model has been extensively validated and calibrated with experimental data for all sorts of atmospheric conditions.

The roadway air dispersion model was developed starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the U.S. Department of Transportation (then known as the Federal Highway Administration) to understand impacts of proposed new highways upon air quality, especially in urban areas. Several research groups were active in this model development, among which were: the Environmental Research and Technology (ERT) group in Lexington, Massachusetts, the ESL Inc. group in Sunnyvale, California and the California Air Resources Board group in Sacramento, California. The research of the ESL group received a boost with a contract award from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to validate a line source model using sulfur hexafluoride as a tracer gas. This program was successful in validating the line source model developed by ESL inc. Some of the earliest uses of the model were in court cases involving highway air pollution, the Arlington, Virginia portion of Interstate 66 and the New Jersey Turnpike widening project through East Brunswick, New Jersey.

Area source models were developed in 1971 through 1974 by the ERT and ESL groups, but addressed a smaller fraction of total air pollution emissions, so that their use and need was not as widespread as the line source model, which enjoyed hundreds of different applications as early as the 1970s. Similarly photochemical models were developed primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, but their use was more specialized and for regional needs, such as understanding smog formation in Los Angeles, California.

Environmental impacts

Main articles: Ocean acidification and Greenhouse effect

The greenhouse effect is a phenomenon whereby greenhouse gases create a condition in the upper atmosphere causing a trapping of heat and leading to increased surface and lower tropospheric temperatures. It shares this property with many other gases, the largest overall forcing on Earth coming from water vapour. Other greenhouse gases include methane, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, chlorofluorocarbons, NOx, and ozone. Many greenhouse gases, contain carbon, and some of that from fossil fuels.

This effect has been understood by scientists for about a century, and technological advancements during this period have helped increase the breadth and depth of data relating to the phenomenon. Currently, scientists are studying the role of changes in composition of greenhouse gases from natural and anthropogenic sources for the effect on climate change.

A number of studies have also investigated the potential for long-term rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to cause slight increases in the acidity of ocean waters and the possible effects of this on marine ecosystems. However, carbonic acid is a very weak acid, and is utilized by marine organisms during photosynthesis.