LE LOTUS

I recently talked to Kevin Cullen, the award-winning columnist of Boston Globe
I asked him how culture background affects a journalist.
Kevin Cullen answered: “My background, like any journalist’s, is essential to what I do.”
“It provides my world view, which in this case is the one of a working-class Catholic grandson of Irish immigrants. I think it makes me more sympathetic to people who have to struggle．”

From this I can see how culture background help, or put a journalist on a certain stand. Here I want to take two great journalists in history as example.

Liang Chi-chao (1873-1929) was a Chinese bourgeois reformist, political commentator and journalist. Walter Lippmann (1880-1974) is well-known as an American political columnist and journalist in 20th century.
Liang is the Chinese people as the “media’s pride,” Lippmann was the Americans referred to as “the greatest journalists of our time.” Liang and Lippmann were in two different social and cultural backgrounds, each with different ideas of news dissemination.

Lippmann had the experience of directly engaging in political activities during the First World War, only twice. Since then he did not have direct political activity at all. It seems that Lippmann was more willing to analyze the power, rather than putting himself into it. Therefore, throughout Lippmann news career, he had close co-operation with the U.S. government, the presidents, but also had confrontation with them. On the one hand, he maintained a close relationship with various political forces, because he recognized that authorities are the main source of news. However, he also stressed the independence of news reporting on politics.

On the contrary, In China’s modern history, Liang was first and foremost a politician, then a journalist. Can be said that he is a part-time journalist, and his main business is politics. The time that Liang lived in, foreign powers waited for opportunities in China, people managed miserable lives; the old empire in the subjugated status. In this grim reality, he dedicated his career to try to wake people up, try to reform the country. As a result, he engaged in newspaper work in order to achieve his political views; he wrote many political commentaries, he believed in “words are able to save the country”.

The culture background mainly decided the ways of their thinking, their own concept of journalism. Lippmann obviously developed a more objective view while Liang’s was more emotional.

College professors are not necessarily the “role models”; their jobs are knowledge teaching, method introducing and problem solving for the students. If someone is able to do well in these three aspects, then they can be a professor.

Since most of the college students are over 18 years old, I believe they have already developed their own principle and value of life. They also have mature sense of right and wrong. I think college students are not going to follow someone blindly. Therefore I think if the professor has another special profession, there will not be significant impact on students themselves.

However it is interesting to see a journalism professor also works as a prostitute. Gerald Hannon seems feeling nothing wrong with it. He even enjoyed sharing his experience with the audiences because he thought he knew better than anyone else on this certain case. I do not mind if my professor talked about this topic in class because I agree that people like Hannon will hold a better view on people who are similar to himself. I am interested in the mental world of the people mentioned in his article. He raised several examples like the boy Jim, the married man; I felt that they all have their unique thought. In addition, although Hannon involves in an activity which is against the law after class, it won’t affect his profession as a professor. (If he did not make an appeal to all of his students that everyone should try this). I mean every professor have done something illegal, like over speeding or drunk driving etc.
Nevertheless I will not ask my professor about this issue. That is his “part-time job” in his private life. I think it is rude to ask someone’s private life if he/she does not want to refer to class of their own accord. After all, being a prostitute can be relevant to journalism class (you can regard it as something news-worthy) or irrelevant. It is not something that we must care about.

At last, although Hannon knows those people well, I do not think he can use them as resources. Their relationship is a controversial one and they are kind of too close, physically. Moreover, Hannon might reveal something that those people do not want public to know, his behavior of mentioning those people in his article can be harmful to his “clients”. Hannon may be fine with telling people he works as a prostitute, but this might put those people who called him in a trouble situation.

At 9 p.m.,November 27, 2008, the Western tradition of Thanksgiving, the “Hero” Annual Selection Award was world-wide live. Another 10 ordinary people chosen by CNN became the brightest star, attracted the attention of hundreds of millions of viewers.
It is undeniable that those elected have made impressive moving deeds. There is Liz McCartney who determinedly resigned her job after Hurricane Katrina and returned home to help people rebuild their homes; there is Phymean Noun who offered hundreds of children who work in Phnom Penh’s trash dump a way out through free schooling and job training.

Some media believe that the selection is based on typical deeds of global civilian, audience will have a sense of closeness and treat those heroes as wide-ranging models. Above all, the most valuable thing is that there is not commercial opeartion in their behavior.
However, I still cannot agree with the practice of creating heroes for the public.

From journalism point of view, even though these great people deserve to be learned and followed, the job of a journalist is to report the story accurately and deliver this information, period. How these meaning ful actions of those heroes affect the public should depend on the public’s natural reaction. People have brains, they do not need the media to tell them what to learn or how to think. People have different definitions for the word “hero”, and it is not professional for people work in media industry to define something.

After many of the civilian being named “hero”, they become famous people. Media values their influences on public at the beginning because they are ordinary people. However, the “hero” selection behavior separates them from the ordinary people. The public wants to know this certain individual more than the people who really need social attention and care in the story. A trophy contraried to the original purpose of the “hero”, because no one loves and cares others in order to get a trophy. In general, it is a cart-before-the-horse thing.

The award also will negatively affect the quiet life of a normal ordinary people. Once a person becomes famous, interviews and questions are gathered to come like cloud. Perhaps he/she wants to have his/her personal space, or he/she would like to refuse to questions from reporters and interviews, but he/she may be branded arrogant and unfriendly .

The saddest thing is that after being known as a “hero”, the person will face the risk of being commercialized. In the major earthquake occurred in Sichuan, China 2008, there is a boy named Lin Hao calmly and effectively organized his classmates, and left the school building without Casualties . After that, what Lin has to face is the influx of praise, high visibility, and interviews. He succeeded to enter the best school in Chengdu without effort, even though he simply could not keep up the progress of that school because of his poor learning basis and the endless television interviews. In an interview, he mentioned actually he was very reluctant to recall those terrible scenes repeately. The praise became a torture for Lin Hao at last. It is nothing else but a irony.

All in all, it is not appropriate for the media to create “heroes”. It is irresponsible to define these people as heroes and bring them huge amount of pressure and controversy. They probably have never expected that the situation could be this complex. Just give back the peaceful life to them because they are such warm-hearted people and need respect. Do not worry about the public may never see those glittering characters, those awards are totally unnecessary and exaggerated.

Both of the death of seven astronauts and the death of seven children are great news for me. They both contain some news values which make them worth reporting. However, if I have to choose only one of them to report, I will choose the death of seven children.
Compared with the seven astronauts, those seven children are definitely “grass-roots”. The impact of astronauts’ death to the country was a lot more significant than the death of seven children. But it is debatable for British newspaper to over-report on the astronaut news but “only a total of 350 words of UK newspaper coverage to the death of seven school children in an avalanche.”
The first reason that I would choose to report the death of school children is I am not American. If I was working that time in my country, there was no doubt that some other journalists would report the astronauts’ death. The public in my country were able to get the information, then that was it. I would not join in the crowds and write an article contain similar information from the same story. That would not be interesting at all.
Furthermore, I believe that the schoolchildren’s story would have emotional closeness to the audience, even for the international audiences. There are some countries do not have astronauts at all. On the contrary, every country has families and children. I mean, even audiences are from different country they would identify with those seven casualties. It is mentioned in Melvin Mencher’s book News Reporting and Writing that “people are interested in events and individuals that seem close to them.” Audience first attracted by the story because it was unusual and the huge impact. However I think the further reporting would not be popular anymore. The cause of the accident, data and impact were all connected with technology or something that were known by minority. It seems so far away from people’s daily life.
In addition, I do not agree that people are keen to report the “huge event”. There may be some counter arguments on the impact issue. Nevertheless there is an alert in Melvin Mencher’s book.
“Never, never neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening. It may be a false alarm and lead to nothing. But it may, on the other hand, be the clue provided by fate to lead you to some important advance.”
————-Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin.Seven children are not some celebrities or elite people. Their impacts are not as huge as those astronauts. But if we dig deeper, they may be someone who achieved in their own study area, or the cause of their death was not only the snow slide, but also the unreasonable operation during the activity or rescue process which would possibly bring more astonishing news for the audiences. Maybe those seven children asked for help but were ignored, or they did not prepare enough because of the school, parents, or organization’s negligence of duty. Moreover, reporting tragedy in daily life brings the awareness of safety, making related people introspective, and attracting attention from parents, schools. Some problems are necessary for society to face and solve. Let alone that some people really lost their life and brought huge pain to their families. As a journalist I think at least we should treat the “life” equally. It is both pitiable and ridiculous to have a hierarchy of death exist.

HERE IS SOME BACKGROUND OF ROBERT FISK
After the U.S. launched its attack on Afghanistan, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan to provide coverage of that conflict. While reporting from there, he was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees fleeing heavy bombing by the United States Air Force. He was saved from this attack by another Afghan refugee. In his graphic account of his own beating, Fisk pardoned the attackers of responsibility and pointed out that their “brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the ‘War for Civilisation’ just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.’”

Unfairness happens every single day. Since the columnist has the deep concern for those underdogs, it is also interesting to see how the columnist put the story on paper.

News can be beneficial to the audiences. People need news because they need to be informed. According to different occupations and different living environments,people may have different concerns. Like the owner of export processing factory will pay close attention to the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. This kind of information is something that they really cannot miss.

Second, individual interest makes the public in need of news, Audiences get to know if their favorite teams are going well or not by searching online, watching TV or reading newspapers. I do not mean that people are interested in watching TV or reading newspaper, they are interested in something that is delivered by media industry. It is more like a curiosity, people just want to know something that they are unable to be personally at the scene.

Above all, news are better-formed and become an instrument of public opinion which is able to monitoring the operation of the whole society. Audiences are able to know what the president has done for a week, or the unfairness happened on homeless people.

News are also able to demonstrates public’s values. The headline news are usually the stories which are potentially attractive to the public. Audiences care the news then they can interact with the news well.

An over-reliance on the network, manifested as loss of interest in real life. Some people beyond the normal limits of online operating hours, in order to get the psychological met. When the network attachment is out of control, it have a negative impact on the people. We put it as a kind of psychological barrier to look at. For the youth, we cannot blindly prohibit their access to Internet. Teachers and parents will play an important roke in preventing children from getting addicted to Internet. Parents should communicate more with the correct guidance. The rapid development of the Internet is changing people’s lives mode of production, study and master the network using is the way to enter this new era.