Shrink-wrap Sunday 5.15.22
State of the Press: Prizes, Milestones and… Click-bait?
Weekend springtime greetings! Over the next few weeks as newShrink nears its first anniversary, Shrink-wraps will revisit and reflect on its core purpose and themes.
This week is a check-in with the state of the press as a factor influencing, and influenced by, the American psyche, our collective and individual soul. Today’s focus is particularly on how we as readers, consumers, and citizens approach, consume and act in response and relationship with the news. Along with a couple of relevant current stories as case examples this week has brought the annual prestigious Pulitzer Prize awards plus the striking anniversary of a venerable journalism resource, the Columbia Journalism Review.
Editions in coming weeks will take on the State of the Mind (mental heath end of the psychology spectrum) and State of the Soul (the depth or unconscious realms.) Then early June will bring a political edition taking stock of the primary season so far.
connecting themes…
Today’s title themes and examples apply newShrink’s purpose of tracking the often-mentioned idea of the soul of America through its news by operating
🔷 more like journalists,
🔷 more like the scholars and experts of various fields such as history, law, government, medicine, and
🔷 more like psychologists in both the clinical and depth dimensions of the field.
An additional, overarching theme to be listening for from the vantage point of first-year-in, is all of the essential ways we can — and need to be —not only informed, educated in our respective areas of training and experience… but, awake! That’s in the Shakespearean sense, with the exclamation point. It means finding ways to be and then act more and more intentionally, on purpose, as consumers, readers, people especially in a fast-changing technology and content media environment.
One tech note: Please alert me if anything too weird happens with your receiving newShrink or how it looks today. This is the first-ever edition improvising on iPad with keyboard, as it seems I’m now officially in process of replacing my Mac. Its frying wasn’t unexpected and this is overdue; just wish these things happened at the end and not in the middle of stuff already in progress! Meanwhile, the usual navigating details for accessing all links and references on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments.
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… with stories
Here we have Ben Franklin again, his enduring legacy and stature in both printing/publishing himself and creating and embedding in our Constitution the role and value of the free press in democracy.
#1) The Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal Logo
The Full List of 2022 Pulitzer Prizes — Starting with Journalism Categories
Here is a case where the list, itself, is rich and varied content worth savoring — also a great menu for future reference on all kinds of reading, viewing, news, literature, drama and arts materials. I’ll be exploring some specific pieces in the context of future editions. One logistical note: names, topics and details of the entries for each of the listed Finalists are accessible by clicking on their news organization names — although there’s no indicator or note delineating the links.
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#2. Washington post wins top public service Pulitzer for Jan. 6 coverage and an overview of other key winners
(from PBS News Hour)
NEW YORK (AP) — The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism Monday for its coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, an attack on democracy that was a shocking start to a tumultuous year that also saw the end of the United States’ longest war, in Afghanistan.
The Post’s extensive reporting, published in a sophisticated interactive series, found numerous problems and failures in political systems and security before, during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the newspaper’s own backyard.
The “compellingly told and vividly presented account” gave the public “a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation’s darkest days,” said Marjorie Miller, administrator of the prizes, in announcing the award.
Five Getty Images photographers were awarded one of the two prizes in breaking news photography for their coverage of the riot.
The week’s exemplary recognitions in the profession have an unfortunate counterpoint with news involving one of the nation’s venerable schools of journalism and mass communications (and my undergrad alma mater.) In a nutshell the situation and developments leading up to the downgrade seem related to intense politicization not only of administration and trustees but also academics in the university system.
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#3. UNC School of Journalism Accreditation is Downgraded
(From WRAL TV in Raleigh. Embedded video version included.)
Group cites diversity issues in downgrading UNC-CH journalism school’s accreditation status (From the News and Observer of Raleigh)
The national accreditation group for UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media voted to downgrade the school’s accreditation status to “provisional” following a routine review.
Opinion Column: Hussman’s provisional accreditation is not “unexpected” (From The Daily Tar Heel of UNC.)
The above file photo by Ira Wilder of The Daily Tar Heel depicts Carroll Hall, which now houses UNC Chapel Hill's school of media and journalism. (Some readers may recall UNC years, as I do, when this was the business school for classes in economics, accounting and marketing and the J-school was in Howell Hall.)
Earlier this week, UNC's Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s accreditation status was downgraded by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, according to a report by WRAL’s Cullen Browder.
Challenges to the Hussman School’s accreditation come after ACEJMC found the program out of compliance with its 2021 standards for diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice.
Meanwhile, Friday marked a seemingly upbeat changing-of-the-guard that Washington press corps members and a lot of the rest of us are noticing.
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#4. Karine Jean-Pierre Is Named White House Press Secretary. Jen Psaki passed the baton and podium on Friday.
Ms. Jean-Pierre, who will succeed Jen Psaki, will be the first Black woman and the first openly gay person to serve in the role.
A couple of thoughts…
🌀One observation here, from the standpoint of journalism’s ever-evolving process of redefining itself, roles, boundaries and values, is that both Jean-Pierre and Psaki have moved, apparently seamlessly without controversy or conflict, from positions as journalists to PR spokespeople and back again to journalists.
🌀Of course, many journalists — especially in the generations before separate curricula and degree programs in public relations and other areas of communications — have left the journalist side of the podium for PR. (I did this myself a few decades ago.) And especially at the elite White House and other influential levels news organizations have always had or made room for a spokesperson-turned-journalist or commentator.
🌀It’s the back-and-forth fluidity of it now that suggests such questions as where the boundaries between the roles are or should be (if any), whether they are or should be tacit or explicit, and whether or at what point this affects content, intensity of scrutiny or depth on the journalism side… and levels of candor or secrecy in PR.
In other breaking news at writing time, a well-deserved federal appointment from my home region. The difference in emphasis between the national (NYT) version and the local (Charlotte Observer) one is a good example of how routinely tapping news organizations of different scope provides different perspectives. From the newShrink attention to scholarly context where it’s needed, the seriously well-qualified Jefferson brings valuable depth and breadth to the Fed.
Senate confirms Philip Jefferson as a Federal Reserve Governor (NYT)
Davidson economics professor confirmed for a top job at Fed (The Charlotte Observer)
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#5. Columbia Journalism Review: Celebrating 60 years as the Voice of Journalism
Here are excerpts from editor Kyle Pope’s preface to this anniversary edition of the publication from Columbia University (as are the Pulitzers):
Sixty years ago, the Columbia Journalism Review debuted, tucked beneath a plain white cover. In an opening essay, “Why a review of journalism?,” the editors felt obliged to explain to readers what wasn’t at all obvious: the need for an outlet to critique the press. “There exists,” they wrote, “a widespread uneasiness about the state of journalism. The Review shares this uneasiness, not over any supposed deterioration but over the probability that journalism of all types is not yet a match for the complications of our age. . . . The urgent arguments for a critical journal far outweigh the hazards…”
…In this issue, we have sought to convey the scope and ambition of CJR over the course of its life. The stories are organized thematically, rather than chronologically, to help connect the dots from one age to the next. In these pages, you’ll find Walter Lippmann; David Simon; assessments of the Kerner Commission’s findings, fifty years apart; and wariness of bloggers’ citing Jenny McCarthy as a vaccination expert. You’ll also find Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, referring to this magazine as “the fucking Columbia Journalism Review.”
#6. CJR at 60’s Essays Address Five Key Ongoing Issues for the Profession…. And Us
🔷Witness to History: The Moments When Trust is Tested
🔷Identity: The Problem with “Objectivity”
🔷Economics: The Journalism Industry’s Persistent Struggles
🔷Threats: Defending Journalists’ Freedom, and
🔷Technology: How Technology Transforms Media
CJR’s Mission: To be the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing world of journalism. It is the most respected voice on press criticism, and it shapes the ideas that make media leaders and journalists smarter about their work. Through its fast-turn analysis and deep reporting, CJR is an essential venue not just for journalists, but also for the thousands of professionals in communications, technology, academia, and other fields reliant on solid media industry knowledge.
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Amid such substantial fare this week I welcomed this comedic take from the vantage point of the writer and writing-craft side of the field, from a longtime journalist, friend and reader:
🌀This one for some reason made me a little defensive… as if any moment the dog’s reply will be a zinger-retort about… ellipses…(!!!)
🌀 Around midweek I was reading and gathering material — and images, such as those iconic front steps — out of Columbia University about both the Pulitzer Prizes and the CJR anniversary edition. Then friend and reader Barbara Barnett, the veteran journalist and retired J-school professor, happened to post an even more vivid one.
#7. “The Staircase of Knowledge:’’ Stunning Steps at University of Balamand Library, Lebanon
🌀This speaks to newShrink’s focus on the journalistic, scholarly/historic as well as some of the soul/psychological dimensions of those such as Dante and Plato.
🌀With the humor-file of mind still open from that above cartoon something about all of these steps and Columbia University reminds me of my first visit there. It was as a high school student, just in time to catch megaphone-bearing antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman — of Yippies, Students for a Democratic Society and ‘68 Chicago DNC riots fame. (The latter is the scene for the above photo of him on the right.)
🌀The impromptu early taste of student protests came as a diverse group of other journalism classmates and I who staffed the school newspaper, yearbook and literary journal with our teacher/sponsor were in New York to collect an array of national scholastic press association awards. While there droves of us from around the country visited the university journalism school. We must have been conspicuous even amid the crowd around the steps, for Hoffman made a lot of jokes about high school kids —especially targeting gum-popping southern girls. (The false gum-popping charge rankles to this day; I’ve surely had worse vices along the way, but not that tacky-annoying one!)
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In putting together this week’s edition, particularly the various visual images from separate unrelated stories and sources, by this time I am starting to notice: There certainly are a lot of stairways showing up here. They’re not only implicit in the two Columbia University stories and the metaphoric ones pictured, but also in the UNC photo at Carroll Hall. A stairway also features in a periodically recurring dream-snippet.
Then, not only in North Carolina but in national media has come a snowballing of coverage of this next topic (or “event?”) that to me has seemed astonishing, even given hometown or home state allure. I’ve had interesting and thought-provoking exchanges and conversations about it with friends, including a couple of readers who tend to be insightful and savvy about the interface of journalism with crime and courts.
I’ll note preemptively here that something about the Michael Peterson two-decade legal saga in the wake of his wife’s tragic death and the story, case, sets of various dramatizations, documentaries etc. keeps nagging uncomfortably and I have yet to fully define it. Here I’ll mainly flag things I notice with questions — and at this point that’s from the journalism and perhaps scholarship standpoint, not the psychological. While a lot of my academic research interest in psychology has been and continues to be on real-life news, the focus and intensity is consistently toward the biographical, the individual person/people in the situation or event. So I’ll often be zeroing in on the “who” more than the various actions, plot developments, who-did-or-didn’t-do-what.
As with the UNC journalism school accreditation downgrade and aspects of other stories here, the Peterson story — with its various versions from journalistic and documentarian to fictionalized drama to podcasts — presents both case example and challenge for us as news consumers to engage with ways that journalism is and must be evolving and redefining itself. This is in response to new media technologies and the other topics in the CJR essays above as well as possible other factors.
At top-right in the visual is the real-life news photo from the Peterson trial.
#8. The 2003 murder trial in which Michael Peterson was convicted in the murder of his wife Kathleen Peterson.
(File photo from Chuck Liddy, News and Observer of Raleigh).
Michael Peterson is handcuffed by Durham Sheriff’s officer Bryan Mister after being found guilty of first degree murder in the death of his wife Kathleen Peterson. In 2018, after a massive forensics scandal led to the conviction being overturned, he entered an Alford plea in exchange for his freedom. (The Alford plea is to technical guilt while maintaining innocence.)
Some of my thoughts…
🌀There’s been a solid trend for more than a decade toward high interest in film, TV, books, theater, and now podcasts, that are biopics about individuals, true-life stories, spotlights on real events and people. In one example from research for my 2014 dissertation, which focused solely on biography of individuals (and the psychological dimensions), Oscar nominations and wins in the major categories for biopics and true-life stories were relatively rare from the Academy’s origin to about 2000.
🌀Since then there has been exponential increase in all categories. (This year’s best acting wins by Will Smith, for King Richard and Jessica Chastain, for Eyes of Tammy Faye, are examples.)
🌀The Crown is a multi-season favorite about the British royal family on Netflix, and venues such as Vanity Fair provide episode-by-episode matching or dismissing of the fictionalized series to historic (and journalistic) fact. It does seem the logical order to weight credibility of the fictionalized drama against the historic or journalistic accounts; reversing the order of this is one jarring factor in the many Michael Peterson renditions.
🌀There’s the very current Gaslit focused on a key figure in Watergate, with Julia Roberts and Sean Penn, which I’m watching and enjoying now.
🌀At the other extreme, I’ve agreed with reviews like The New Yorker’s, that the current First Lady biopic is pretty unwatchable despite its stellar cast and my intense interest in its subjects.
Now for the Peterson Staircase(s)… or the originally French-titled documentary version, Soupçons, which means “Suspicions”…
#8. The Peterson murder case gets another series. Why are we so obsessed with true crime?
(By the News and Observer of Raleigh, in The Charlotte Observer)
It’s a fascination that dates back to ancient Greece and “Oedipus Rex,” perhaps the original true-crime drama, said Neal Bell, theater professor at Duke University, who has written two plays based on real murders.
In a more modern sense, the attraction begins with Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” which kick-started the genre by allowing a reader, and later a movie viewer, to watch a murder investigation unfold from beginning to end — from the bodies in the basement to the killers on the gallows.
From there, we were hooked. We’ve never been able to look away, from “Helter Skelter” and the Manson family murders to “The Staircase” and the Petersons’ mansion in Durham’s tony Forest Hills.
🌀Regarding the current new HBO Max dramatized version of The Staircase, the “we” in this headline seems to refer to us as consumers, viewers, listeners and readers. But there’s also a “we” of intense, voluminous coverage by journalists and their organizations in Peterson’s NC area and nationally.
🌀By a cursory search The News and Observer of Raleigh has published a total of eight stories so far, all breathless in tone and headline, starting a year ago with the casting of Colin Firth as Michael Peterson.
🌀To the N&O’s credit, in the digital document versions these are at least labelled under the clear entertainment tag-line “Happiness is a Warm TV.”
Then we have The Charlotte Observer’s ongoing regular assignment of talented feature writer Théodon Janes, watching the HBO Max drama episode-by-episode in ongoing conversation with Peterson’s defense attorney David Rudolph of Charlotte. Rudolph was not consulted for the series but was intimately involved with the French-directed documentary and its updates as the case evolved.
How accurate is HBO’s ‘The Staircase’? Not very, argues Charlotte attorney David Rudolf.
Michael Peterson’s real-life attorney calls HBO series’ big twist ‘completely unfair’
Some thoughts…
🌀For the many of us who, like me, read and take in a lot of news as well as entertainment, cultural, literary fare digitally, these stories are a good reminder that the standard first main screen is designed for click-bait not context or clarity between news and entertainment, fact and opinion. (On the Observer’s main digital page, among the several Peterson-related stories nothing visually arresting distinguishes the news updates on the real case from stories about the original documentary or the HBO Max series.)
🌀 Nor on digital entry sites is there the written or audio voice of the detached narrator providing what used to be called the nut (or actually “key-shit”) graf of here’s what this is, how it compares to this, why it’s important and you should care and do something about it.
🌀 In today’s economic and tech environment journalistic success in newsrooms (and careers) gets measured and rewarded by clicks. It’s an area where we readers, listeners and watchers may want to be intentionally awake! Even forming the habit of regularly opening and scanning the “replica/like a real publication view” versions to assess how stories are played, placed in relation to one another, labelled and grouped as news, entertainment etc. can be useful.
🌀In general, public radio and especially the whole genre of podcasts have brought a lot of needed depth and, especially in radio, in-the-moment context. One caution I see with podcasts, which can be excellent for taking us more deeply into both events and the people involved in them, is there can be a kind of tunnel-vision result unless the deeper material is brought back up and applied to broader contexts. The great podcasts do that.
🌀I don’t know David Rudolph or what he expects to gain from doing these play-by-play interviews with Janes while watching the HBO drama. But though his client is out of prison, any lawyer in his situation wants full vindication and affirmation — for himself as well as client. In my view the play-by-plays aren’t so much negative or damaging as mostly inane, nits or calling-out of obvious things done in every court case dramatization. Even with the couple of more substantial contradictions or false elements surfaced, there is a strong implicit “so what?” factor regarding what it even might accomplish.
🌀In some searching I haven’t found more comprehensive profile interviews with Rudolph beyond basic bio and sound-bite answers connected to the Peterson case. Interviewed for a couple of casual-chatty online venues he has made some interesting, self-insightful statements about the pivotal significance this case has had on the entire arc of his life both personally and professionally along with his entire philosophical orientation to practicing law. That is the sober, evocative, psychologically and journalistically insightful fresh story I wish someone would do on this case.
To wind up this segment I’ll share a series of quotes from veteran critic Roger Ebert, which for me affirmed and expanded the questions I’m having — and holding open — rather than resolving them. That, I believe, is the state of the press in America these days, too.
From Ebert: “HBO’s The Staircase is a Masterful, Stark True-Crime Epic”
It’s far from an open and shut battle for justice, on either side of the court house…
The Staircase as a Russian doll saga is not just a possible murder, it’s how it became a story that was bent and revealed and protected, depending on who was telling it…
Regarding the intimate involvement of Rudolph, the defense team and family with the earlier documentary Ebert observed:
When they’re inside the Peterson home, they alter the entire atmosphere, for us to see how a camera makes all the difference in how the truth comes out.
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I’ll leave you today on a more celestial note:
Total lunar eclipse – a supermoon eclipse – tonight, May 15-16, 2022!
Visible in clear skies in most areas of the US, the penumbral (weak part of Earth’s shadow) eclipse begins at 9:32 PM EDT. Partial is at 10:27 PM and totality from 11:29-12:53 AM. (Aren’t these exact times marvelous, for something so ineffable?)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀 🔵 🔷 🦋 💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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