About Columnist Frank Viviano
Longtime foreign correspondent Frank Viviano offers CBS5.com's readers in the Bay Area and beyond his unique perspective on world affairs. Viviano served as chief Asia correspondent, and later Paris bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1988 to 2002, when he began writing for National Geographic Magazine. He's lived and reported from Europe and the Middle East since 1990.
In a career that spans three decades from 1977 to the present, Viviano has covered wars and civil conflicts across the globe, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, U.S. immigration issues, the 1989 military crackdown at Tiananmen Square and across China, as well as the economic rise of East Asia. His articles have appeared in more than 200 newspapers and magazines in America, Europe and the Far East. He has also authored seven books, published in 14 countries worldwide.
In China's Ruling Circle: No Sign Of The Best And The Brightest
4/10/08
They are China`s best and brightest, thousands of scientists, technicians, business managers and academics educated at prestigious universities in America, Europe and Japan. In the great leap forward that has carried the world`s most populous nation to the forefront of the global economy, few factors have been more crucial than the role of what Chinese call haiguipai, "returnees from overseas."
Yet in the tightly closed upper ranks of Chinese politics and government, the haiguipai are almost entirely absent – as are fresh insights and well-informed policies that may have helped defuse China`s current crises in the rebellious regions of Tibet, western Sichuan and Xinjiang.
Disturbing questions are raised by the absence of the foreign-experienced from the inner circle of power, says Cheng Li, a senior fellow at Washington's Brookings Institution. "Do China's top leaders really trust Western-educated returnees? Can the Chinese political system genuinely open its doors to talented people returning from the outside world?"
In effect, the same high-achievers who are now the vanguard of economic modernization appear to be too suspect, too "corrupted" by their exposure to western ways and attitudes, to be trusted with major political responsibilities at home. In governing terms, the best and brightest are a lost generation, all but voiceless in the very decisions where their worldliness is essential.
THE BEIJING OLD BOYS SCHOOL
A survey of Chinese officialdom, drawing on sources in China itself and abroad, suggests that haiguipai have been systematically blocked from the most important leadership positions.
The all-powerful Standing Committee of the Communist Party Politburo today is comprised exclusively of men with no significant experience of life, customs and attitudes beyond China's own borders. Hu Jintao, 66, the general secretary, is a hydraulic engineer educated in Beijing. Premier Wen Jiabao, 66, is a Beijing-trained geologist. Wu Bangguo, 67, chairman of the National People`s Congress, is an electical engineer and a graduate of Beijing's Tsingua University.
Indeed, eight out of ten members of the Standing Committee went to universities in Beijing, the center of Chinese political orthodoxy, and none of them has ever had a government appointment overseas.
Overall, according to a study published in 2005 by Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, just 61 of the 937 most powerful officials in China – including the Communist Party's 356-member Central Committee, the top three posts in all 28 government ministries, and the top four posts in the nation's 31 provinces -- have any direct living experience outside of their country.
Even among those 61 mavericks, half spent no more than a brief time overseas as visiting scholars. Only 10 are graduates in law or the social sciences, fields which have a close bearing on national policy deliberations, especially in such controversal areas as minority rights.
One result is that a recent wave of anti-Beijing protests, involving dissident Tibetans in Sichuan and Tibet itself, and Muslims in the oil-rich province of Xinjiang, has been handled with a blunt military crackdown that belies China's claims to social, as well as economic progress. It's no accident that Party secretary Hu was first elevated to the Politburo in 1992, after directing an earlier four-year campaign in Tibet against followers of the Dalai Lama. It is no accident, either, that unrest has grown steadily worse, in the absence of new solutions that might draw on similar problems elsewhere.
In the frozen ruling circle's response to crisis, as well as its collective background, very little has changed since that 1988 Tibetan campaign, or the bloody events at Tiananmen Square a year later.
RACING FORWARD ON ONE LEG
The slim profile of returnees in the Politburo is certainly not due to a shortage of qualified candidates. Since the early 1980s, when China's doors were first opened to visitors from overseas and to students headed in the opposite direction, more than one million Chinese have attended foreign universities. They currently count nearly 200,000, with some 50,000 in the United States, and 30,000 in Canada.
By contrast with their near invisibility in politics, returnees are now heavily represented in non-government leadership roles. In Shanghai alone, more than 3,000 private enterprises have been established by foreign-educated Chinese, and nationwide more than half of all university administrators were at least partly educated abroad, mostly in the United States.
The disparity between rising worldliness in civil affairs and dogged xenophobia in governance raises another troubling question, closely related to those posed by Cheng Li. Can a nation race forward, without catastrophic stumbles, if one leg is at serious odds with the other?
The de facto ban on haiguipai at the top level of government is also at odds with China`s own history. The founding father of the Republic of China, Sun Yatsen, was educated in Hawaii and held U.S. citizenship.
His principal successor, General Chiang Kaishek, attended schools in Japan and even served for three years in the Japanese Imperial Army. Chiang's own chief heir as President of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Chiang Chingkuo, was educated in Moscow and had a Russian wife. Ma Jingyeou, the current president in Taiwan, is an alumnus of Harvard Law School.
Communist Chinese leaders Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping both spent many years in France. Scores of other major figures in the People's Republic of China received university educations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A disastrous exception was Chairman Mao Zedong, who refused an offer to study in France in the 1920s, arguing that China`s problems could not be resolved with borrowed ideas.
It was under Mao's autocratic leadership that the People's Republic declined into violent oppression and extreme poverty – cut off from its own erstwhile socialist allies, as well as the West, in the name of resisting foreign corruption.
The Resurrection Of Silvio Berlusconi
3/18/08
In many ways, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is as venerably Italian as the Roman Colliseum, a master of political strategies that date back to the Caesars.
If current polls prove accurate, those skills will be back in command in Italy after next month's national election, when the controversial twice-elected (and twice-ejected) Berlusconi is expected to complete his latest resurrection – a suitably overblown description for a politician who has openly compared himself to Jesus Christ.
But first-century Rome is not merely where twenty-first-century Italian politics is headed. Increasingly, it appears to be the prevailing model for electoral democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.
In a word, that model is what Italians call spettacolo (show business).
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
In ancient Rome, of course, there were no popular elections. Nonetheless, its emperors recognized that public discontent could be toxic, and the result in domestic affairs was a policy known as "bread and circuses." Keep people well-fed and mindlessly amused, the theory went, and they'll take no interest in the shenanigans of an unimaginably wealthy imperial family or a corrupt senate.
The opposite cornerstone of Roman show business was security, and its mortar was engineered paranoia. Keep people frightened – of barbarian threats from the outside and crime at home – and they'll accept almost anything in return for the semblance of protection.
Sound familiar? Fear, sometimes real, sometimes entirely imaginary and nearly always manipulative, is a mainstay of contemporary political rhetoric. Substitute today's consumer-driven fiscal policies and spin-conscious election campaigns for bread and circuses, and the echo of ancient Rome is loud and clear.
No single player on the international scene has invoked that echo longer, or more effectively, than 72-year-old Silvio Berlusconi, the man now favored to win the April 13-14 election and return to power.
In a sense, he trained himself precisely for this role, beginning his climb to the Palazzo Chigi, the Italian equivalent of the White House, as a crooner belting out torchsongs in the nightclubs of cruise ships. Early in his political career, he settled on Communism and immigrant crime as convincing lyrics for a security ballad, and in 1993 launched his own political party, Forza Italia ("Go Italy!"). Along the way, in a steep ascent that generated an $11 billion personal fortune – and two decades' worth of criminal investigations – he also acquired a dazzling array of businesses under the umbrella of a holding company named Fininvest.
Its subsidiaries include supermarkets, department stores and insurance firms, but the heart of the Fininvest empire belongs to the media, where Berlusconi's level of national control far exceeds the wildest dreams of his fellow statesmen.
Financial analysts estimate that the prime ministership gives Berlusconi control over 90 percent of Italian television, much of it as the chief stockholder in Mediaset, the nation's largest private broadcasting group, with the balance as a result of his de facto political grip on Italy's three public networks. His companies are also responsible for an astounding 60 percent of all advertising sales in Italy – the essential modern ingredient in bread and circuses alike.
Berlusconi's profile is only slightly less overwhelming in the print media, where he controls more than a third of all book and magazine publishing and a leading national newspaper. In any case, reading is of minimal importance in Italy. Fewer than 100 newspapers are now purchased there for every 1,000 people, just one-fifth the per capita total for northern European countries.
That may be Berlusconi's most significant contribution to politics: the final triumph of advertising and mass consumption, of spettacolo, over information.
There is certainly no mistaking its dominance in his own empire. The hallmarks of Mediaset television are blizzards of commercials, interspersed with AC Milan soccer matches – Berlusconi is the team's owner – game shows, "reality TV" serials and vaudeville extravaganzas featuring leggy troupes of scantily-clad young women. The spin-doctors of first-century Rome would be jealous.
THE INVISIBLE CRIME WAVE
When Berlusconi television displaces soccer and softcore porn in favor of news, the media diet shifts effortlessly from undisguised tittilation to irrational fear.
The impression – especially in election-year broadcasting – is of a nation under siege, beset on all sides by criminals, most of who seem to be immigants from Islamic countries, the modern equivalent of the Barbarians who threatened ancient Rome. Ordinary Italians, in the plot of this grim soap opera, have been left utterly defenseless by their government since Berlusconi and his coalition partners were voted out of office in 2006. They were replaced by what he refers to usually as "Communists" and now and then as coglioni, a vulgar insult that literally translates as "testicles" and suggests cowardice in the face of danger.
The striking thing about this picture is that it bears as much similarity to reality as do the reality television shows favored by Mediaset.
Fear-crazed Italy, where 35 percent of the population regards the nighttime streets as too dangerous to walk – twice the percentage in the United States – is actually among the safest countries on Earth. The U.S. per capital homicide rate is almost four times higher than the figure for Italy, according to UN statistics. More unexpected is learning that the risk of being murdered in Sweden, Canada, Finland, Britain and Portugal is between 50 percent and 300 percent higher than in Italy – which has seen its homicide rate drop by more than half since 1991.
What matters is not that the fear-mongering has no basis in fact. It is that the public invariably falls for it.
As for the menace of Communism, it no longer exists as a realistic political alternative anywhere in Europe. In Italy, the once-powerful Communist Party long ago broke up into warring factions. The largest fragment – recently reorganized as the Democratic Party by Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, 52, who leads the campaign against Berlusconi – has abandoned almost every principle that might be confused with the ideas of Karl Marx.
Over the past two years, Italy has been led by former banker and European Union President Romano Prodi, who implemented a tightfisted spending program that could have been designed by Alan Greenspan. No-nonsense fiscal austerity, Prodi felt, was the only way to attack Italy's disastrous economic problems, the most visible legacy of Berlusconi's five years in power from 2001 to 2006 – the longest reign in postwar Italian history.
Prodi's austerity program made unexpected progress in very short time, significantly reducing the national debt and restoring the confidence of investors. But it was fatally undermined by Berlusconi's endless, widely-publicized claims that his rivals were slaves to Communist influence and indifferent to crime.
SOUND FAMILIAR?
Where the spectres of crime and subversion ought to be haunting Italy is politics itself. This may be the only western democracy in which it is necessary to postpone court hearings, on standing allegations of graft and corruption, because the defendant – Silvio Berlusconi – is busy running for the the nation's highest office.
Overall, one in ten Italian legislators has been convicted of illegal acitivities. Since 1990 alone, Berlusconi himself has been the subject of more than a dozen criminal indictments and trials, on charges including perjury, involvement with organized crime, bribing financial investigators and judges (three times), illegal campaign financing, false accounting (eight times), embezzlement and tax fraud (twice). In the majority of these cases, charges were eventually dropped because trials dragged on until the statute of limitations ran out, or because as prime minister Berlusconi acquired immunity from criminal prosecution.
Yet like the excesses of his distant predecessors in Imperial Rome, none of his misadventures seem to trouble vast numbers of Italian voters. It's enough for them to hear, as they do nearly every day on Italian television this election season, that a Berlusconi government will eliminate property taxes altogether, and cut every other tax to the bare bone.
No one knows where the money will come from to run Italy's schools or update its infrastructure, which is arguably the most disfunctional in Europe – just as no one knows, exactly, what can be done to halt a violent nationwide crime wave that is statistically non-existent.
All of this might seem too idiosyncratically Italian, too evocative of a political system that has long been treated as comic farce by foreign observers, if its most devastating punchlines weren't painfully close to home.
Heedless promises of tax cuts. Calls for an all-out war on crime. The door slammed on immigrants. The politics of immense personal wealth. A legislature awash in criminal indictments. The triumph of cheap spectacle over real information. The fragile state of truth.
Sound familiar?
An End To The Islamic Crisis?
3/3/08
I thought of Saddiq the moment I heard the news, the imminent release of a document that could mark a turning point in the long, devastating crisis of Islam.
Saddiq was a Saudi agent, sent to shadow me 24 hours per day during a six-month assignment on the Arabian Peninsula in 2002. For a week or so, we were coldly wary of each other. Then, with a mutual shrug, we dropped the pretense of hostility and worked together to make my reporting as accurate as possible – better informed from my perspective, less western-biased from his. We often talked deep into the night, about almost everything.
The document, to be published by Turkey's Department of Religious Affairs, is the result of a three-year project to re-examine – and revise – the Hadith, one of the founding texts of Islam. Its announcement was scarcely noticed in the U.S. media, but it is an epochal, front-page story across the Middle East and Asia.
"I cannot impress enough how fundamental [this change] is," Fadi Hakura, a Turkish scholar, told the BBC when the story broke on February 26.
There is no doubt in my mind that Saddiq would agree. Like the vast majority of Saudis, he is a fervent Muslim. And like many Muslims, he is locked in a profoundly frustrating struggle to reconcile his intense faith with the demands of a rapidly changing world.
This struggle goes far to explain the crisis: the paralysis most Islamic countries have experienced in the face of contemporary political and economic challenges, and the corresponding temptation to withdraw into the glories of the Islamic past.
"We are told, over and over, that our civilization was the most advanced on earth a thousand years ago," Saddiq said one night. "But what about today?"
The answer, or at least a major part of it, lies in the Hadith.
RISE AND FALL OF THE GOLDEN AGE
In layman's terms, the Hadith is a record of the conversations and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed after the revelation that produced the Koran – the moral "recitation" that is the theological bedrock of Islam.
The words of that revelation itself cannot be changed. For Muslims, God's final, sacrosanct instructions to humanity are expressed in the Koran, as related directly to Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel in what is now western Saudi Arabia.
But the Hadith is categorically different, an oral history composed by human beings. It serves as a collective tool for interpreting what God's words meant, based on the Prophet's own efforts to understand them.
It is from the Hadith that most principles of Muslim daily life – its customs, its laws, its social atttudes, even its dress and grooming codes – are drawn.
In the first four centuries after Mohammed, these principles were subject to constant evaluation and reinterpretation. This was the Golden Age of Islam, the era of extraodinary intellectual debate and inquiry that Muslim leaders never tire of evoking. In addition to the massive culling of the Hadith – from more than 600,000 initial entries by some counts – Muslim scholars preserved the learning of ancient Greece and Rome during the barbarian invasions of Europe. Muslim researchers devised the scientic method of experimentation and pioneered key discoveries in medicine, astronomy and chemistry. Muslim mathematicians invented algebra and trigonometry.
But by the eleventh century, with the distance from Mohammed's conversations with his disciples growing ever greater, the "editing" of the Hadith was declared complete.
In effect, the door was shut to further interpretation.
With the Mongol assault that ravaged Arab and Muslim civilization in the thirteenth century, almost every kind of inquiry ground to a halt.
It is impossible to exaggerate the level of intellectual stagnation in the cradle of Islam since then. In a 2002 report, the United Nations found that the number of foreign books translated into Spanish in a single year is now greater than the combined total of all books translated into Arabic in the past ten centuries.
THE PRICE OF STAGNATION
The evolution of Muslim society also stagnated, tied as it was to a closed debate. Nowhere is the result more evident than in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed's birthplace and the site of Islam's two holiest shrines, the mosques at Mecca and Medina. And nowhere is the struggle between inflexible custom and modern reality more visibly debilitating.
Nearly every day of our partnership, Saddiq felt the need to apologize for the behavior of the Muttawa, the 5,000-man religious police force formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Their "criminal" prey included anyone, Saudi or foreigner alike, who violated anachronistic social constraints spelled out in the traditional Hadith.
"They're thugs," Saddiq would say from time to time, as we watched the Muttawa sweep through Saudi shopping centers, Starbucks and fast-food joints, arresting men who smiled too openly at women or women who allowed a lock of hair to escape their veils. "They're comical, absurd, a bunch of clowns masquerading as cops."
That's a very common point of view in Saudi Arabia, expressed only when the Muttawa were out of earshot. But like them or hate them, the religious police are a metaphor for larger contradictions in Muslim life, most glaringly in attitudes toward women – for rules that have little or nothing to do with the Koran, and almost everything to do with a rulebook that stopped evolving a millennium ago.
The tension is palpable in affluent Saudi Arabia. But in two decades covering the Islamic countries, I encountered it everywhere, from Indonesia and Malaysia to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Egypt and Jordan.
Everywhere, that is, except Turkey, with its eight decades of secular rule, its home-grown industrial revolution, its adroitly managed economic boom – and equally important, its current moderate Islamic government.
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11
In public, Ankara's Department of Religious Affairs downplays its work, and is quick to issue corrections when the word "reform" is too loosely employed to describe the revision of the Hadith.
"We are not reforming Islam," insists Ali Bardakoglu, Turkey's senior reliious official. "We are reforming ourselves, our own way of religiosity."
The unease over provocative terminology, in an era of suicide bombings and in a country that shares lengthy borders with Iraq and Iran, speaks for itself. But so does the actual project undertaken by the department's 80 historians and theologians, as well as its timing.
The Ankara revision would eliminate such medieval injunctions as "The best of women are those who are like sheep," and "Your prayer will be invalid if a donkey, black dog or a woman passes in front of you."
Its implicit purpose is to update a code that blocks meaningful participation in the modern world.
It cannot be an accident that reconsideration of the Hadith – after a 1,000-year lull – was initiated in the grim wake of September 11, 2001, when the Islamic crisis exploded into unprecedented violence, and the West reacted with terrified bewilderment and its own brand of disastrous violence.
Like Saddiq, most Muslims know, painfully well, that they have fallen out of the mainstream of history. They know that al-Qaeda will not return them to the glories of the past. In private, they discuss and agonize about their weaknesses endlessly.
Yet they also believe, deeply, that their religion belongs at the forefront of history. To ask that they blame Islam, or see its core message as "a problem," is asking them to renounce everything.
Whatever the Turkish authorities say for public consumption, they have reopened the door to debate over social behavior – to a coherent modernization of daily life – without impinging on the central, sacrosanct values articulated in the Koran.
Reforming Muslims' "way of religiosity," rather than their religion, is precisely the point.
Attention Bill Gates: Under The Tuscan Sun Of Rwanda
2/6/08
The green fields of Nyinawimana rise in 50 acres of carefully sculpted terraces, abuzz with honey bees under a generous sun. This might be Tuscany instead of the hills northeast of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. And in a sense, it is.
There's a powerful story here, the kind of story you seldom hear at a time when news is mostly defined as catastrophe and the notion of spontaneous human solidarity is regarded as sentimental fiction. Nyinawimana is about both of those things: gut-level solidarity and sheer unimaginable catastrophe.
The beehives and high-yield farming terraces are among the landmarks of an extraordinary collaboration between rural Italians acting on their own initiative, and their Rwandan counterparts.
Together, in five years, they have reshaped the hills with shovels and hoes into family farm plots, created a thriving modern honey industry, built dairies and poultry facilities – an entire economy that provides work and sustenance to more than 1,000 people.
On a dollar-for-dollar basis, it may be one of the world's most productive overseas assistance efforts, a de facto embarrassment to foreign aid programs and international charities that have spent half a trillion dollars on Africa in the past four decades to little apparent effect.
In January, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $306 million pilot project aimed at increasing the yields and incomes of family farms in Africa. "If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers," Gates said.
Nyinawimana and its Italian friends are already there.
RWANDA, 1994
Fourteen years ago, in the spring of 1994, an estimated one million Rwandans died in a genocidal civil war between Tutsi and Hutu tribesmen. Part of the world's conscience died with them.
The best that can be said about that world – from the affluent West and East Asia, to the United Nations and a phalanx of global aid institutions – is that it watched and did nothing. The worst is that some of those who watched had provided weapons to the murderers, and turned their faces away as though they bore no guilt.
"There's a Rwandan proverb that 'the skin of one small rabbit is enough to cover five people when there is brotherhood in the world,'" says Florent Mwiseneza, a Catholic priest who survived the 1994 genocide. "But today this proverb can sound like madness, because so many of our people have come to regard the world as ugly, blind, deaf and without feeling."
No army of international peacekeepers was rushed to the killing fields of Rwanda, as they were in those same years to Croatia and Bosnia. No NATO air-strikes were employed against the aggressors, as they were a few years later in Kosovo.
Unlike the former citizens of Yugoslavia, the Rwandan dead were viewed as "the other," distant and unknowable, beyond anyone's capacity to act. To Africans, the different reactions are easily explained. The Rwandans were "the other" because they were black.
The survivors in the village of Nyinawimana remained the other, forgotten and abandoned, for seven years – until a retired mechanic and a car salesmen took notice a continent away, in a lost corner of Tuscany called the Garfagnana.
"Before the Tuscans came, there was nobody from the outside here to help us," one of the villagers recalls. "Nobody at all."
THE MIRROR
The Garfagnana is not the affluent, charm-soaked Tuscany of romantic novels. Framed by the high rampart of the Apennines to the east and the precipitous Apuan Alps to the west, it's a country of marginal farmers, chestnut groves and wild mushrooms, the home of tough quarrymen whose ancestors cut marble for the Roman Forum. Many families make do on less than $10,000 per year. For generations, their children have emigrated abroad, because the Garfagnana cannot support them.
Like the farmers of Rwanda, the Garfanini understand the blunt, devastating equation of too many people trying to get by on too little arable land.
There are also few families in the Garfagnana that haven't experienced the unimaginable. In World War Two, it was the setting for fierce artillery battles that leveled scores of towns and villages. In August of 1944, in revenge for the killing of a Nazi officer by Garfagnana partisans, German stormtroopers rounded up 560 people in the village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, most of them elderly grandparents, mothers and small children, and shot them or burned them alive.
The Garfagnana was finally secured in 1945 by the 92nd U.S. Army Infantry Division, the "Buffalo Soldiers," which sustained some of the war's highest casualty rates, with nearly 5,000 dead or wounded on the Italian front in eight months.
The Buffalo Soldiers were African-Americans, the soldiers of a segregated army, and in their own country all but invisible. But to the people of the Garfagnana, they were heroes and liberators.
The Garfanini raised their children on the memory of the Sant'Anna Stazzema and the Buffalo Soldiers. In news footage from Rwanda, with its fog-shrouded mountains, its struggling farmers – and its horrifying violence – they didn't see "the other," a distant unknowable nation. They saw a mirror.
"When we watched the television, when we saw what they'd been through and were still going through, we saw our own land, our own history," says Franco Simonini, the mechanic.
THE BIRTH OF "HOPE"
Not long after the first images of the Rwandan holocaust were belatedly aired in Italy, Franco and his neighbor, car salesman Angelo Bertolucci, began to talk seriously about Rwanda. They had no idea where their conversation would lead. "All we really knew then," Angelo says, "is that we wanted to do something."
Money alone, they were convinced, wasn't the answer. It's not the way you do things in these mountains.
"Garfagnana people are naturally generous, but a lot of them believe that for every 100 euros you donate to a charity, you're lucky if ten get to anyone who needs help," Angelo says. "Everywhere it's mangia mangia,' they tell you – "eat, eat," a Garfanino euphemism for corruption.
More important, in Angelo's view, is a visceral understanding that cold cash, delivered by an anonymous bureaucracy, puts money into someone's pocket at the price of their dignity.
Instead, the two men tracked down missionaries with service in Africa, who put them into direct contact with priests and agricultural teachers in Rwanda itself. They talked to the mayors of Garfagnana towns, asking their support. With the help of local bankers, they formed a non-profit corporation and called it Kwizera, Rwandan for "Hope," with Franco as president and Angelo as secretary.
In 2001, Angelo and Franco flew via Rome and Cairo to Rwanda, "to look around, to ask what we could do." They carried a suitcase of suggestions and blueprints from Garfagnana farmers, engineers, stone masons, veterinarians and tradesmen, and the equivalent of $25,000 to get things rolling.
As they have on a total of 14 trips between them – as have all the Garfanini who have traveled to Rwanda – Angelo and Franco paid for their own tickets.
The Lake Angels, a group of local men from the Gafagnana hill town of Barga, are typical of those who heard about Kwizera. The group's name came from their semi-annual hikes to Lago Santo, a lake deep in Italy's Appennine Mountains. "We grew up together, and at first these walks were just a way for us to remain close," says Alessandro Gonnelli, a plumber. "We drank a lot of wine, we told stories, we talked all night." On several of their long nights at Lago Santo, they too talked about Rwanda.
The Angels set up a stand at Barga's annual summer music festival, serving wine from their own small vineyards, Later they expanded to fresh Garfagnana sausages and bacon, prepared by an Angel who runs a butcher shop, and Christmas baskets bearing their olive oil, wine, chestnuts and dried porcini mushrooms. By 2007, the group's yearly contribution to Kwizera surpassed $10,000.
FROM ANCIENT ROME TO RWANDA
The Garfagnana's African mission has since grown to nearly $500,000 worth of projects. That doesn't sound like much, compared to $500 billion in official foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa since 1970. But when you look at results, it is the legacy of that half trillion dollars in official aid that seems trifling.
This is the failure Bill and Melinda Gates implicitly hope to reverse: decades of vast expenditures that have changed almost nothing for the small farmers who are Africa's backbone.
In addition to buying 50 acres of land above Nyinawimana and joining forces with 400 local farmers to terrace it by hand into arable plots, the Tuscans of Kwizera have constructed stables, cisterns, schoolrooms and housing for agricultural workers. Along with modern bee-raising and poultry-breeding, they have introduced new breeds of goats and cows.
"Rwandan cows are very sturdy, but of a type raised only for meat, and very few families can afford one," explains Paul Gahutu, a local teacher.
When Franco and Angelo learned that the average milk output one of those cows was less than two quarts per day, they organized and financed a farmer's shopping trip to Uganda. Today, Ugandan cows that produce 15-20 quarts per day graze the terraces of Nyinawimana.
In June, the Lake Angel plumber Alessandro Gonnelli will travel to the village with plans for a permanent irrigation system, in hills that are deluged with rainfall ten weeks each spring and bone dry the rest of the year.
His plan "uses the technology of the Roman Empire," Gonnelli tells a reporter, pointing at an ancient aqueduct that has served the Garfagnana for centuries. The idea is to create a network of catch-basins and pipes that will channel rainwater down the terraces into holding tanks for use in the dry months, making an extra growing season possible. "It's a very basic system that will do its job and last a long, long time," he says.
That's a succinct description of the hope Kwizera has carried from rural Italy to rural Rwanda, through a mirror that makes all the difference in the world.
The Internet & News, Part 2: The Perils Of Free Lunch
1/24/08
Every industry, no matter what products it offers, succeeds or fails on the most elementary of market relationships: the marriage of suppliers and consumers. News is no different.
A great deal of attention, including the final Worldview column for 2007, has been given to the contradictory effects of the Internet, pro and con, on news suppliers. Far less critically examined is the role of those who consume news.
In the written press, this role is undergoing profound change in almost every respect, from the simple act of reading to the more complicated array of assumptions that readers bring to it. The picture is not yet complete, and it's possible that the pros of news technology may eventually outweigh its cons.
But it's difficult to imagine a technological solution to the fundamental human problem: the entrenched habits of the Internet news consumer.
HOW WE READ
The pre-Internet news experience, by default, was a wandering journey, a casual stroll through a newspaper's pages that often led to surprise discoveries. A dateline that rang no bells. An unexpected turn of events. An entire subject area that had never before engaged the reader's attention.
The design and ordering of those pages were, of course, deliberate – a calculated series of decisions by editors that rested on many factors, market-driven, political and personal. To a certain degree, the journey was guided by those decisions. But serendipity was unavoidable.
A reader who had never entertained a thought on Central Asia might, in the course of the daily news journey, pass an impulsive hour in a feature in Afghanistan. The wandering eye and the curious mind could be drawn to anything, and no editor, now matter how astute, ever anticipated their halting points perfectly.
Any contrast between that old, leisurely and serendipitous newspaper stroll, and its new high-speed incarnation online, confronts us squarely with the central paradox of the Internet: endless possibility and shrinking delivery. Or put another way, the reality of "less" hidden in the promise of "more."
Nowhere is that paradox more evident than in the rising importance of two Internet tools for readers: "news profiles" and "hyperlinks."
The theoretical appeal of the news profile is irresistible. In response to a self-description by the Internet reader, measured in "preferred" topics, datelines and news genres – business, technology, international affairs, politics, sports, travel – an Internet service such as Yahoo, Google, AOL or Earthlink delivers a packaged compendium of the day's events.
But the contents are limited to those events that fit, very snugly, into narrow preconceptions about what articles are worth reading. The rest never make it onto the home or office computer screen. Serendipity plays no part.
Profiling is especially favored by younger, highly-educated and well-employed news consumers, the elite of the Internet Age, for whom time and efficiency are paramount concerns. Quite a few of the self-profiled work in New York's Financial District, and were prominent among the victims of September 11, 2001. Like the befuddled U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials who might otherwise have foreseen the 9-11 attacks, they probably never wandered into an account of the country that hosted and trained their killers.
The danger of linking is more subtle, because its promise of "more" seems so unambiguous.
Unlike the old newspaper story, whose use of headlines and the occasional set of italics or quote marks offered little more than sign-posting, online articles are heavily peppered with color-highlighted words and phrases that "link" us to select background essays.
At their best, these links do fill in blanks in our knowledge. Yet they also instruct us in what we should find important, rather than allow independent judgments drawn from context. At their worst, hyperlinks are an exercise in spoon-feeding.
THE END OF THE STORY
It doesn't take a degree in cognitive psychology to recognize another, implicit habit of the Internet reader that is altering the news landscape. Internet news is tailor-made for the short attention span, the quick information snack on the run. Its bread and butter is not that mainstay of the old newspaper – the story – it is the brief, pared-down dispatch.
The story, in the hands of a good reporter, was not so far afield from what oral epics had been in the time of Homer. Its words – accompanied by a few very carefully selected photographs -- did everything possible to pull the reader's imagination into the reality of a news event. A war story offered cogent descriptions of the weather on the morning of battle, the sound of shells screaming into a city and the cries of the wounded, the fierce heat and acrid smell of a tank bursting into flame. It was drama, with characters, plot, rising and falling action, all the narrative devices that compelled the engaged imagination of the public from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Bergman and Spielberg.
There's no room for any of that in an Internet dispatch. The effect is more than an impoverishment of readerly experience. It is a depiction of reality that eliminates almost everything – the nuance, the feel, the complexity – that makes a distant event real to our imaginations.
This is a way of saying that the reader – yes, you – is as much responsible for the decline of news as is the industry itself, and perhaps more. You want your information to be rapidly served, concise, immediately relevant and without cost. The results speak for themselves.
The news business is like a restaurant. No matter how talented and ambitious the chef, a kitchen can only serve what its clients are willing to eat – and pay for. If Internet Age news consumers want cheap fast food, that's what they'll get.
However much lip service we give to the notion that there's no such thing as a free lunch, it is the prevailing assumption on the demand side of the Internet news economy, an assumption that is reducing supply to starvation levels.
THE COST OF AN ILLUSION
With few exceptions, mostly in the world of business information – which has an intrinsic, measurable dollar value – media enterprises have found it impossible to wean the public away from the illusion that news gathering and delivery can be cost-free to news consumers. Even the powerful New York Times, the last comprehensive source of foreign news in the United States, has dropped its payment system for full Internet access. There weren't enough takers.
And even at the New York Times, the consequences of supplier starvation are proliferating. Two recent examples, chosen precisely because they took place on the remote margins of the world arena where global crisis ferments, will serve to illustrate the point.
On January 8, the Times published an article on an attempted presidential assassination in the Republic of the Maldives, which it described as "an island nation in the Pacific Ocean." One week later, citing Reuters – one of the world's leading press agencies – the Times reported a bloody terrorist attack, by Tamil Tiger insurgents, near the town of Moneragala "in north-central Sri Lanka."
The Maldives, which is faced with a growing tide of Islamic extremism, actually lies between Somalia and Sri Lanka, six time zones and thousands of miles distant from where the Times article placed them. As for Moneragala, it is in southeastern Sri Lanka, on the very opposite end from the location identified by both Reuters and the Times.
Harmless errors? If the Maldives were indeed in the Pacific Ocean, it would suggest that violent Islamic extremism is now extending itself to a part of the world where it has never been present before. As for Sri Lanka, the mistake implies that the Tigers are active only where they have always been active, in northern Sir Lanka's Tamil heartland. The reality, however, is that they are now striking all over the island, a major escalation of a religious and ethnic war that could eventually embroil India, Great Britain and the United States.
Neither error was corrected for nearly a full day, and in the end, the Maldives error was spotted by Times readers rather than editors.
Meanwhile, the gaffs were reproduced by thousands of online publications around the globe.
Government policy and worldwide public opinion are forged in the confusions bred by errors like this – and by the "free news" financial crisis that accounts for them. The staffing of overseas news bureaus has been cut to the bone under escalating budget pressures, as documented by World View in December. And home-office editorial teams, the final barriers against misinformation, are increasingly pressed beyond the limits of human capacity.
These are the costs that matter, the small errors that proliferate wildly and balloon into geopolitical miscalculations – circulated worldwide by a medium that worships speed but ignores standards, that borrows promiscuously from the conventional print and broadcast media while bankrupting them.
REINVENTING THE WHEEL
The terrible truth is that the entire structure underlying the gathering and reporting of news is crumbling. It will continue to do so, at great and perhaps fatal risk, until something is done to reinvent the media wheel – to renew the institutional structure that keeps journalism professional, and with it the consumer's recognition that quality is proportionate to cost.
The facile assertion today is that we have entered a brave new era of "open media " in which everyone is a journalist, there are no editors and all "reporting" carries the same weight. But the bones of the old structure -- the rigorous editing, the constant questioning, the respect that key media institutions earned and protected, the commitment to an objective assessment of that slippery beast "truth," the value placed on open-eyed experience in the field -- had concrete meaning.
Without that meaning, Democracy itself is at stake, because it is no more than an empty word without a vigilant and authoritative press and an informed public. For the moment, we are perilously close to having neither.
After Iowa And New Hampshire: The View From Abroad
1/9/2008
In at least one, mutually embarrassing way, the American and foreign media stand united Wednesday: After the New Hampshire Primary, they all have egg on their faces.
Like their U.S. counterparts, foreign journalists and editorial writers spent the post-Iowa weekend filing political obituaries on Hillary Clinton, alongside coronations of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. Wednesday, the collective blush of chagrin is as acute in Tokyo and Berlin as it is in New York and San Francisco, Senator Clinton is back atop the foreign charts, Huckabee is all but forgotten and Obamamania has yielded to a reality trip.
If that all sounds very familiar to American ears, it's because a new and virulent form of international pack journalism has emerged in America's endless presidential campaign. Never in memory have so many reporters from so many corners of the Earth paid so much attention – and so early – to a political event beyond their own national borders. Nor has there ever been such a broad overseas consensus on what these elections mean, and (reading between the lines), how the rest of the world would like to see them end.
Put simply, it comes down to a choice between John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
STAGGERING INTEREST
The level of foreign interest in the primaries is downright staggering. The BBC and the Economist from Britain, France's Le Monde, Germany's Der Spiegel, Doha-based Al Jazeera, Japan's Mainichi Shimbun and Russia's RIA-Novosti are among scores of newspapers and press agencies that have dispatched entire teams of reporters onto the primary road, and created special sections on the U.S. elections that are updated daily.
The most notable commonality in this otherwise disparate group is its pronounced emphasis on a two-horse version of the Democratic race – so much so that the GOP results often seem little more than footnotes. After both Iowa and New Hampshire, every foreign newspaper surveyed by CBS5 World View featured enormous photos of senators Obama or Clinton on its front page, and in most the name of the Republican victor appeared only in a small subhead.
"There is no mistaking the listlessness among the (Republican) faithful," the Japan Times observed on the eve of its New Hampshire coverage. "A key category to watch is voters who consider themselves independent, an increasingly powerful bloc. Iowa suggests that they want change and look to Democrats to achieve it."
Germany and France have fielded two of the largest primary campaign teams. The candidates respective web page "appearances" in those countries, produced by a Google search as of Monday, is typical of a global pattern. Obama was the overwhelming leader, alluded to in nearly nearly 1.7 million pages in French and German. Hillary was a runaway second with 720,000, John Edwards a very distant Democratic third with less than 230,000.
Among Republicans, no candidate achieved more than a quarter of Obama's total, apart from a sudden spike to 350,000 in German and 139,000 in French for Huckabee, most of which were linked to Iowa-datelined articles asking "Who is he?" Mitt Romney came in at a total of 370,000, Rudy Giuliani at 270,000, and John McCain – who went on to win the Republican primary the Tuesday – a meager 168,000.
IF THE WORLD COULD VOTE
What the foreign press is saying, as much as how often, speaks volumes about this election. It explains, unambiguously, the media tilt toward Democrats.
Abroad, the administration of George W. Bush and his Republican White House is regarded – on the right and left alike – as an unmitigated catastrophe, marked by cynicism, the willful embrace of ignorance in foreign policy, and gross incompetence in management.
Last April, a survey conducted by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org found that large majorities of respondents around the globe now reject a leading role for the United States in international problem-solving. The study included polls in China, India, Indonesia, Russia, France, Thailand, Ukraine, Poland, Iran, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Armenia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, representing 56 percent of the Earth's population.
Whether these findings please or infuriate Americans, they color most foreign perspectives on the current presidential race.
"After the bad years of President George W. Bush, many around the world are hoping that America will return to virtue and peace," according to Der Spiegel, one of the most respected publications in Europe.
"At a school regional Speech Contest, circa 1958-9, I quoted from Abraham Lincoln 'With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives me to see the right,'" a South African wrote in a blog exchange published by Al-Jazeera. "What has happened to that America, I ask?"
Hence the disproportionate attention to two candidates, both Democrats, who invoke the legacies of two revered former presidents: John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
If it is hard to overstate the fierce hostility that Bush provokes among foreigners, it is even harder to exaggerate their affection for the memory of Kennedy and their respect for the more recent performance of Clinton.
In my travels as a correspondent over the past 35 years, I found tattered magazine portraits of JFK hanging on the walls of thatched huts in Asia and Africa, and countless books about him on the shelves of Russians, Eastern Europeans and Africans. The public park in the small Italian town where I now live is named for JFK and his brother Bobby. People still quote his words, translated into their own languages, to visiting Americans. They are still moved by them.
Bill Clinton -- who danced rings around a Republican Congress presided over an America that was the economic and technological wonder of the world during the 1990s, balanced its budget, brought the war to an end in ex-Yugoslavia and came painfully close to forging peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- would be handily re-elected President if he could run and foreigners could vote for him.
Together, Kennedy and Clinton symbolize two hallmarks of the American character that have captivated the rest of the planet since the time of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Eloquent idealism and sound, practical good sense -- the insistent belief in the possibility of a better future, and a fierce determination to get things done.
It doesn't take much political acumen to divine which of the current candidates most clearly represent these virtues today – even without the fascinating prospect that a black or a woman might be elected president of a country long viewed as a bastion of racism and backwardness.
POETRY OR PROSE?
Hillary isn't Bill, as she herself consistently points out. But competence is unmistakeably her strong suit, and beyond the borders of the United States she carries the promise of an America that can once again achieve difficult goals, and persuade others to follow her lead.
When Clinton appeared on television Iowa, "the cameras focused on the people surrounding her. Former president Bill Clinton; his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright; his favorite general, Wesley Clark," wrote Shmuel Rosner Chief U.S. Correspondent of the Israeli daily Haaretz. "To the Israeli viewer, the image sent a message of reassurance: This is who we are, the nice people from the 1990s."
Germans "would prefer to hand one of the most important jobs in the democratic world to someone who does more than just spread feel-good sentiment, who has a few more scars, whose career was built on measurable decisions," the Süddeutsche Zeitung editorialized. "Hillary Clinton would be the right candidate for that – even if she seems boring compared to Obama."
But the contrast between boredom and inspiration does little justice to the far-flung debate launched by the 2008 American election, or to the unprecedented intensity with which it is being followed.
"If Obama becomes president, there would certainly be impact all over the globe," a viewer in Nepal told Al Jazeera. "The mindset, the way of thinking, his view of the world… is certain to be different. He would understand the pain of those with less authority and power…"
For Rome's La Repubblica, Obama is il Kennedy nero – "the black Kennedy" – while Milan's rival Corriere della Sera calls him "the Lincoln of our times." Elsewhere overseas, the senator from Illinois has been favorably compared to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the late German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the patron saint of peaceful coexistence and reconciliation for Europeans.
"Obama embodies America's yearning for political reconciliation at home and abroad," agrees Der Spiegel, even as it worries about his vagueness on some issues. "Americans are tired of the current administration's aggressive rhetoric. They want reconciliation, not war. They want a harmonious society, not a divided one."
The rest of the world sees it remarkably the same way, and like American Democrats, is torn by a choice between the heart and the head – between the hope embodied in youthful eloquence, and the longing for a steady hand. "You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose," Senator Clinton famously commented, arguing that her own steely resolve and experience will carry the day.
But "you cannot, in American politics this year, cut straight to the prose," counters the BBC's Justin Webb. "She still needs to find the poetry somehow, somewhere."
The Internet & Foreign News, Part 1: How We Report
12/13/07
There were no fax machines or cell phones. Conventional long distance telephone calls were nearly unknown. Above all, there was no Internet: no email, no search engines, no news forums.
This was foreign reporting in much of the world three decades ago, when I was a young journalist in China and Southeast Asia.
News gathering today has been transformed beyond recognition. It is less costly and far more efficient. But something crucial has been lost along the way, something essential to our ability to find meaning in a confusing universe.
Thanks to the Internet and its tools, more knowledge lies at the disposal of more people today than at any moment in history. Yet the paradox is that we appear to be growing more ignorant, more indifferent to broad knowledge and serious inquiry, with each passing day – a crisis that is at its most perilous in the realm of foreign news coverage, born of our technology-driven withdrawal from the lonely, insistent pursuit of direct experience.
LOST IN CHINA
China, prior to the mid-1980s, was a voyage to another planet, the acid test of a reporter's ability to weather loneliness and think outside of the proverbial box. To cover China then meant severing the ties that bound you to the world you knew, and like an infant learning to walk, confronting another one step-by-step.
At any given moment in those years, there were probably no more than 25 fulltime western journalists in the country. A few – the correspondents of the New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Der Speigel and other media giants – were based in Beijing, the capital, and had official press credentials, which took forever to arrange and only made reporting harder. The accredited elite were walled up in a prison of carefully limited assignments, monitored by government "information officers" whose actual role was to suppress information. For that reason, most of us remained uncredentialed, wandering China on tourist visas in search of our stories. If we got to know each other, to exchange contacts and ideas, it was in chance encounters on the road.
The only research bank was the one you carried in your head, augmented by facts acquired on the spot. You wrote in longhand -- a typewriter would have announced your profession and attracted the Gong An, the security police. Then you smuggled your copy to Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai, where friends at a press agency discreetly shipped it out by telex, a technology that had scarcely changed since World War One.
You hoped the story would be legible when it arrived, if it arrived. You hoped the editors would use it. It might be several months before you spoke to them, after dozens of articles had been sent into the void.
By today's standards, our efforts were inefficient, unscientific and primitive. But at their best, those 25 reporters, working blind, produced 25 utterly different stories every week. Slowly, and with the kind of ground-level journalism that rests on gut instinct and full immersion, the contours of Planet China took shape in the western press.
THE FAILED REVOLUTION
This, by contrast, is reporting in 2007, not only in China but worldwide: Connectivity writ large. The buzz of the Blackberry. The eyes trained on emails or text messages. A constant surveying of what is on the Net today, and what has been there over the past couple of weeks. Effortless visits to Wikipedia and Google for research and reassurance.
Almost everyone is accredited because there isn't much choice. Visa requests are googled by consulates nowadays, and if your name turns up on newspaper bylines, forget about a tourist visa. There is no hiding your profession in the Internet Age.
Nothing would more foolish than to dismiss, across the board, the value of the new technology and the immense possibilities it opens. But where, in practical newsroom terms, is the revolution it ought to have ushered in? Where is the globalization of knowledge promised by a globalized media network?
The dirty secret of Internet news is that it generates a microscopic proportion of the original reporting it offers. The rest is plucked whole from the archaic, shuddering conventional press, which is in precipitous retreat from international coverage.
Between 1983 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a University of California media study, the space accorded to foreign reporting by U.S. newspapers declined by 80 percent. Over the same years, the ranks of fulltime foreign correspondents diminished to a shadow of what they had been prior to the Internet.
In 2006, the Christian Science Monitor 's Jill Carroll contacted 20 leading U.S. newspapers and two large press syndcates, asking how many of their reporters were based abroad. The total came to 108, responsible for covering the entire world, with 60 representing just two publications, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Time Magazine had 33 foreign correspondents in 1989, and 24 in 2001. In the same period ABC News cut the number of its foreign bureaus from 17 to seven. In 1970, CBS News had 24 foreign bureaus and correspondents in 44 countries. Today it has eight foreign correspondents working out of three bureaus.
"The situation is as bad, if not worse, in Europe," a former high-ranking editor at Agence France-Presse says. "Hundreds of experienced foreign reporters have lost their jobs in the past few years alone."
In 2000, the industry-funded Project on the State of the American Newspaper found that one third of all foreign correspondents worked for a sole publication, the Wall Street Journal. A Project for Excellence in Journalism survey of 16 major dailies in 2004 concluded that the percentage of front-page stories on foreign affairs was only half the figure for 1987 – notwithstanding the explosive increase in terrorism and the war in Iraq.
Is it any wonder that the West was unprepared for the shock of September 11, or unable to make sense of its continuing ripples? Is there any question but that we will be even more unprepared for the shocks to come?
INTERNET INCEST
The crisis isn't simply a matter of numbers, the shrinking ranks of foreign correspondents and the declining space accorded to foreign news. Of equal concern is the way that news is gathered and reported, the "how it's done" that leads to the "what we know "– and more, what we don't know.
For reporters 30 years ago, the China beat – or its equivalent in Latin America, Southeast Asia or Africa – was an all-encompassing, all-consuming reality. Lost in the mysterious intricacies of another land and culture, cut off from all that was familiar, we stumbled haphazardly toward our own, independent conclusions. "Home" was the distant void where our stories were telexed.
Today, many chroniclers of the foreign scene "travel" without ever leaving home, literally as armchair blogsters or figuratively as hyper-connected correspondents glued to their cellphones and laptops. In either case, the source data, the substitute for raw experience, comes mostly from the same place, the virtual universe of the Internet.
The results are also nearly the same: journalists who picture the rest of the world from within the confines of their own frame of reference, a frame that is often more vividly present, thanks to 21st century communications, than the physical landscape beyond their hotel room door and the smells and sounds in its streets.
The powerful tug of the familiar isn't new; it reflects a natural human impulse, summed up in the adage that "all journalism is a form of autobiography." What is new, however, is the ability to move about in the larger world without severing those autobiographical constraints or stretching them.
Indeed, the Internet has given birth to a kind of collective media autobiography – I don't know what else to call it – as reporters everywhere are trained in the same technologal environment, employ the same self-referential research tools, and consult each other's work online before committing their thoughts to virtual paper.
Reporting, in its Internet guise, is incestuous. The entire transaction is conducted within the same family of interests, facts and preconceptions.
Take a spin through Google News, which is now the chief provider of information for millions. The articles featured on its site are selected by a robot editorial program that trolls the web, picking out the most frequently repeated stories and angles – the concerns that already monopolize our attention.
The appearance is a vast expansion of the media gene pool, with Google's robot editor directing us to hundreds of articles on a single major event, extracted from newspapers and magazines on every continent. But the reality, on closer inspection, is incest.
The vast majority of those stories are clones of each other, with mind-numbingly scant differences in the range or content of what's reported in Beijing or Moscow, Buenos Aires or Chicago, Bamako or Riyadh. The scope of our potential interests is trimmed down to the barest of common denominators: what we already know, and more alarmingly, what we already think about it, endlessly repeated.
Reporters, no less than their readers, are faithful disciples of this system, even as its free supply of information whittles away the circulation of their newspapers – and with it the money that finances their own budgets. They learn, if they want to survive, that the articles meeting the robot's approval are invariably brief, shorn of independent analysis and skimpy on background.
As far back as the 1950s, the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that each new generation of technology imposes its own inherent limitations and possibilities on the content of news. "The medium," he insisted in his most celebrated observation, "is the message." Although he died in 1980, before the triumph of the Internet , McLuhan would surely have noted that speed, brevity and the short attention span are its defining hallmarks.
One consequence is that the story as story – a narrative, in which reporters aspired to put their readers at the center of an event, to confront them firsthand with its terrible complexities – is in danger of vanishing, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of short takes and oversimplification.
The jury is still out on the longterm prospect. The Internet has been a significant part of our lives for for less than 15 years, and the final verdict on what it will mean for news, for a deeper understanding of the world, has not yet been rendered. But at the moment, the outlook is profoundly troubling.
Coming: PART TWO: HOW WE READ