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THE CENTER FOR WAR, PEACE, AND THE NEWS MEDIA |
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With a $40,000 inaugural grant from the Proteus Fund, the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media moves to BU with a burst of energy and innovative programs. The non-profit, non-partisan center, created by Robert Manoff, now a COM professor, at New York University in 1985, came to BU in the fall of 2005. The center fosters comprehensive news coverage of international issues to create a more knowledgeable citizenry and has trained over 125,000 journalist-participants from thirty-seven countries, published journalism materials in eleven languages, and raised over $30 million to fund its U.S. and international programs.
COM Dean John J. Schulz sees a strong relationship between the center and the University, one that benefits both institutions. “Having known Robert Manoff and the outstanding work of his center,” Schulz says, “I was especially keen to respond when the opportunity arose to bring him and the center to Boston University.”
According to Manoff, much of the grant will go toward the center’s Global Beat Website, which provides assistance for journalists and others by culling important news and analysis pieces from outlets around the world on everything from the election of Hamas to the war in Iraq, nuclear weapons in North Korea, and the ongoing political crisis in Zimbabwe. Schulz notes the Website’s importance: “The Global Beat Website gets thousands of hits each month from serious researchers and journalists all over the world.” Journalists, Manoff says, are often pressed for time, trying to compile information and meet tight deadlines, and are unable to sift through a wide variety of international sources on their own.
Another key piece of the center that will benefit from the Proteus grant is the Global Beat Syndicate, which produces op-ed pieces sent to over 400 American news outlets via the Knight-Ridder News Service. The syndicate, which Schulz edits, usually sends out four or five pieces per week to newspapers around the world, mostly on international issues. “We try to get new voices into the debate — especially international experts outside the Euro-American sphere — so that Americans can be exposed to the full range of views on important international issues,” Manoff explains.
He is also excited about the opportunities at Boston University for helping student journalists develop expertise in covering international issues. Changing models for how news and analysis is collected and delivered has been a consistent focus of the center over twenty years. “We’ve done a lot of work in developing new paradigms of international reporting,” Manoff says, “ideas about new ways of organizing and managing news organizations so that they can be more effective in their coverage of the world, new ways of thinking about what kind of stories should be written and how they should be written, new models of reporting, and also new ways of educating journalists and some new ideas about curricula.” In one of his classes, Manoff is teaching journalism students some anthropology to prepare them for reporting on a world where other cultures and religions are increasingly at the center of not only foreign but domestic news.
A recent example of how the center supports journalists covering complex issues with international implications involves the 2006 military budget. In conjunction with other news organizations, the center held a briefing in Washington on the military budget attended by journalists from Dow Jones, the Copley News Service, Knight-Ridder, Defense News, and other major organizations. Included in the report by Manoff was a short summary of the center’s findings over its twenty years of studying how the media covers defense, budget, and related issues. “So this gets put in front of journalists, and they can see it’s not someone pounding on them — ‘you guys did a bad job, you did this, you did that,’” Manoff says. “Instead, it’s an invitation to engage with us in a dialogue, in a colloquy, about how you can do better.”
The war on terrorism is changing how news is covered. “This is such a multi-headed hydra of a story that you basically have to employ virtually every beat,” Manoff says. “On the one hand, you need investigative stories to look deeply into American policy, and the money-laundering network that Al-Qaeda uses, and so on. On the other hand, you need the most nuanced, most intellectually ambitious cultural reporting skills to understand, to help readers understand Islam.” To fully cover war on terrorism stories will, then, require a different editorial approach to ensure that all sides of this large and complex story are presented coherently.
Perhaps more than any other time since World War II, international issues are being debated in American newspapers and news outlets. As the scope of reporting has grown wider, the complexity and interrelationships of issues have increased. As Manoff sees it, training young journalists and offering a variety of international sources for those in the field will remain important in helping citizens remain engaged and informed. Noting September 11th, the war on terrorism, and the looming possibility of a bird flu pandemic, Manoff says, “the world doesn’t honor any country’s inclination to be left alone.”
— Nate Beyer
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