There will be never be another Walter Cronkite

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Walter Cronkite, legendary news anchor for the CBS Evening News, died July 17. There will never be a figure in American journalism like him again. For 19 years, from 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was the news.

Since the rise of the Internet and cable news networks, the ability of one news network program to capture the attention of the majority of Americans has faltered.  The Pew Research Center for People & the Press found that as a source of presidential campaign news in the 2004 election, nightly network news was down 10 percent from 2000. Meanwhile, cable and Internet news were each up 4 percent, and comedy TV shows up 2 percent, and with people ages 18-25 this decline in traditional news usage was much more dramatic.

Pew Research hasn’t done a massive survey on media usage in the 2008 election, but I speculate that these trends have continued through the last election cycle. Considering the success of President Barack Obama’s online social networking campaign and fund raising strategy, I would say the flight to online information sources is staggering.

The trend toward fragmentation is not the only factor in the de-Cronkite-ization of the American news landscape. There is also the issue of a partisan press—a sea change in media behavior, as compared to the Cronkite ideal.

Cronkite was an authority on the news of the day, and he was a distinctly neutral one. There’s no way any news anchor on television today, regardless of network or show format, could sign off with, “And that’s the way it is.” Because cable news and blogs are much more likely to be supported by a political standpoint, their conclusions are much more likely to be biased.

In the 2004 Pew survey, 39 percent of Americans said, “news organizations are biased in favor of one of the two parties.” In 1987, only six years after Cronkite left the CBS Evening News, 62 percent of people surveyed found media coverage to be unbiased.

America is not unfamiliar with a politically biased press. Indeed, the first newspapers after the Revolution were sponsored by political parties and were considered mouthpieces. By 1789, the Federalist Party, the party of George Washington, had the Gazette of the United States on its side. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison of the Democratic-Republican Party urged the formation of the National Gazette, to counter the Gazette of the United States' political influence.

But by the mid-1900s, Americans were no longer familiar with a deeply partisan media. The expectation of an unbiased media is deeply ingrained and is taught without question to young journalists. But Cronkite and his unbiased,trustworthy delivery of the news have not been maintained in the popular media landscape. Cronkite has given way to the likes of Bill O’Reilly, who champions a point of view like no other. And then there are the political leanings of Fox News and MSNBC, both cable news networks who decided to wear their respective biased political leanings on their sleeve and were rewarded with higher ratings.

Sure, CBS, ABC and NBC all have their daily national newscasts, and they’re admirable, but they are not the behemoth of journalistic influence that Cronkite was. The current newscasts lack the monolithic audience, the glow of public trust, which Cronkite enjoyed. Walter Cronkite was an emblem of integrity and honesty that will be missed in journalism.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 22, 2009.

Tehran Spring

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tyrants who allow any small freedoms to their oppressed masses would eventually be in want of an army of tanks.

On August 21, 1968, such an army of tanks from Warsaw Pact countries crossed into Czechoslovakia to clamp down on a burgeoning democratic movement now known as the Prague Spring.  The thawing of USSR-mandated oppressions meant the freedom of speech, the freedom to move across borders, the freedom to engage in open debate and an economy focused on the needs of consumers instead of the government, led by Alexander Dubček, head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

But, Leonid Brezhnev (then leader of the USSR) knew that if you give oppressed people a hint of freedom, they’d take the lot if not violently run down. Under the guise of killing off bourgeois tendencies in Czechoslovakia under Dubček and under a policy eventually called the Brezhnev Doctrine, 200,000 troops and 2,100 tanks crossed the Czech border and dozens of people were killed in the invasion. Dubček was arrested, taken to Moscow and forced to take it all back.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must have been taking notes, for Iran has been repeating some history. In certifying the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad almost four weeks ago, Khamenei galvanized discontent from his oppressed masses. If you give a people elections, they generally expect those election results to be carried out.

The Tehran Spring is the new Prague Spring: In this morality play, Khamenei is Brezhnev, an all-supreme power with a vested interest in maintaining the tyrannical status quo. Meanwhile, opposition party presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi is Dubček, a leader who promises greater freedom and reform.

(And no, it’s not a perfect analogy, but just let go of the minor details. The parallels hold true even though Khamenei is the domestic supreme ruler of Iran and not the ruler of a multi-republic superpower like Brezhnev was. And they hold true even though Moussavi has not been elected to office and delivered on promises of greater freedom like Dubček had in 1968.)

The Iranian government has been shutting down contact with the West, expelling journalists and trying to keep protesters off Twitter.  Meanwhile, the government has acted in the streets, detaining 302 Iranians to date, subsequently releasing 78, and the confirmed death toll stands at 35 according to a running total kept by The Guardian.

And while there had been a lull in protesting, Iranians took to the streets of Tehran on July 10 yet again.  It takes more than Basij militia with batons, tear gas and the threat of being crushed by the government to stop the protests. If only there were tanks.

If the drama in Tehran plays out like Czechoslovakia in 1968, the protesters will be overwhelmed by military might. Moussavi will concede the election to Ahmadinejad, and the accusations of election fraud will go uninvestigated. And even worse, Iran will backslide into an even more oppressive era with more truncated freedoms.

In revolutions, it seems that the determining factor is the use of tanks against the pro-democracy folks. People are willing to risk tear gas, batons and arrest, but not being trampled by a tracked-and-armored battling vehicle. But, evidence points to the Tehran protesters having staying power and defying the historical expectation of defeat set by the Prague Spring.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

A case for alien invasion

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

If flying saucers arrived on Earth tomorrow, we should all prepare to cheer. Well, unless the little green men are intent upon world domination, then we should triumphantly blow them up with our scrappy ingenuity. And then cheer.

An alien invasion would ultimately cause the world to unite, and after defeating the other race, our little Earth would likely become a peaceful, “Star Trek”-like utopia.  All the hate, the genocide, the wars, would be a page in a violent history of intra-human fighting.

Humans are rather notorious for liking and trusting people they know or have something in common with while disliking and distrusting people who are foreign to them. In evolutionary psychology, it’s called in-group favoritism, and it explains a lot of human behaviors.

Throughout human history, humans have identified with other humans who are like them, creating “in-groups.” In the Pleistocene Epoch 1.8 million years ago, when early members of the genus Homo appeared, an “in-group” was the hunter-gatherer tribe to which a cave person belonged while “out-groups” were rival tribes.

Human-style rivalry is remarkable in one major way: we help other humans in our in-group who are not our kin. Evolutionarily speaking, this means that a human can gain some kind of gene survival advantage through cooperation with other humans. As early humans started developing technology and later, agriculture, this ability to share resources and cooperate led to larger and larger in-groups. A human is still more likely to cooperate with their family, but we have the ability to create broader in-groups of our own definition.

Today, this manifests itself in the creation of nation states, xenophobia and even sporting culture. Humans bond with other humans who are from their hometowns, share a religion or a political leaning. It explains why MU athletics insists upon not capitalizing Kansas — MU is an in-group, while kU is our rival out-group. In one 2003 study, Harvard University researchers found that college students at two rival colleges rapidly constructed their own university fellows as an in-group and the rival university students as an out-group.*

In the Pleistocene Epoch, it simply would have been too risky for an early human to trust another human from a competing tribe, and we hold onto that psychological relic to be wary of the unknown.

So, what has all this got to do with aliens?

If little green men from Mars were to be discovered, or to invade Earth, “Independence Day”-style, humans would very likely become one big in-group. We Earthlings, all 6 billion of us, would have a common enemy, someone else to call “other.” They will look different from us, have a different language, different technology and beliefs.

And not to mention, they will be from an entirely different planet. To wit, Missourians are divided by a baseball team rivalry based on a geographical distance of 250 miles. Being from space, in many ways, is the ultimate unknown to us. All of the factors that can create in-groups and out-groups among the Earth-bound would be inevitably overridden by a race of sentient beings from another planet.

Thus, the majority of the infighting and conflict between nations and states would end on Earth. The threat of extra terrestrial life will take precedence over mere human squabbles. The larger out-group conflict will take priority over all in-group human clashes. After all, the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” holds true.

The nations of Earth could start relating to each other much like states in the U.S. do: peaceful parts of a larger whole. The conflicts between different cultures, religions and races would also be de-prioritized as perceived out-group threats. Basically, humans wouldn’t fight so much. I don’t want to say that the ever-prophesized World Peace would come about, but maybe we’d give the United Nations more power and let go of petty differences that hinder useful diplomacy.

I think alien life is somewhere out there — to presume that Earth is the only planet in the vastness of the universe capable of sustaining life is a display of confounding conceit. When it is found, whether seen through a telescope we send through the galaxies or when it arrives here in flying saucers, humans will have some other intelligent species with which to contend and incentive to make Earth a peaceful place to live for us.

*The 2003 study, titled “Implicit Group Evaluation: Ingroup Preference, Outgroup Preference and the Rapid Creation of Implicit Attitudes,” by Kristin A. Lane, Jason P. Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University can be found by request here.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 8, 2009.

A life in letters is history repeated

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

THE BEACH — I had every intention of tackling “Infinite Jest,” the 1,000-plus-page masterwork by novelist David Foster Wallace this summer. The novel is the ultimate postmodern challenge to the avid reader: it’s very long and very complex with very serious and precise language.  I’ve made it through about 10 pages. I just couldn’t face the brain workout – my first year of graduate school has given it enough exercise.

I thought a retread of “Little Women” would be more my speed this summer. I am nothing if not a 5-year-old when it comes to books: I read my favorites over and over again, without remorse or boredom. And I love them every time. I am still upset every time, after all these years, that Jo March does not marry Teddy.

Nelson Mandela very famously wrote, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” Now, Mandela was surely talking about things much more profound than my incessant need to reread my entire library, but there is something about going back to words and stories that are always the same. The books are unchanged, but I am altered.

And so, instead of venturing into the literary unknown, I am staying in deceptively safe and known waters. But just because the water is safe doesn’t mean there isn’t risk of drowning: I found myself more than upset to discover I couldn’t even finish Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Holden Caulfield is a brat, and one who needs to take his meds, man up and learn to think in concise sentences.

And then, during a retreading of my all-time favorite book, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving, I was almost disinterested in its narrative drive (usually the appeal of all Irving’s books), which gave interminable focus to political ranting about the Reagan administration.

And most recently, I have been sucked into A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning book “Possession: A Romance.” This is one experience where I was not as appalled by my reaction. A deep satire of academia wrapped in a literary mystery and topped with a nerdy love story, I have found “Possession” to be funnier than I did before I entered graduate school. I guess spending my days immersed in research has changed my outlook more than I thought. And I am much more appreciative of the long passages of fictional Romantic-era poetry, having been through courses on Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

I suppose this is growing up. The way we experience stories through the years is bound to change and morph. And there are delights to be had in rereading books. The structure of sentences and the choice of words become more interesting when a reader can focus better on them. The foreshadowing becomes painfully and wonderfully apparent — it gives me chills to recognize small hints to the plot once I know what is going to happen.

And more than that, I am reminded of my former self. Although I experience the novels differently now that I am older, I can always remember why I so loved the book in the first place. It’s like time travel; I pick up “Anne of Green Gables” and I am again eight years old, tall and accident-prone. When lost in “The Joy Luck Club,” I am 15 and contemplating my family history. I read “The Lovely Bones,” and I am 17, making my own definitions of home.

And this is the real appeal of rereading my library until the covers fall off. It crystallizes my life experiences, makes growing up more comprehensible: my books are my biography.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 1, 2009.