BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR - 'Schlepping' With Hillary

"The reporter who's been “schlepping” around with Hillary Clinton for eight years" PBS NewsHour 7/29/2016

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Finally, another installment in our Brief But Spectacular series, where we ask interesting people to describe their passions.

Tonight, we hear from New York Times political reporter Amy Chozick, who has been providing The Times with regular coverage of Hillary Clinton since her first presidential run in 2008.

AMY CHOZICK, The New York Times:  From the outside, it looks like, oh, you're covering Hillary Clinton, and it's like the most exciting news story of the year.

The day-to-day is a lot of, like, schlepping around to Holiday Inn Expresses, eating out of your lap in plastic containers on a bus, pretty grueling, not all that glamorous.

I had been a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo with The Wall Street Journal.  And my editors moved me back to the U.S. and they said, how would you like to cover Hillary Clinton?

I didn't know what a caucus was, which the Clinton people joked with me years later, that that's OK, they didn't know what a caucus was either.

And I saw Hillary Clinton's arc from thinking, oh, I'm assigned to Hillary Clinton, I'm riding this to the White house, to all of a sudden seeing her lose to Obama and also, when she was losing, become a very different type of candidate, less guarded, more willing to communicate with the reporters who traveled with her, just sort of having fun when it looked like she had nothing left to lose.

She would do this famous game that — the campaign trail, and that was rolling oranges down the aisle of the plane.  The press sits in the back, would write a question on the orange and roll it up to the front of the plane.  And then she writes her answer and rolls it back.

Well, my editor said, OK, that's enough.  We really need you to go be with the Obama campaign.  I saw him, just, you know, keep a crowd just raptured.  And my takeaway was that this guy is incredibly charming to a crowd of 50,000 people, and Hillary is incredibly charming to a crowd of five, you know?

And that's been a struggle for her current campaign.  It's a pretty historic phenomenon that this first female nominee of a major party has a predominantly female press corps covering her.  I don't think we think about it very much, you know, on a day to day, but it's certainly more female than 2008 or any of the press corps I have seen.

Writing a tough story about a candidate who you're going to see the next day, whose advisers you're going to be in very close contact with the next day, is inherently awkward.

With Hillary Clinton, I know she takes these things pretty personally, the coverage, but I also always think of her as one of those, like, kid's dolls that you punch and they bounce back up.  I mean, she has bounced back from so much difficult coverage, whether it's Whitewater, Monica.

I mean, you could — decades of coverage.  And I think that's very much formed her impression of the political media, rightly and wrongly.  And so there's not a lot she hasn't seen at this point.

My name is Amy Chozick, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on covering Hillary Clinton.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And you can watch more of our Brief But Spectacular series on our Web site.  That's PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.

RACE MATTERS - Newsroom Diversity

"What stagnant diversity means for America’s newsrooms" PBS NewsHour 12/15/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  As racial concerns continue to rise to the surface across America, is the media doing enough to tell the stories of people of color?  Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault speaks to Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute about the industry’s struggle with diversity.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT (NewsHour):  Race nowadays is all over the news media, not at least coverage of protests in places like Ferguson, Baltimore and New York.

But the media are also taking hits from critics, especially those who complain of a lack of fairness or consistency, again, when it comes to issues involving race.

Richard Prince is a journalist focusing on race and diversity in his thrice-weekly online column “Journalism.”  It runs on the Web site of the Maynard Institute, the sponsoring organization started in the wake of the mid-’60s riots and aimed at trying to correct the lack of stories relating to race and diversity.

We met Prince at the Newseum, a Washington, D.C.-based institution that’s home to examples of media committed to fairness and balance in their coverage of race and diversity.

Richard Prince, thank you for joining us.

RICHARD PRINCE, The Maynard Institute:  So glad to be here.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:  Your column carries a lot of articles about journalists who are themselves complaining about fairness in media.  What’s your take on the criticisms of media and their issues?

RICHARD PRINCE:  I don’t think there is any more criticism of the media than there has ever been.  It’s just that we get to hear it now and see it instantaneously.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:  Well, you’re a little younger than I am, but I remember the presidential commission that reported on the riots in the mid-’60s.  And it blamed the media for not having enough people or any people at all in the neighborhoods where people were simmering over few — lack of jobs, poor education, no opportunities.

And it said that you have got to get more African-Americans or people from those neighborhoods in the media.

What happened?

RICHARD PRINCE:  Well, since that time, there was a great push, as you say, after the Kerner Commission report of 1968.

All through the ’70s, diversity was a great buzzword.  And then in the ’80s, you started getting a backlash to affirmative action and that kind of thing.  Then you had the recession, which meant that newsrooms had to sort of tighten up and not hire as many people, start laying people off, and the Internet, which made things worse, because it took away a lot of the revenue base of newspapers particularly.

And so diversity sort of went off the table.  And so now we are sort of in a stagnant situation, where the — I think of newspapers, for example, and online outlets.  We have 13 percent of the newsrooms now are people of color, whereas the population has a third people of color.

So there’s a big gap there.

EGYPT - Non-Justice of a Dictatorship

"Egypt’s conviction of Al Jazeera journalists sparks international outcry" (Part-1) PBS NewsHour 6/23/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Elsewhere in the Middle East, three Al-Jazeera journalists learned their fate in a Cairo courtroom today, sparking an international outcry.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Tanks were deployed and tight security in place for the readings of the verdicts, after a five-month trial that was widely denounced outside Egypt as a sham.

JUDGE MOHAMED NAGY SHEHATA (through interpreter):  Seven years of maximum jail time.

JEFFREY BROWN:  The sentences for Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, a Canadian- Egyptian, Australian correspondent Peter Greste, and Egyptian Baher Mohamed, who received 10 years, led to pandemonium at the court; 17 co-defendants were also sentenced.  Fahmy is a former CNN producer who once helped the NewsHour’s Margaret Warner and crew escape an attack by a mob in Cairo

Today, he was yelling, “They will pay for this,” as he and the others were taken away.

His brother, Adel Fadel Fahmy:

ADEL FADEL FAHMY, Brother of Defendant (through interpreter):  This is clear-cut corruption; it is a corrupt and politicized case and everything is wrong in this case.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Fahmy’s family vowed to appeal, as did Peter Greste’s brother, Mike.

MIKE GRESTE, Brother of Defendant:  Wrong verdict.  I don’t — I don’t know how the judge came to that decision.  I would be very interested to hear his reasons for giving that verdict.  But it doesn’t make any sense.

JEFFREY BROWN:  The three journalists were arrested last December and accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood by reporting on civil strife in Egypt.  The Brotherhood had been banned as a terrorist group.

At the time, the journalists were working undercover because the government had accused Al-Jazeera of pro-Brotherhood bias.  Last week, the company terminated its operations in Egypt.  Al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar; the Gulf emirate is a political supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the network denies any charges of bias.

AL ANSTEY, Managing Director, Al-Jazeera English:  Today was a really grim day for journalists and for journalism.

JEFFREY BROWN:  It’s managing director spoke in Doha.

AL ANSTEY:  People who respect freedom of expression, people who respect basic freedoms should say, no, enough is enough.  Governments who deal with Egypt should recognize the injustice of what took place in Cairo today.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Official denunciations also poured in from around the world.  This was Secretary of State Kerry from Baghdad.

JOHN KERRY, Secretary of State:  Today’s conviction is obviously — it’s a chilling and draconian sentence.  And, you know, it’s deeply disturbing to see in the midst of Egypt’s transition.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Just a day earlier, Secretary Kerry visited Egypt, with word the U.S. is releasing $575 million in assistance that had been on hold, and that Egypt will be getting Apache helicopter gunships to fight insurgents in the Sinai region.

The secretary met with President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, among others.  Last year, the former army leader ousted Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and last month, he was elected president himself.  All the while, a crackdown on political opponents has intensified.  Alaa Abdel Fattah, a leader of the January 2011 revolution, was sentenced last week to 15 years for violating a ban on protests.

And, on Saturday, Mohamed Badie, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, had his death sentence upheld, along with nearly 200 supporters.

"Crackdown on Al Jazeera journalists helps government control Egypt’s narrative" (Part-2) PBS NewsHour 6/23/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The controversial convictions of three Al Jazeera journalists in Egypt are among the most high-profile cases in a general crackdown on dissent.  Jeffrey Brown talks to Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Michael Hanna of the The Century Foundation about the geopolitics behind the convictions and shifting U.S. policy toward Egypt.

REPORTERS - Risks of Being a 'One-Man Band'

"NewsHour’s Miles O’Brien on moving forward after an accident led to amputation" PBS NewsHour 3/7/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Miles O’Brien has traveled the world for the NewsHour, and at times to very dangerous places, as he did for his current series of reports from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.  The third installment in that series will air on Tuesday, the anniversary of the tsunami that destroyed it.

After leaving Japan, he traveled to the Philippines for other upcoming stories.  There, he dropped a heavy camera case on his left arm.  The injury became life-threatening.  And, during emergency surgery, Miles’ left arm was amputated above the elbow.

He’s now back home here.  And he joins us to talk about what happened, plus a little of Fukushima.

Miles, we are so glad to see you.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Judy, it’s good to be here.  It’s good to be anywhere.  Good to be alive.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Well, you know, people think reporting is a glamorous profession.  You were over in Asia reporting on your own.  You were, as you said, in Japan.  You were doing your own camera work, sound.  You were doing your own reporting.

You’re in the Philippines, and then this accident happens.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Yes.

You know, being a one-man band is — comes with its own set of risks.  Being a journalist comes with its own set of risks.  But I suspect if we had been talking about this before the accident, we would be thinking about perhaps a trip to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant or a war zone.

And, sometimes, it’s the heavy case filled with gear that you need to be careful of.  And that’s what I found.

Compartment Syndrome