All free speech systems are works in progress: interview

CL: The main difference I think is economic and have to do with audiences.  Local media are often hyper-local, since that's what people want to know about - their own neighborhoods, not the goings on in Washington or Tehran.  And people consume much more local than national media.  Our national media run the gamut from very good (eg, the NYTimes) to very bad (FOX News), but the difference there is, to me, economic. Each of those two media serve a small but well-paying audience.  That market is only so big, and at the local level it is often too small to sustain anything of quality.

KZ: What are the main features and qualities of being a journalist in the United States? How should one's performance be so as to keep up with the stream of professional journalism and avoid falling behind in contest with the other journalists? You have the experience of writing for several newspapers which are consider to be belonging to the category of "mainstream media". What standards does a journalist need in order to secure a berth in such mediums? Do mainstream media investigate the journalists ideologically in order to hire them for cooperation?

CL: The qualities one needs depend, I think, on the work one does.  Many "prominent" journalists in the US, for example, have never spent a day in journalism school. Many also have poor reporting skills and poor ethics, too, though many are also exemplary. If your primary business is entertainment (FOX News), then reporting skills matter much less than personality does.  If your business is highly specialized information with high market value (financial news perhaps), then you need research skills and real knowledge about your field.  Assuming one is serious about news, however, the skills one needs today now include a host of production skills we did not used to worry about. So, for example, if you're in Cairo right now it's not enough to send back written copy. You need to be able to shoot and edit your own video, gather and edit audio, write for the Web and the newspaper, and to a TV stand-up from the hotel lobby. You need, in other words, to have at least the skills of the so-called "citizen journalist" with his cell phone and twitter account.

I personally believe - and here I am at odds with the tradition of US journalism - some real knowledge of history, economics, natural and physical sciences.  It is shameful that so many of our national media in Egypt right now are there to interview not Egyptians, but other Americans and Westerners.  It's because most reporters there know little or nothing of 20th-century Egyptian history or that of the region, except in the most sketchy ways.  You see the same thing in coverage of, say, global warming, where reporters - in the name of being objective - think it's okay to know nothing about the actual science of their subject.  This is unprofessional and irresponsible, it seems to me, but it is very, very common.

 KZ: What's in your view the main responsibility of a professional journalist? What qualities and characteristics make a professional, responsible, committed and reliable journalist?

CL: This is a question for the ages, so I'll give you a short answer.  The responsibility of the professional journalist is much the same as that of the professional scholar:  to give evidence.  It is never to think that because something is possible it is either plausible or probable.  It requires one to investigate, to be self-consciously open to other points of view, to study one's subject. 

And on the ethics side - it is to remember above all that free speech has a cost (as, in economic theory all "free" things do; if something is free that means its cost has been shifted to someone else). In journalism, the cost of free speech can be born by someone else who is publicly humiliated or ruined, a community harmed, a country undone.  To me, ethics means remembering that God does not think I'm special, and I could be completely wrong and should be humble in case I am.
 

KZ: When we look at the list of the world newspapers by circulation, we find that Japan has occupied the first five ranks. What does this fact signify? What qualities do the Japanese newspapers have that have made them so powerful and influential?

CL: Some cultures are well known as 'reading' cultures and others as 'visual' ones.  Americans get most of their news from TV, for instance.  The Japanese are a reading people. It is also true that Japanese media post-WWII were developed as mostly national media, designed to serve the entire nation.

KZ: If you were to analyze and investigate the problems of newspapers and media outlets in the developing world, what main points would you have identified? Why don't the people in these countries have an inclination and appetite for reading the newspapers and magazines?

CL: In the developing world the problems are many.  One is the lack of civil society organizations, particularly in post-conflict or post-authoritarian states, where civil society was largely stamped out.  A second is that these countries often have media laws left over from the old authoritarian or colonial regime, and those laws tend to be oppressive. A third is that these countries often have large and dominant state media sectors - in TV and print - and they essentially take over the market for advertising and other revenues, making it all but impossible for private media to sustain themselves.  A fourth is that many developing countries are poor, and poor people aren't going to spend money on newspapers that they need for bread.  A fifth is that many developing countries have high illiteracy rates, and so TV and radio are much more important than print. This is the case over much of Latin America and Africa, for example.

There is a well-known economic principle called "rational ignorance."  It says that rational people in functioning markets do NOT, as much as we might think they should, consume public-affairs news and information.  They would rather be entertained.  And that's because they know, or think they do, that their participation in electoral politics will make little difference to the outcome of an election.  And so it is more efficient (rational) for them to spend their time and money doing other things than becoming well informed citizens.  Obviously if large numbers of people reach this conclusion, democracy can become hollow and dysfunctional. As it often is.