On April 8, the College of LS&A hosted the annual Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professorship in Journalism Lecture, featuring Professor Graham Griffith and his presentation “American Media’s Greatest Misses of the Twenty-First Century: A look at Journalism During Periods of Crisis.” The event began at 6:00pm in the Amphitheatre of the Rackham building, following an hour long reception in the West Conference Room.
Griffith began his speech by telling the audience that as the University’s Visiting Professor in Journalism, he has lately been trying to “act like a professor,” but would be “giving this talk as a journalist.” He then proceeded to outline the basic tenants of his theory on journalism’s role in a democratic society, which he referred to as his “biases.”
“The role of journalism in a democracy is to help people make sense of the world in which they live,” he stated. “At no time is this role more important than in times of crisis.” Griffith went on to explain that this does not mean that the media ought to play a role in predicting or preventing future disasters, rather, it should look to simply provide news consumers with the information they need to understand a crisis if and when it occurs.
With that being said, Griffith argued that the American media essentially dropped the ball when it came to the three domestic crises which have come to define the first decade of the 21st century; i.e. the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial collapse at the end of the decade. Griffith spent the rest of the presentation by individually discussing each of these three events.
Showing the audience CNN’s live video footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Griffith noted that in this case, the American media was simply unprepared “to analyze and report the issues” surrounding the way the United States is perceived by the foreign world. Following the 9/11 attacks, Griffith notes that the media was completely unable to answer George Bush’s famous question “Why do they hate us?”
According to Griffith, the media’s lack of preparedness was primarily due to a massive decrease in foreign news coverage throughout the 1990s. Instead of reporting on critical developments in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the American media chose to focus its attention on frivolous domestic issues like the O.J. Simpson trial, the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “All of this coverage and to what end?” lamented Griffith. “Did all of these stories help us understand our world better in any way?”
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