Intellectual Autobiography for Graduate Class

I remember my first camera. My grandfather gave it to me along with it a life of inspiration. It was this beat up old thing that he dragged from Shanghai to Sydney. It had a crankshaft that had to be manually dialed and was best loaded in the dark. I loved that camera. My first print off of it was an empty Coke bottle with a cowboy hat tilted on the top of it. I shot it in black and white in front of some garbage cans on my back doorstep. I don’t know how, at that age, I was able to capture classic Coca-Cola and capitalism at its best but am amazed at my own observations. I continued to shoot a lot through middle school and high school. I applied to a highly competitive photography program at a technical school my senior year and was accepted. I learned black and white and E6 processing, portrait photography, hand-painting and digital restoration. It was a busy year but there was something that happened in that class I will never forget.

It was a darkroom day for me in school, which means I would spend all day making prints. I started early and made a decision not to listen to any form of music or radio. I actually work best in complete silence. A few hours had elapsed and my professor came in and shouted the twin towers had been hit. I wasn’t sure what she meant by this. It sounded important. I left the dark room and went down the hall where the rest of my class had convened. I watched as the second tower fell. I knew at this point it was New York and 2 planes had flown into the World Trade Center. I didn’t know where it was in relation to anything. I didn’t know who was to blame or where the attack came from. According to the TV it was one of the darkest hours of American history and I had been in a dark room.

I spent the next weeks engulfed in news. I watched the towers fall over and over again. I enrolled at a journalism program at the University of Oklahoma and received an internship at The Oklahoma Daily. I wanted to do photojournalism. I wanted to tell a story with my images. I started at the photo desk testing the waters in print journalism, unsure of my abilities. I spent quiet a bit of time in the newsroom. I became eager in my photography and wanted to add a writing aspect to it. We had such a strong staff and excellent set of writers and copy editors it was difficult to really grasp what could be done differently. In a newsroom the only way to get your voice heard was to have a louder voice then everyone or a more creative one. The podium was the paper. Day in and day out writers proved their place.

The great thing about a student publication is white space. It had to be filled and an editor needed inches and not just ideas. One night I was sitting out with my managing editor discussing my next step. I had been throwing around the idea of a food column for sometime now. I knew a lot about food having grown up as a chef’s daughter, raised in a cooking school. The Managing Editor suggested I go and speak with the Entertainment Editor and “pitch” this idea of mine. I asked him what I should call it and he said “well how ‘bout Lindy’s Leftovers.” And it stuck. The food column became a relative success. The Editor of the paper really liked it and suggested I expand on it. I did expand and eventually became the Entertainment Editor a few years later. I wrote for multiple sections of the paper and took photos at football games to court appearances. I had a very good run at the paper and it molded a lot about what I feel journalism is and should be today. I met many interesting people and most of my closest friends today are people from that paper.

One Semester I decided to study abroad in Spain. A few weeks before I was to leave there was a terrorist attack on the train system in Madrid. The trip was cancelled. I quickly found a trip to Costa Rica in its place. I finished my minor and traversed most of Central America on that trip. I fell in love with the culture and the people. When I came back I enrolled in a class called International Relations in Latin America taught by Charles Kenney. This class forever changed the way I look at US intervention. We read Talons of the Eagle by Peter H. Smith. Since the Monroe doctrine, the US has intervened in almost every country in Latin America. They have intervened almost 3 dozen times (Smith). I look at those events and I wonder if they were covered by the broadcast media. Crisis in Latin America doesn’t make the evening news today. Did it then? What have we missed along the way? And what else isn’t being covered. I found out more on my next trip.

I enrolled in a study abroad program in London focusing on British media studies. This trip positively changed my life. I spent the summer focused on the disintegration of American media. Our class had a meeting with Tom Fenton author of Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News and the Danger to Us All where he talked about tracking stories about Al Queda for more than a decade and not reporting it because network news execs didn’t think it was news worthy (1). He believed Americans had been suffering from a “news gap” and 9/11 was the result. Fenton said journalist could be held just as accountable as any government agency (3). He believes we need more and better news. “Our lives depend on it,” he said.

We also traveled to Paris and met with Jim Bittermann, Senior European Correspondent for CNN News. We gathered in his apartment on one of his days off and discussed a myriad of topics but mostly the downsizing of foreign correspondents and News bureaus abroad. The numbers were frightening. CNN used to have close to 300 corespondents in Europe and now they are lucky to have Jim and a few others. Bittermann shared experiences with us of covering two papal transitions, the gulf wars, NATO Air strikes on Kosovo, and the death of Princess Diana among many many other things.

I spent some time at the British Broadcasting Center (BBC) in London where we went over story structure and video synthesis. The BBC doesn’t put a time limit on a story some pieces can be 15 minutes long. In America news packages range from one to three minutes and have very fast cuts they usually don’t stay with one image for very long. They take the time to tell the story and let the video do the talking. Our group also spent some time at Associated Press Television (APTN). They are largely becoming more and more responsible for all the worlds’ video. This puts a fierce monopoly on the market and has caused some strain in the industry. This trip really made me think about the decline of the American news media and its effect on society.

One of the other students in London and former Daily writer introduced me to television. He had decided he was going to do an entertainment show on public television in Oklahoma. He asked me to be his co-host and producer. At the time I was manage editing and writing at a local magazine (another former daily writer asked me to come on board). I had a lot on my plate but agreed. I fell in love. I spent the next year in front and behind the camera producing local news and entertainment pieces. Shortly there after, I applied for on camera job down in Texas as a small town reporter. I wanted to apply everything I had learned in Europe for my tiny broadcast. It turned out it wasn’t everything I had hoped for. This was a good thing though because it pushed me to move to New York and apply at CBS News.

I wanted to see how an American network functioned and be “embedded” with what many in fly-over country would call the “liberal” media. My time at CBS has been my second education. I worked very hard as a broadcast associate to get on the foreign desk. I felt I had something to offer and was very interested in international news. Coincidentally my job was to monitor feeds from APTN and cut video of important international events. I became a filter for our own video we put in pieces and delivered to affiliates. For example, I would work with the network desk to get video out of Pakistan when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. I was instrumental in our own accusation of the video of Saddam Hussein’s death sentence being executed in Baghdad. I’ve seen countless hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, weddings, funerals, elections and roadside bombings.

At one point we were covering several roadside bombings a day. It became so familiar it almost went unnoticed in the news. I decided to take a class at NYU, Iraq: Anatomy of a Conflict. It was taught be Michael Soussan who was a whistleblower at the UN for the Oil for Food Program. This class was really unbelievable. We had such a diverse group of students who really were set out on understanding why we were occupying Iraq. I took away a lot from that class and one in particular was an interest in graduate school. I thought about studying politics or international studies but I find that my mind always goes back to media.

My father, son of my camera weilding grandfather, who is also a great inspiration in my life gave me a book once by Hugh Hewitt In, But not of, he said “recognize that the choices and habits of your school years will become those of your life”(Hewitt 43). I feel like I generated positive habits in my undergraduate years and plan to accomplish more in my graduate years. I would like to study corporate responsibility to inform the public on issues that effect their security and compensation. My time abroad and in the newsroom has made me more aware of the treats our society faces due to a lack of information. I’m hoping to research these ideas and develop a project to visually show these Fenton “News Gaps”.

Bibliography:

Hewitt, Hugh. In, but Not Of : A Guide to Christian Ambition. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Limited, 2003.

Fenton, Tom. Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All. New York: ReganBooks, 2005.

Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle : Dynamics of U. S. -Latin American Relations. New York: Oxford UP, Incorporated, 1999.