Honduras and Iran: Essay Requirement for the School of Authentic Journalism

By Al Giordano

Today we announced the availability of 24 scholarships to attend an intensive ten-day session of this newspaper's School of Authentic Journalism, February 3 to 13 of 2010 on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The application for scholarships is ten pages long and includes an essay requirement.

The video above appeared on CNN last summer but was not filmed by the network. A citizen who had been on a bus to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to attend a protest against the military coup d'etat there took out his cell phone camera and began filming after soldiers stopped a caravan of buses and ordered everyone out of them. The soldiers - as the video discloses - then shot out the bus tires with their rifles.

In other words, the world would never have known this story had a regular citizen not videotaped it and then gotten the video to the network. This one scene represents the future of authentic journalism; a citizenry armed with its "weapons" (in this case a cell phone camera) and a will to break the information blockades. That's a big part of what we teach, in more advanced ways, at the School of Authentic Journalism: how to do this kind of work better, faster and with greater coherence.

Since the School is part of a larger international public teach-in on authentic journalism, I'd still like to share the application's essay description and its questions here, and invite you to add your own comments and thoughts on the questions it raises.

Essay Requirement

In June of 2009, in two different countries – Iran and Honduras - civil resistance movements emerged. The first against what many perceived as electoral fraud and the second against what many perceived as a coup d’etat. The regimes in both countries denied the charges and set about repressing, often violently, the protests. Both regimes engaged in heavy-handed press censorship and accused the resistance and also critical reporters of being the agents of foreign powers.

Reporters from BBC Persian and other media were deported from Iran. Reporters from TeleSur and other media were deported from Honduras. Internet access was often blocked or slowed inside both countries, as TV, radio and print media critical of the regimes saw their facilities seized, blocked or sabotaged.

And yet despite those efforts of censorship, images and words of the protests and their grievances succeeded in breaking the information blockade. Videos surfaced on YouTube and other online sites. People used cell phones to send text messages onto the Internet via Twitter and other portals. Bloggers and independent media narrated the story in spite of violent repression and threats against them.

And the international cable networks and other commercial media – unable or unwilling to report, many without reporters on the ground in these lands – ended up dependent on videos and images and audio recordings produced by citizens or independent media to tell the story. Without that work by media from below, the stories would not have been as fully seen or heard across the globe or inside those countries.

Your essay should answer two categories of questions:

1. If something like this happened in your country or another one while you were visiting, how would you apply your skills as a journalist or communicator to reporting the story? What media would you use? And what skills that you don’t have would you wish you had to do it most effectively?
2. The response of some news organizations – both corporate and independent - to these back-to-back events was to intensely report the resistance in Iran in glowing and positive terms while ignoring or attacking the resistance in Honduras. Others ignored or attacked the resistance in Iran while highlighting the Honduras resistance positively. In those cases, many cited their view that the Honduras resistance was somehow a tool of the Venezuelan government, or that the Iran resistance was somehow a tool of the US government. As a journalist, how do you sort that out? And does a civil resistance movement become illegitimate, or less legitimate, if it happens to resist against a regime that is also opposed by a foreign government?

Write your essay using as many or few words as it takes you to answer those questions.

If you'd like to apply for one of the scholarships, just send an email request to app@narconews.com (if you'd like the application in Spanish send it to sol@narconews.com).

And if you know any up-and-coming journalists or communicators of talent and conscience, please let him and her know about the scholarships and encourage him and her to apply.

Finally, you can see in the upper right hand corner of The Field our autumn fundraising drive graph. Even if you can't attend the school yourself, your help is needed to make sure that others can. It's an investment in a new generation of authentic journalists that will tangibly increase the quantity and quality of the news and commentary you read here at The Field, through Narco News and all the other publications that its alumni go forward to report from.

As Field Hands, you'll have a front row seat to the School, too, as for the first time we'll be videotaping its classes, lessons and discussions and making the highlights available for the global public, so everyone can literally tele-commute to its classrooms from wherever you are.

The School of Authentic Journalism, which held its first session in 2003, has always had a very skilled and experienced faculty, but this year we've outdone ourselves. Let me introduce you to the 2010 j-school professors, and tell you a little bit about them, too, at that link.

And now you know what I've been so busy with these weeks while I've been a little more quiet than usual here. It's great to be back, though, and I look forward to your comments, as always.