Journalist Mort Rosenblum and U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee investigator Jack Blum spoke to about 20 students Tuesday on the political climate in the United States and the state of the news media.
The program - held in Tisch Library - was sponsored by the Institute of Global Leadership as part of its Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program.
Rosenblum began his talk by sharing some memories of reporting during major historical moments. He covered the collapse of the Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the International Herald Tribune from 1979-1981.
He started his international reporting during the Biafra succession from Nigeria in 1960 and continued to cover conflicts up through the invasion of Afghanistan by U.S.-led coalition forces following Sept. 11, 2001.
He also addressed the difficulties of reporting on foreign conflicts. "Reporting today is really dangerous," Rosenblum said. "It is hard to write a story when you are dead."
Blum, who served as special council to Senator John Kerry, said the next big issue to unfold on the global scene would be a national debate in the United States.
"We haven't had a real political dialogue here for a long time," he said.
American politicians are too concerned with being reelected to talk about important issues, he said, and they often spend their time assigning blame.
The EPIIC theme this year is Politics of Fear. Rosenblum and Blum discussed cases in which fear has dominated the public. "Being a tyrant is an art," Rosenblum said. "Fear is a thin veneer; once it cracks it falls apart really fast."
According to Blum, the concept of sovereignty needs to be redefined to forbid human rights violations on the grounds of a country's internal policies. "We've reached an interesting pass today on this planet, where we have over 180 sovereign states, some small,...some huge, but all are equally sovereign," he said. "We've got to reconsider global norms; you don't kill your own citizens, you don't enslave other people."
When the floor was opened up to questions, Rosenblum and Blum discussed the building of a democratic state in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, as well as media coverage of the war and its aftermath.
"There are very important stories in Iraq that were never written," Blum said.
Rosenblum said this was caused, in part, by the Pentagon's system of embedded journalists, where most American reporters in Iraq during the beginning of the war were attached to a unit of the military. "We're not getting a clear picture from Iraq for a number of reasons and one of them is access," he said. "We had much more access in the first Gulf War."
Rosenblum and Blum said the sound bite culture misses out on important international stories. "We have a national disease in the United States," Blum said. "It is Attention Deficit Disorder. Talking heads are on TV for 30 seconds tops and then they are gone; there isn't any time for anything before it moves along."
Rosenblum said newspapers are the best source for information. "I want somebody to sort out the garbage - that is why I buy newspapers," he said. "A newspaper is an index of information, while a blog can be written by someone in his mom's kitchen in Des Moines. How are you going to evaluate those sources?"
