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Thursday, February 17, 2005
The Plaza Hotel, Grand Ballroom
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Keynote Address by
Ray Suarez
Senior Correspondent
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer |
I want to thank the Association for giving me the honor of inviting me tonight, to talk to my fellow members… and to those who are colleagues in the business who’ve opened their checkbooks for us tonight. Making sure the future is well supplied with Latino journalists is one of the most important things this organization does… so thanks especially to you if you played a part in topping up the scholarship fund tonight. If you did it just because you think it’s nice… well, that’s fine. Let me add to the value of being nice for its own sake the element of self-interest in making sure the pipeline is full to bursting with tomorrow’s Latino journalists. That will keep the pressure on in the newsrooms of the future… so that in a business where we are still fighting for adequate representation it will be as pathetic in 2015 and 2020 as it is in 2005 to say, “we’d love to hire more, but…”
Look across the vast business…papers, radio, TV, magazines, websites… and ask yourself if Latino journalists are yet given the highest-level responsibility to tell America’s story, if they are yet the high-impact players we know others are. Well, as a matter of fact, we are, are more often, than was the case in 1995, or in 1985, when I joined this organization. It’s one of those half empty/half full deals. When I was growing up across the river, there were almost no Latinos on television… Desi Arnaz… Aida Alvarez, who comes from my father’s home town… JJ Gonzalez, and Quick Draw McGraw’s burro sidekick Bobba Looie. Four. It’s a pretty short list.
Yes, it’s a lot better today.
Heck, when the Bush White House assembled a fake news team to send out fake news stories on Medicare to real television stations, who was the male anchor? Alberto Garcia. Now that’s progress! We’ve gone from having to fight to be hired in real newsrooms to being automatically included in fake ones… not bad!
When I scan the news business, I get a huge kick out of seeing old friends, people whose work I enjoy and admire, climbing the greasy pole. But I think we’d be making a mistake to become an organization that agitates for more hiring, keeps head counts and nose counts and makes jobs the measure of our success. I say that because as we’re scrambling to get the best rooms onboard the ship we’re neglecting the fact that it’s the Titanic. We’re helping young Latinos bust through the front door and forgetting to tell them the building’s on fire. We’re training people at our wonderful annual convention student programs, critiquing tapes and photo portfolios and clip files to haul people up the ladder in a business that’s in crisis.
Shrinking circulations. Evening news that’s become irrelevant to millions. Magazines going belly up.
And worst of all… a public that tells researchers year after year they don’t trust us, that they don’t believe us… that they don’t care what we’ve got to say, that they feel less insecure about doing without what we offer all together. And yet, here we are America, embarking on some of the most critical policy arguments, national debates, nothing less than battles for the soul and future direction of the country… and our readers, viewers, and listeners are more and more comfortable doing without us.
Hey, love me, hate me… just don’t ignore me… that’s the worst of all. Old friends in this organization and I have shared late night rants in hotel bars across the country about bean counters and bottom line mentality and a lack of commitment to the product. We’ve had that conversation for years. This is far more dangerous than some accountant pulling the strings in your newsroom, and making news decisions based on the cost of coverage. Watch the news every day… listen to the radio… pick up the paper and check on line… this isn’t a bean counter problem. There are multi-part reports on Social Security, reporters in Baghdad and shooting Yasir Arafat’s funeral, serious pieces on global warming, and yes, speculation about Michael Jackson’s illness slowing up jury selection. When people complain to me, “how come the media isn’t covering, “fill in the blank,” I ask them, “How did you find out about it?” Yeah, from journalists.
But in a country that has a higher percentage of adults with four year college degrees than ever before, people with real lives… mortgages and kids and car payments, the kind of people we used to assume would eventually be our natural customers are more and more likely to give us a pass. This is a disaster for us as creative people, as people devoted to our craft. At the NAHJ we’ve just spent decades fighting our way in from the edges of a business that seemed all too happy to do it without us. From being ethnic novelty acts, EEOC add-ons, human lawsuit shields we’ve fought the good fight to bust in to the vital center of the culture… in a business that creates the images and impressions and convictions of millions that move elections and governments and nations… only to find that once we got there, it really didn’t matter so much any more. Sure, the paycheck still spends. But is that really all we’re doing this for?
I get up and go to work every day absolutely sure that we are meant to be high-impact players in the culture. I get to the office convinced you can’t tell America’s story in 2005 without us, without the members of the NAHJ, and that you’d be foolish to try. I go on the air every night lit up by the notion that our work is as vital as oxygen to the country’s brain. Can’t do without us. The alternative, brain death. And yet… and yet… When I say to America that we’re here to arm you with the tools to do the work of being a citizen in a confusing time, they meet that zeal with a shrug.
This isn’t about closing a bureau, or restrictions on crew overtime, or telling reporters to take their own pictures, or repurposing material for money-losing web sites. Those are interesting fights, and we have to fight from time to time… but the real crisis in the business goes to the heart of what we think we’re doing. And who we’re doing it for.
The Russian Czar used to have wonderful craftspeople make ingenious miniatures, with moving animals, jewels and semi-precious stones, singing birds and hunting scenes… Craftsmanship and creativity and execution to make you weep with the beauties of these works. And all these thousands of hours of work and serious investments in materials, who was the eventual audience? Maybe a dozen people. Colleagues, we don’t make Faberge eggs. The craft is not so important that we don’t have to think about the end user. We write to be read. We speak to be heard. We show to be seen. We make product for mass audiences, as mass as we can make them. And if we find that the eyes, ears and minds we’re targeting don’t trust us… find us trivial, ignorable, we’re not going to make it. And outside the Spanish language press--which speaks to an audience hungry for what they’ve got to say—we in the mainstream business may be in for a painful renegotiation of what it means to be a reporter in the 21st century.
I love this business. For all the carping I’ve done about it over the years I have been able to live out my dreams with a notepad, a typewriter, and now, a laptop. I dreamed this work would give me a chance to see the world beyond Brooklyn: it has. Being serenaded by the women of a tiny village in Southern Africa as they dug a pond to start a fish farm… sitting on a carpet with an imam in Uzbekistan, as he talked about the future of Islam for his people after the repression of the Soviet years… getting to Plainfield Illinois just seconds after a tornado has flattened the town… walking into St Peter’s Square just in time to watch the Pope’s ambulance speed out of it, trying to find out from weeping nuns what just happened… watching a stadium explode with joy on the last day of Nelson Mandela’s campaign for president of South Africa… interviewing slumlords, rock stars, gang bangers, crown princes, tribal chiefs, big city mayors, small town police chiefs, death row inmates and lottery winners, the best and worst that life has to offer and everything in between. This is our life, yours and mine. Granted it’s sometimes really hard to remember after a lousy day, but we have been given this wonderful gift… the privilege of going out and rooting around in the great vast world beyond our front doors, and then telling everyone else what we’ve found out. Why wouldn’t we want to raise a ton of money tonight to make sure we can pass on that gift?
But along with struggling in competitive workplaces to get ahead, make a name, build a reputation, we’ve got another really important job: we’ve got to do everything we can to save this business. If you’re a boss, you’ve suddenly got something deep and profound in common with your workers… and those of you who end your days complaining about the boss are now on the same side. We’ve got to start a whole new relationship with our publics… they are who we’re doing this for… we work for them.
The scholarship fund can be a big part of that task. The preparation for a life in the business has to change. You can’t just be a lightly educated, nervy, seat of the pants son or daughter of the struggling class. Today a four year degree is just the beginning… more and more of us, for better or worse, are going to grad school. Today’s journalist has to be conversant with avian flu and West Nile virus, be able to explain why California suddenly had no electricity, whether there’s really stimulus in an administration’s economic stimulus plan, and why anyone would want Elizabeth Taylor to testify at their trial. Who cares if the dollar’s weak against the Euro?… what does it mean to me that thousands are dying in the western Sudan, while our huge trading partner China, the country that buys up our debt, is blocking any attempt to make Sudan stop killing its own people? Why would Saddam Hussein want yellow cake, or aluminum tubes? What’s a centrifuge? Will a missile defense shield make us safer, or make our enemies build more bombs to penetrate the shield? Our scholarship kids, the kids we’re raising this money for, can’t just write a good lead… though that’s important and a very good start… they also have to understand economics, political science, the constitution, global warming, zoning laws, labor market theory, the history of Islam. The world is becoming a more complex place to understand at all, much less explain to everyone else. Nicholas Lemann, up at the graduate school of journalism a few miles north of here at Columbia University, is trying to include a broad, deep, curriculum for tomorrow’s reporters that not only teaches them how to cover a story, but explains the world well enough so that you can go out and explain it to someone else. With any luck that’s what some of the money we’re raising tonight will do… take some of that wonderful raw material that I meet every year at the job fair, bright, ambitious, engaged young people who are often the first person in their family to finish high school… and get them the remaining tools they need to tell the rest of us what happened, why it happened, and what it’s going to mean.
It’s one of the most important jobs we’ve got going in this country… if they believe it, we have a better shot at making our audiences believe it again too. Thank you very much for having me with you tonight.
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