Washington — Improved knowledge of human rights is giving young reporters an additional tool as they approach a variety of stories, says Peter Spielmann, founder of the Human Rights Reporting Seminar at Columbia University’s Graduate School for Journalism, one of the most respected journalism schools in the United States.
Spielmann, a veteran journalist who launched the seminar in 2000, told America.gov: “I think that, at most, 20 percent of my work has had some human rights aspect, even if I didn’t think of it in those terms at that time.”
Looking back on his career, Spielmann, who is currently an editor and supervisor on the Associated Press’ North America Desk, said it was the crisis in East Timor during the late 1990s that really raised for him the question about the effect principled journalism could have on dangerous, abusive situations. That crisis also inspired Spielmann to develop the Human Rights Reporting Seminar.
“The militia situation in East Timor benefited from fairly prompt and dramatic media coverage,” Spielmann said. The Australian government was impelled by the publicity, he said, to send a peacekeeping force that helped disband the militia and to encourage the Timorese government to pursue a truth and reconciliation process.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PRINCIPLES
“Human rights give reporters a litmus test, a framework to work with,” Spielmann said. “It gives you a broad perspective. When you get into these confusing, individual situations, you have some principles to fall back on — some commandments, as it were.”
Those “commandments,” he said, are the broadly agreed upon values as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.
Spielmann, who worked as an AP correspondent at the United Nations for five years, said reporters also should be guided by other major documents defining human rights, such as France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the British Magna Carta.
“These establish standards against which government, corporations, entities like the United Nations, and other institutions can be evaluated. Are the people in their care receiving their civil, political, social and cultural rights?”
Spielmann said he devoted one session of his seminar to the trauma journalists must face when covering wars and other violent events. Here again, human rights knowledge helps.
“I think if you have in mind a number of principles that you believe in, it helps you to live through the exposure to difficult and disturbing situations.
“It helps, I hope, that despite what you are seeing in front of you, there is such a thing as decency; there are moral principles that one can argue for and try to uphold and even enforce, if it gets to that,” he said.
DEVELOPING A PASSION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Although he still advises graduate students, Spielmann turned over the Human Rights Reporting Seminar to Bill Berkeley in 2006.
As a journalist, Berkeley has worked mostly in Africa and covered events dealing with genocide, torture, summary killings, state tyranny and state terror for major newspapers and magazines. He also worked for several years for a human rights organization investigating human rights abuses in southern Africa. He has written two books about Africa and is working on another about Iran.
“A major objective for the class for me is to turn students on to great journalism on human rights and great reporters who have written profoundly on the subject,” Berkeley told America.gov. “The major thrust of my course is to get students fired up and give them a sense of the power of the stories and the possibility of storytelling.”
Apartheid in South Africa initially triggered Berkeley’s interest in human rights.
“I was somebody who found racism profoundly offensive but also fascinating. I was drawn to the struggle going on in the 1980s in South Africa,” he said.
Berkeley said the work of journalists can and does reach decisionmakers who can make a difference in world affairs and the area of human rights. He noted the satisfaction he felt when former U.S. President Bill Clinton read and praised Berkeley’s book explaining the Rwanda genocide.
“As dispassionate and cynical as they claim to be, ultimately what motivates many journalists is the fantasy of saving the world,” Berkeley said.
US Embassy in Dushanbe
Источник: US Embassy in Dushanbe