Total Pageviews

Pictures of the Day: Kenya and Elsewhere

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from Kenya, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



Pictures of the Day: Kenya and Elsewhere

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from Kenya, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



Sunday Column: The Danger of Suppressing the Leaks

The Danger of Suppressing the Leaks

IMAGINE if American citizens never learned about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Imagine not knowing about the brutal treatment of terror suspects at United States government “black sites.” Or about the drone program that is expanding under President Obama, or the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

This is a world without leaks.

And a world without leaks â€" the secret government information slipped to the press â€" may be the direction we’re headed in. Since 9/11, leakers and whistle-blowers have become an increasingly endangered species. Some, like the former C.I.A. official John Kiriakou, have gone to jail. Another, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is charged with “aiding the enemy” for the masses of classified information he gave to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. He could face life in prison.

The government has its reasons for cracking down. Obama administration officials have consistently cited national security concerns and expressed their intention to keep prosecuting leakers.

“The government has legitimate secrets that should remain secrets,” Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, said in a telephone interview.

Journalists tend to view the situation differently, and not just because they want, in the oft-heard phrase, “to sell newspapers.” They see leaks â€" which have many motivations, not all altruistic â€" as vital to news gathering.

Declan Walsh, a reporter who wrote many WikiLeaks-based stories for The Guardian before coming to The Times, calls leaks “the unfiltered lifeblood of investigative journalism.” He wrote in an e-mail from his post in Pakistan: “They may come from difficult, even compromised sources, be ridden with impurities and require careful handling to produce an accurate story. None of that reduces their importance to journalism.”

Readers whom I hear from on this topic tend to express one of two opposite viewpoints: 1) The Times should relentlessly find out and print whatever it can about clandestine government activities, and 2) The Times has no business determining what is in the best interest of national security, or pursuing classified information that is passed along illegally.

Whatever one’s view, one fact is clear: Leakers are being prosecuted and punished like never before. Consider that the federal Espionage Act, passed in 1917, was used only three times in its first 92 years to prosecute government officials for press leaks. But the Obama administration, in the president’s first term alone, used it six times to go after leakers. Now some of them have gone to jail.

The crackdown sends a loud message. Scott Shane, who covers national security for The Times, says that message is being heard â€" and heeded.

“There’s definitely a chilling effect,” he told me. “Government officials who might otherwise discuss sensitive topics will refer to these cases in rebuffing a request for background information.”

And that, says Michael Leiter, is as it should be. Mr. Leiter, the former director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center, says the prosecutions are “intended to have a deterrent effect. We’ve come too far toward willy-nilly leaking of sensitive information.”

Many observers, though, see a useful middle ground. “This is often looked at as a battle of good versus evil, and both sides see it that way,” Mr. Hayden said. “But that’s not the case.” He believes that for a national security effort to succeed, it must not only be “operationally effective, technologically possible and lawful,” it must also be “politically sustainable.”

The latter requires public support, he said, “which is only shaped by informed debate.” You can’t have debate without knowledge, and given the growing penchant for overclassification, that’s where the press steps in.

Mr. Shane looks back on a Pentagon Papers affidavit written in 1971 by Max Frankel, then The Times’s Washington bureau chief and later its executive editor, which described Washington reality: “The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and a right to know. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality. When the press loses a quest or two, it simply reports (or misreports) as best it can.”

David McCraw, the lawyer for The Times’s newsroom, said, “The system works because of restraint on both sides.” Dean Baquet, the managing editor, agreed: “We’ve proven that we can be responsible with information. In fact, sometimes we even overdo it.”

But the ramped-up prosecutions threaten this fragile ecosystem that has served the public pretty well.

Private Manning’s extreme treatment, in particular, worries Mr. Walsh and others because of the example it sets. (That case is in a class by itself, of course, with the wholesale transfer of some 700,000 documents. The Times reported many articles from the material, as did others.)

Many observers are quick to note a double standard for leak prosecutions: tightly controlled leaks from the highest levels ruffle no feathers.

Chris Hedges, an author, columnist and former Times reporter, thinks powerful institutions like The Times ought to push back harder â€" showing solidarity, including “legal common cause” with Mr. Manning and Mr. Assange, providing more detailed coverage of leak prosecutions, and crusading in editorials. “Beyond what’s right, even enlightened self-interest should dictate it,” he told me.

To its credit, The Times repeatedly has gone to court to seek material related to the drone program and other issues, has covered Mr. Kiriakou’s case heavily, and consistently has written editorials defending press rights.

“Obviously, everybody in the industry could do more,” Mr. McCraw said of legal efforts. “Resources are limited, but we’re picking the best possible shots.”

The Times needs to keep pressing on all these fronts, and with more zeal in print than it has so far. If news organizations don’t champion press interests, who will

In the meantime, the chilling effect continues apace. That is troubling for journalists, but even worse for citizens, who should not be in the dark about what their government is doing.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 10, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: The Danger of Suppressing the Leaks.

For the Tech Crowd, a Taste of Newspaper Talk

Here in Austin, Tex., where I’m attending the digital media extravaganza known as South by Southwest, or SXSW, the arrival of the local newspaper at the hotel room door each morning seems almost otherworldly. Amid this gathering of techie (not to say geeky, because that would be a bit unfair), mostly young, mostly male participants, where plaid flannel is the de rigueur fashion note and Google Glasses are the accessory of choice, The Austin American-Statesman feels like an unfamiliar visitor from the distant past. (It’s a good paper, by the way, with Pulitzer Prizes in its history and a lively local report each day.) To put it mildly, this is not a print newspaper kind of crowd.

Still, it is a crowd that is deeply interested in information and innovation. So, when The Times’s David Carr spoke on Sunday, he managed to attracthundreds of SXSW participants to a large hall, where his topic was “Gates of Heaven, Gates of Hell” â€" at least some of those gates referring to newspaper paywalls. He discussed the success of The Times’s paywall and other recent changes in the paper’s business model. The questions, oddly enough, skewed toward print, with the questioners expressing their hope that the printed newspaper would stick around for a long time.

Mr. Carr, who earlier gave a shout-out to his boss, Jill Abramson, The Times’s executive editor, who was in the audience, responded with a reassuring paean to the enduring appeal of print advertising and circulation to newspaper executives: “We put the white paper out because they give us the green paper back.” And, he added, “We like that.” (Print ads and print circulation still provide most of the company’s revenue.)

Mr. Carr joked, though, that his own expertise on business plans is not the final word: “In my job,â! € he said, “they ask me what I think and go as quickly as possible the other way.”

I am scheduled on Monday to take part in a panel discussion looking at which version of an evolving news story becomes part of the digital archive, and how â€" if at all â€" the changes in the online version of an article can be looked up later. My co-panelist is Eric Price, an M.I.T. graduate student who (with the former Timeswoman Jennifer 8. Lee) formed the organization called NewsDiffs, which very effectively keeps track of those changes. I don’t expect to draw anything like a Carr-sized crowd, but at SXSW, it’s all relative. Nate Silver, the big data guru, filled an even bigger hall on Sunday, and the entrepreneur Elon Musk (Tesla, PayPal, SpaceX) had overflow rooms for his Saturday talk.



Framing — and Reflecting — Beauty

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Inside a beauty parlor in a small Florida town, Carrie is having her hair done. She is oblivious to the commotion around her. Peering intently into a mirror, she is at that quintessential moment of beautification when she must decide if the image she sees pleases her and sh is ready to face the world.

Deborah Willis captured that moment in Eatonville, a small, predominantly African-American town outside of Orlando. But you could argue that she first encountered that moment â€" many times over â€" as a child at her mother’s Philadelphia beauty shop.

That candid portrait is part of “Framing Beauty,” Ms. Willis’s exhibition at the International Visions Gallery in Washington (on view through April 13), which explores how present-day African-Americans construct their identity and image. But the storied artifacts, subjects and communities depicted in these photographs imbue them with both a sense of history and continuity with the past.

The subjects of “Framing Beauty” are the students and beneficiaries of a long history of African-American vigilance and activism â€" a poignant insight revealed in Ms. Willis’s photograph of Carrie. In Eatonville, a t! own known for its legacy of autonomy, Carrie grasps â€" and controls â€" the mirror that reflects her determined and attractive face, a metaphor of the personal ways African-Americans have constructed their image in order to empower themselves.

The photograph, one of five beauty parlor images in “Framing Beauty,” reminds us of the powerful role of the beauty industry in African-American history and culture. As the historian Tiffany M. Gill points out in her book “Beauty Shop Politics,” these businesses spurred not only black entrepreneurship in the Jim Crow era but also political activism. Motivated by such organizations as the National Negro Business League, African-American women in search of economic independence created vibrant communal spaces where women supported each other in the service of social and cultural change.

That historical allusions abound in Ms. Willis’s exhibition is not surprising In addition to her photographic work, she is a widely known historian and curator of African-American photography. Influenced by her father, an amateur photographer, and her cousin, the proprietor of a photo studio, she was inspired to become an artist after reading a library copy of Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” in the early 1960s.

It was the first time Ms. Willis, 65, had seen a book with photographs of black people, which changed her life. She pursued her formal studies at the Philadelphia College of Art in the mid-1970s, later receiving an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute and a Ph.D. in cultural studies from George Mason University.

“Framing Beauty” is informed by Ms. Willis’s scholarship. Not just about the way contemporary African-Americans shape their self-image, the work ultimately reminds of the historic ways photography allowed a people to countermand! the nega! tive image of themselves in the culture at large. The exhibition helps us to understand, as Ms. Willis observes, the extent to which the medium allowed a people, even in times of abject oppression, to “experiment with varied ideas of themselves and ultimately to honor how they saw themselves and wished to be seen by others.”

Eatonville, one of a number of locations represented in “Framing Beauty,” provided Ms. Willis with a perfect environment to explore the rich connection between past and present notions of African-American identity and self-presentation.

Eatonville was one of the first black towns to incorporate after the Civil War. It soon became a Southern mecca for African-American culture and the arts, popularized in the 1920s and 1930s by Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up there and became the pre-eminent female writer of the Harlem Renaissance and the inspiration for Ms. Willis’s “Embracing Eatonville.”

DESCRIPTIONDeborah Willis “After Madonna,” 2008.

By the 1930s, Eatonville emerged as a model of black self-sufficiency, despite its continuing struggles with poverty, illiteracy and the hostility of the segregated world around it. Questioning the idea of integration â€" the enduring liberal answer to segregation â€" the town embraced a separatism that allowed its inhabitants to go about their lives and shape their self-images in an atmosphere less burdened by interracial tension.

As Hurston herself observed about the empowerment she felt growing up in Eatonville, it was not until she was sent to school in Jacksonville, Fla., at the age of 13, that she would see herself as different and marginal: “I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways.! In my he! art as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown,” an anxious and tentative image of herself conditioned by the veil of apprehension and derision that enshrouded her in the outside world.

The mood of the Eatonville photographs, like that of the exhibition in general, is largely one of quiet dignity â€" of a people unself-consciously celebrating their beauty and naming their style, to paraphrase Ms. Willis. Their subjects engage in updated versions of self-construction, following in the footsteps of ancestors who liberated “themselves from the legacy of caricatures that sought to define them throughout most of Western visual history.”

This theme resonates in Ms. Willis’s photographs: a serene and elegant Madonna and child transgressing the racial limitations and blind spots of art history; a mural on the side of a Harlem church, its heavenly imagery depicting the passage from the earthly to the sacred in the form of parishioners, dressed in their Sunday best, walking into the building elow; bodybuilders, their physique obsessively sculptured, engaging in public displays of authority and prowess; and a majestic elder, her cane braced in one hand like a scepter, being tended to in an Eatonville beauty parlor.

In the end, as Ms. Willis’s scholarship has confirmed, the photograph has historically served as a powerful mirror in the African-American community, reflecting the achievements, triumphs and positive imagery all too often erased from the culture at large. Her compelling photographs bring this story up to date, ever mindful of the previous generations who emerged from the shadow of whiteness, in their own image, self-possessed and beautiful.

DESCRIPTIONDeborah Willis “Harlem Postcard.”

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.” Mr. Berger has worked with Ms. Willis on several exhibitions and publications, including a show curated by Mr. Berger, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.” (Ms. Willis was a senior consultant.) More recently, they each contributed essays to “Gordon Parks: Collected Works” (Steidl, 2013).

Follow @drdebwillis, @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)