At Slate, Jack Shafer writes “In Praise of Jeffrey Gettleman,” the East African bureau chief for the New York Times. Per Shafer:
As a reporter, Gettleman can’t editorialize or finger the worry beads, which makes him the paper’s anti-Kristof. Instead of reducing Africa’s conflicts to hellzapoppin’ horror show or composing uplifting chords that put smileys on the faces of the suffering, Gettleman dons the big pants of the reliable narrator and puts the dead into deadpan.
And then Shafer tries to inoculate himself against (and, finally, braces himself for)— oh, thin skins of journalism — any hard feelings that his singling out of Gettleman’s work might cause. (“My enthusiasm for Gettleman’s work should take nothing away from other excellent Times reporters in Africa,” Shafer explains; and, further along, Shafer asks, “Is there a German word for unintentionally insulting Person A by praising Person B? I’m sure there is, and I’m sure I’m going to hear all about it.”)
Why tiptoe? Why not flat-out state the obvious: That building more sweatshops is not a solution to poverty in the developing world, that it's cruel to defend workplaces with few to no labor or environmental standards on the basis that "Despite the human toll and the poisoning of community land and water, it's better than not having sweatshops", or that if you don't force decent treatment of workers and reasonable pay you will do next to nothing to eliminate poverty or to reduce the number of horrors (e.g., kids spending their days picking trash out of landfills, kids entering or being sold into the sex industry) that we're pretending that sweatshops alleviate. Seriously, there's nothing wrong with stating that a guy who gets paid six figures to write columns with that level of actual or pretended naivete doesn't compare favorably to a good reporter, even on the reporter's worst day.
#1 Posted by Aaron, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 12:59 PM
I find this praise of Gettleman odd since his reporting on Africa with exceptions play up stereotypes and gets the story wrong.
I have blogged endlessly about his reporting:
http://theleoafricanus.com/?s=Gettleman
And academics whose primary research are in African countries have also spent time dissecting his reporting:
http://www.h-net.org/~africa/
Regards
Sean
#2 Posted by Sean Jacobs, CJR on Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 10:36 AM