Learning What You Don't Know: Training Journalists in Armenia

Leah Kohlenberg submitted this to us for Commentary. When she offered it she told us that, "as a journalist trainer for 4 years, I've found that some of the issues in journalism development are the same all over the former Soviet Union. Though this essay is about my training experience in Armenia, it could be applied to any of the other places I've worked as well - the Republic of Georgia, Slovakia and Mongolia". All of the stories below occurred between January 2002 and January 2003.

Leah has been a journalist for 12 years. She worked for 6 years in the United States at small daily newspapers specialising in health care reporting. She spent 2 years at Time Magazine in Hong Kong covering the 1997 handover and then went to Mongolia. Since then she has been based in Seattle, Washington, teaching journalism, writing, and training journalists.

Leah can be contacted at: leahkohlenberg@yahoo.com

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GORIS, Armenia - I hold up a photograph of a man planting flowers in front of a large skyscraper.

"What's a fact about this photograph?" I ask the group of seven professional journalists gathered for a workshop called, technically, a "Masters class on issues reporting."

Greta, the 50-something editor of an independent (though once government-owned) thrice-weekly newspaper, who has 30 years reporting experience under her belt, squints professionally at the photo.

"It must be early spring, because the trees have no leaves, so it's too early for planting," she says decisively.

A second journalist, Alva, who runs the city's television and radio news broadcast companies, raises her hand. "The man is a volunteer who is happy to be doing his job and making the city green," she says.

Both are shocked when I put these statements under the column "assumption" on the white board. "But those are facts," they protest, "Everyone knows they are true."

No longer are newspapers in this former Soviet Bloch country forced to spew governmental platitudes, but that doesn't mean the quality of news is rising.

"Now instead of printing the government's opinion, we can state our own opinions," Narine, a television journalist from Vanadzor, told me proudly.

The problem, as one can imagine, is that when reporters don't know the difference between a fact and an assumption, that leads to some might shaky opinions masquerading as news.

Officially, my title is international journalism trainer. But I secretly consider my main job to be that of chief mind-blower.

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About 50 kilomoters South of Goris is Kapan, a city close to the Iranian border, and built to accommodate workers of several factories and mines, all of which closed down when the Russians abruptly dissolved the Soviet Union 12 years ago. Only one or two factories currently operate, and only on an itinerant basis.

So journalists are keenly aware of the importance of the Armenian-language business story I present to them, taken from one of the Yerevan newspapers, the capital city five hours drive away.

The story is about a factory that re-opened thanks to an investment company whose origin we never learn in the story. The reporter, considered one of the best in the country, has chosen instead to lead with a visit to the factory by Armenian President Robert Kocharian (who happens to be running for election next year). The details of jobs to be added and salaries to be paid were buried in the middle of the story, a fact noted with disdain by my students.

"The reporter is campaigning for the president," one snorted, and the others nodded, laughing and adding "Not very successfully, either."

I asked them to rewrite it, and they do, most starting with the fact that the factory will add jobs and increase salaries. This is good. But there is no information on how the factory will compete in the market, I pointed out: no idea of how much the company can produce, or more importantly, how much it is selling. Shouldn't we find this out?

"Isn't that a secret?" asked one of the reporters. "I don't think we need to know that."

"That's absolutely of no importance," asserted Somvel, a middle-aged man who edits the government-sponsored newspaper. "All that matters is that there are jobs, and salaries are paid. It's the owner's problem to make a profit."

"It's your problem, too, "I argued, "because if the factory can't make a profit, those jobs won't exist for long and the salaries won't get paid. Don't you think people ought to know up front about the company's business strategy - if there is one?"

"Well, nothing lasts forever," said Somvel, smiling triumphantly. He thinks I can't debate this point, and in a way, he's right: it's a childish argument, and how can you argue with a child?

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Joseph Campbell, the renowned cross-cultural sociologist who studied and compared the worlds' myths, writes of the following stage a child must go through to become an "emotionally mature" adult:

"The young human being responds to the challenges of its environment by turning to its parents for advice, support and protection, and before it can be trusted as an adult, this patterning must be altered ... the function ... of education everywhere, has been always that of switching the response system to adolescents from dependency to responsibility."

What happens to the child who never makes this switch?

"A neurotic might be defined as one who has failed to come altogether across the threshold of his adult "second birth,"" writes Campbell. "Stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke instead flight to protection, fear of punishment, need for advice and so on ... like a child, he will tend to attribute his failures and troubles either to his parents or that handy parent substitute, the state and the social order by which he is protected and supported."

Campbell is voicing his concerns about how America fails to help children grow up to be responsibly mature adults. And surely, my country's unnaturally strong emphasis on material goods is one way of discouraging critical thinking. In fact, it can probably be said that regardless of culture, thinking is hard and most human beings will avoid having to do it.

But Campbell's concerns also apply to the former Soviet Union, where people were actively encouraged not to think by the government.

All decisions then were centrally planned and funded by so-called "experts" in Moscow, from education to health care to economics to governance. Doctors, teachers, journalists and factory owners in as far flung places as Mongolia or Armenia awaited orders from Moscow on what medications to dispense, what to teach, what to write and what to produce. Moscow paid the bills, built the infrastructure and doled out the salaries.

Key to maintaining Moscow's absolute authority was controlling the information flow. Journalism during the Soviet times was essentially pedantic lectures on what people "should" be thinking and "feeling" and "doing" as a group (Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic makes this point quite clearly on her essay entitled "First person singular" from the book "Cafe Europa"). It was rarely based on truth, but rather elliptical metaphorical allusion meant to tell people "what was good for them."

"You are taking all the creativity out of it," one reporter protested, when I suggested that making up information in news stories wasn't ethical.

Then came the fall of the Soviet Union - and suddenly there was no Moscow telling people what to do anymore and more importantly, no Moscow bankrolling them. Industry came to a standstill and the economy tanked, leaving behind people like Somvel, who felt bewildered, angry, abandoned - and largely without the skills and mindset of an "emotionally mature" adult. Even a decade after the paternalistic soviet union has crumbled, Somvel is still waiting for a handy parental substitute. Whether it is through foreign aid or private investment, it doesn't matter: all that is important is that the money should come from somewhere else, as if falling from the sky.

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"So," says Khoren, a 40-something reporter, a bright journalist, where we are interviewing a Peace Corps volunteer participating in a health care reform pilot project. "What is your aim here?"

This is how he starts off his interview - no introductions, no description of the story he's writing, no sense, even, of what he's trying to ask the young American physiologist. So I correct him - "Would you answer questions from someone you don't know?" I ask him.

In some ways, I teach my adult, professional journalists in the same way I teach ten-year-olds how to be reporters. I am constantly reminding them to take notes (many journalists here claim they can remember everything, so they don't take notes at all - just sit and listen with their eyes wide open, as if their brain functioned like a tape recorder). Some of them need to be reminded how to start interviews, and what they are asking about. They can get easily confused about which sources can best answer their various questions. Instead of trying to make sure the story is clear, one reporter told me "a clever reader will be able to figure out what I'm trying to say."

Indeed, my workshop participants, though often older than I, behave like young know-it-all adolescents in class: they talk consistently through the lectures, giggle and make cracks about each other, have loud cell phone conversations and come and go from the room as they please.

They are ready to tangle with me on every point-regardless of whether they've got any facts to back them up. Unfortunately, the disciplinary tactics available in the fifth grade classroom won't work with grownups.

"They want to learn," explained Naira, my 40-year-old translator, who has taught English for years at one of the state universities. "But they literally don't know how - to focus, or to listen, or to stay on task. You musn't yell, but rather, say something interesting to catch their attention."

This is sound advice, and I try to follow it. But it is hard sometimes.

One journalist, a 55-year-old wire service reporter who'd worked for thirty years in the profession, snorted derisively at an example I'd brought of someone I considered an "expert" source: in this case, a guy who studied biological warfare at the University of Maryland, quoted in the New York Times.

"That guy is no expert," said Gagik. "He just sits on his ass and reads newspapers all day. He doesn't know anything."

"How do you know?" I retorted. "You know nothing about this man, other than that the journalist for the New York Times has identified him as someone who studies biological warfare. You don't know the scope of his studies. Surely he knows more about biological warfare than you do."

"He knows nothing," he replied smugly. "I know. Everybody knows."

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"But you can't do that, putting a subject before a predicate. It doesn't work in Armenian."

It may not sound like it, but this is a debate about journalism.

I'd asked the 12 working reporters gathered in Kapan to write the first two sentences of a news story, after giving them the 5 Ws and I H (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How). The sentences, when finished, should have read something like this:

"Free polio vaccines are available for children up to the age of three years, offered Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in July and August. The vaccines are funded by a Unicef grant because the Armenian government can't afford to pay for them."

Almost none of the reporters put the "What" (free polio vaccines) first in the sentence. They might start their sentence saying "On Tuesdays and Thursdays between July and August" or "Thanks to a Unicef grant" or "Because the Armenian government can't afford to pay," or "All Armenians know the problems of polio."

When one participant did produce a sentence like the one written above, the argument got heated.

"You can't write that, it's an announcement, it's not news," shrieked a young sociologist turned reporter. And then another shouted that grammatically, the sentence structure wouldn't hold up in Armenian.

The grammar claim was wrong, actually: Armenian grammar is quite flexible, and the subject can be placed first in the sentence - or anywhere, depending upon what the writer wants to emphasise. But I'm not surprised it's come down to this, because in the four years and four countries where I've taught journalism, the grammar argument has been used on me before.

The problem isn't in the language structure, but in the way it's been used, and how it was impacted by the Soviet Era. For decades, journalists were trained to hide relevant and factual details from the public, instead letting them know the paternal "state" would take care of their needs. Now hiding information has become ingrained in the language. What sounds "right" in Armenian - or Mongolian, or Georgian, or Russian, for that matter -- is a classic case of passive writing, which I believe ultimately leads to passive thinking and passive behavior.

An example: in my last workshop, during a rewrite, journalists started a sentence saying "As to the question of whether the..." This is passive writing, because you are halfway into the sentence and don't know what the reporter is talking about. Don't say there is a question, I tell the journalists, just state the answer to the question directly.

Organising information in a way that serves the reader best, offering useful, fact-based information the reader can act upon to make his or her life better, isn't just a matter of re-training reporters. It's actually a fundamentally different way of thinking, and acting and behaving in the world.

How did I, or any journalist from the west, learn to write like this? I grew up reading it - and even then, I worked for years in various newsrooms, with editors daily sending stories back to be rewritten. How much harder it must be for a reporter to re-learn how to think, and assess information, with no help, no models, and no daily practice. Everything that sounded "right" is now "wrong."

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The first draft of Khoren's story on a health care reform pilot project reads like badly written propaganda, full of gross over-generalisations, unexplained health care jargon and vaguely worded allusions to what will happen in the future. Information is thrown about in an unorganised jumble.

"Khoren," I sigh into the telephone, "Your story is about capitation - how in six months, patients can choose their own doctor, and the state money allocated for their care will follow them." This is a huge change from the current system, in which patients must go to the doctor their district assigns to them.

I send him a five-line outline of how the information should be ordered, but I expect nothing. When people don't take notes and can't assess information sources, why should I expect them to be able to follow an outline?

Which is why I'm shocked and delighted when his second draft appears, the information organised neatly. The story starts out with a true incident of a patient complaining about wanting to see his old doctor, in another health district. The topic sentence - what journalists call the story angle, the specific point of the story - is clear. The remaining information is clearly stated information about how doctors and patients can use this system to get better care, including direct quotes from both doctors and patients.

I call Khoren to congratulate him. Before I can say anything, he launches into apologies: "Leah-jan" he says ("jan" is an affectionate term Armenians tag onto the end of names), "I like this style, but you must forgive me, as it is hard to do and very different from (and here he pauses) the old way."

"Don't worry, Khoren," I tell him. "You are doing great."

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"Leah-jan, I'd like you to read this book."

Khoren hands me a floppy, medium-thick paperback with a bright yellow cover. A local philosopher and scientist wrote the book in Russian, he explains. The English title reads "The Theory of Optimal Civilization."

"I want to interview him," says Khoren, "But I can't decide if he's brilliant or crazy. The introduction is in English. Will you read it and give me your opinion?"

I expected pedantry, but the author started with the contention that communist ideology prevented solid academic scholarship. I'm intrigued, and continue reading aloud, with Khoren leaning over my shoulder:

"In the hard sciences," the author wrote, "people know what they don't know - that is, they know they don't understand a physics equation, or higher math."

But in the social sciences, the problem is that "people don't know what they don't know." (The quoted text appeared printed in bold type). They think they understand a situation, for example, through a political or economic ideology, the author went on to explain, but one ideology alone can't fully describe each incident.

Khuren looked at me with an understanding gleam in his eye. "This is like Armenian journalists, right?" he said. "We think we know, but we don't really know."

I stared back.

"Right," I said. "Absolutely right."

And as we smiled at each other, I thought, this is where it starts: you must first learn accurately and truly what you don't know, before you can begin to find out what you can learn.

And Armenians aren't the only ones to benefit from this lesson. Khoren has armed me with information that I will take back to the U.S., in my battle to create critical thinkers in my own country.