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With respect

By Will Tizard
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 16th, 2007 issue

The media are often accused of whipping up controversy to sell papers or boost ratings, usually by people without direct experience as to how the profession of journalism is practiced by most in the business.

The fact is, reporters spend much of their time trying hard to sort out facts from spin — and if there’s one thing they won’t stand for, it’s someone trying to manipulate them.
This past weekend, the media critics had a point.
In a forest clearing outside the village of Lety, the spinmasters won hands down May 13. Members of the press basically rolled over. Worse still, those pulling the strings were Holocaust deniers from the extreme-right Czech Nationalist Party.
A group of people from several nations and races was holding a memorial service for more than 300 inmates who died at the Roma, or Gypsy, concentration camp in Lety during World War II. The existence and story of this camp is a hot-button issue because it was run not by the Nazis, but by the Czech puppet state.
At the service, Foreign Affairs Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, whose new government car somehow managed to negotiate the dirt tracks that lead to the simple granite monument, urged people to take responsibility to end racism.
“It is not a Roma problem,” he said to the gathering of about 50 people. “It is a problem for all Czechs.”
Along with Schwarzenberg, several others, including Rabbi Karel Sidon and Green Party deputies Kateřina Jacques and Džamila Stehlíková, paid their respects, offering condolences to one survivor of the camp and the families of those who died.
At one point during the service, just as a priest was in mid-speech, a Romany man looked troubled and began eyeing the edge of the forest clearing where someone was talking. The priest continued, and the memorial was not interrupted.
What did happen was that a gaggle of news photographers and a TV Nova reporter suddenly abandoned the service to run over to see what was up. There, 30 yards away, stood a handful of people from the Nationalist Party offering sound bites and holding up small signs stating things like “The Roma at Lety died of typhus because of their own poor hygiene.”
As the memorial service carried on, with everyone but these reporters firmly maintaining their dignity, one man, Markus Pape, a diminutive scholar who has done much to raise the issue of Lety, walked quietly up to the neo-Nazis and did what the police should have. He told the protesters they were not welcome and should move off.
The next day a spate of stories about the event suggested that the Nationalist Party “disturbed” this thoughtful and important memorial. In fact, that was something this party failed miserably to do — though the media, by running slavishly after this small group of losers, managed to indeed disturb a fine and important ceremony.
Reporters generally spend most of their time not in chasing after sensational moments but in nailing down their facts and endeavoring to present them fully and fairly. Or at least they should be.
If a hot tip comes from an anonymous source, you probably can’t use it, however sensational, unless you verify the source’s credibility. Even then, it’s far better to get the source on record so that the readers can decide whether or not they believe them credible.
If many believe that jet contrails that seem to form geometric patterns are created by secret military experiments, you need proof from an expert source, probably two or three, with documentation, before you should assert any such thing, no matter how much the theory bounces around the Internet.
And if ignorant racists want to rewrite history, it’s a good idea to think very seriously before giving them the time of day — much less newspaper ink or TV airwaves.

Will Tizard can be reached at wtizard@praguepost.com


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