대한민국의 j는 누구인가? 전문가 집단은 누구인가? 우리가 예전에 기자의 덕목을 이야기 할때 젤 먼저 가치를 두는 부분은 바로 소양이었다. 진실을 추구하는 것도 소양이요. 정의를 구현함도. 그러다 보니 포기를 모르는 모르는 불굴의 의지는 기본 양념이고 그래서 courage, brave. truth. justice등이 모두 그들의 덕으로 칭송받았다. 1인방송국의 유투버 들이 활개를 치고 다니고 있다. 탐사보도 전문방송이란 개념을 쓰기도 하는데 몇몇의 방송을 제외하고는 재탕, 3, 4, 5, 6 아침에 뉴스를 읽어주는 사람만 다를 뿐 모든 내용이 토시하나 틀리지 않고 반복된다. 왜인지 모르겠지만, 5시 7시 9시 오후5시, 오후7시, 오후 9시 모든 뉴스들이 자료화면도 비슷하고 내용만 조금 틀릴 뿐이다. 최근에 조국 관련하여서는 언론이 중재자 역할을 못하고 얼마나 잔인하고 못되게 한 가정을 도륙했는지 아무도 이해하려 하지 않고 있다. 참으로 안타까운 일이긴 하지만 말이다. 그것이 정의라고 진실이라고 이야기한다면 참으로 할말이 없다.
신문도 면책특권이 있다고 생각하나 보다. 신문도 잉크가 마른 후에는 어떤 법률적 책임도 어떤 사과 정정 보도도 안내고 검증되지 않은 사실들을 지속해서 뿌리고 있었다. 아마도 지금 그 기사들을 삭제하고 있는 중이라 한다. 신문이 가지는 면책특권이 존재하는 지도 모르겠다. 그렇지만 우리가 진실에 다가가지 않고 편의주의의 기사들 예를들어 동양대학교 교무실 지방에 있어서 못가는 것인가? 아니면 특정인물이기 때문에 구지 그이와 연관된 모든 기사는 검증하지 말라고 누가 이야기 했는지 모르지만 말이다. 자기가 보도한 내용보다 더 실증적이고 더 객관적인 정보가 나왔다면 그 이전의 뉴스는 거짓에 가까우니 다시 보도를 해서 정정할 필요가 있다고 본다. 그러나, 그 실체에 접근하려는 노력은 전혀 없어 보였다. 이것에 대한 냉정하게 책임을 누가 지는 지 그것도 언론의 자유 언론의 면책특권이라 이야기 하겠지! 그동안 그랬듯이....
심지어 이번보든 balance가 있는 것도 아니고 neutrality가 작용하지도 않았다. 마치 한편의 마녀 사냥을 본듯하다. 조국이라는 청상치 노인과바다에 등장하던 그 커다란 실체는 형체도 알아보지 못할 정도로 뜯기고 생채기 나고 심지어는 실체를 알 수 없는 뼈만 앙상히 남아있고 그 어떤것도 과거를 그리고 현재를 알아 볼 수 없게 만들어냈다. 결국 무지막지한 순혈주의를 외치던 나치처럼 비유돼는 것도 무리가 아닐 듯 하다. 신문이 자기를 입증함에 한번도 냉정함이 없이 자기에 대해서는 무한적인 애정을 타인에게는 중세 교회의 처녀성까지도 요구하던 정조대를 채우고 허지만 코르셋으로 상대적으로 몸을 드러내게 하는 이중잣대를 beauty로 포장하던 중세 말이다. 우리의 언론이 그 중세 코르셋처럼 느껴진다. 자기에 대해서는 너무나 너그럽고 남에 대해서는 숨도 못 쉴정도로 privacy와 공적의무라는 것을 혼동하면서 자기자신도 모르면서 남에게만 엄청난 기준을 요구하고 있는 것이다.
그리고 겸손하지도 않아 보인다. 겸손과 진실이 상반되지 않을 지언대 마치 상반되는 개념으로서 그들의 행동이 보인다. 누구도 존중하지 않는태도로 그 누구도 사랑해본 적 없는 거만함으로 내리 깔아보면서 지들이 뭐 대단한 것이라도 되는 것이냥. 사기업이지만 모든 공적의무로 또한 세금으로 그들의 배경을 만들어주는데 세금내는 국민한테 거만하고 마치 집주인이라도 되는 마냥.... 안하무인이 도를 넘어서 보인다.
최근에 받은 cnn기자의 인터뷰 대목을 함 들여다 보려고 한다: Editor’s note: Acclaimed journalist Christiane Amanpour has been named the winner of the Zenger Award for Press Freedom by the University of Arizona School of Journalism. Amanpour is CNN’s chief international correspondent and host of Amanpour & Co. on PBS.
Amanpour is known for her on-the-ground coverage of violence and human rights abuses around the world, including in Bosnia, Syria and Iraq. Opinion Editor Sarah Garrecht Gassen recently spoke with Amanpour about journalism, journalism education and press freedom. The following is an excerpt of their conversation:
Sarah Garrecht Gassen: Your motto, I guess you could call it, is “Truthful, not neutral.중립이 아닌 진실로의 ” Could you explain that a bit to a lay audience and what you mean by it and how that in how viewers might see that in your journalism?
Christiane Amanpour: Well, I think that perhaps viewers, and maybe a lot of journalists, confuse the idea of objectivity with neutrality and therefore so much journalism, as you can see today particularly on broadcast mediums, is very much ‘He said or she said on the one hand, and on the other hand’ — without actually recognizing where the actual truth and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence lies.(실제존재하는 진실과 엄청난 양의 증거들이 존재하는....)
You know, it doesn’t apply to every single issue, but certain very important issues you actually have to be truthful and not neutral because if you draw a false equivalence, whether on fact or morality, then you’re not telling the truth and in terrible instances, you could be accomplice to the continuing atrocity.
For instance, I learned this when I first started to work in Bosnia and what I was seeing during the wars that lasted the entire 1990s. There was one side, which happened to be the Serb side, powered by the dictator of Serbia, who were white Christians, ethnically cleansing a part of Europe of white Muslims.W무슬림에 대한 인종청소
They wanted to create a pure white Serbian state for themselves. And this is classic genocide. It’s killing and transporting a people based on their ethnicity and their religion, and I had to recognize that and made many people uncomfortable.
They said, “Oh, but you know, she’s taking sides.” I wasn’t. I was telling the absolute truth: that there were victims and there were aggressors and people had to recognize it.
It actually did demand some action on behalf of our governments and our democratic world, which did come, but it came very late.
So now fast forward to issues like the climate crisis that we’re in right now. It is a real crisis that has been, to an extent, exacerbated and all the solutions have been slow down by a false narrative that has been perpetrated, obviously by lobbyists in the fossil fuel and other industries, but also because journalists have not recognized that they had to be truthful about this and not neutral.
Instead of trying to say, “There’s the science that shows us clearly that we human beings are contributing to carbon emissions’” journalists were trying to equate that with the tiny minority of climate change deniers and people who refuse to accept the science — and they were a tiny minority compared to the overwhelming evidence that was scientifically proved as fact.
So, I think that those two examples show you that in extreme cases when a journalist is not truthful and does not recognize what is staring them in the face then that journalist can be an accomplice to a very negative impact on our world and on our lives.
SGG: How do you get that into the bedrock of journalists coming up, and into journalism education? How do we get that into the ethos of the field of journalism?
I believe there is such a thing as objectivity. What I’m saying is you can’t conflate objectivity with neutrality. Objectivity means reporting on all angles and getting all sorts of views, but it doesn’t mean to say that you draw the same conclusions or equal conclusion.
So I think that journalists from the very start have to be taught to recognize the truth. They have to be taught to seek the evidence. For instance, when they’re doing investigations into corruption or investigations into whatever it might be, journalists pursue the truth.
Americans like to pride ourselves on the First Amendment and the free press. How is the perception of that changed overseas in the past couple years?
I think the idea of the truth-tellers being silenced, or the waters being muddied by the use of the words “fake news,” is a big problem because it just serves to confuse readers, viewers, online users and the like about where to search for the truth.
Then the other big issue is the proliferation of all sorts of lies and conspiracy theories by social media. And, as you know, that’s not human interference, but it’s government interference, it’s automated bot interference. It’s a real sort of weaponization of information.
So I think those are the big issues that we confront. And, of course, the rest of the world takes a big amount of its cues from the United States. The United States remains the single sole superpower in the world and it’s important in every way.
And so when the president of the United States starts attacking the credibility of a free, fair and independent press then that gives other leaders and bad actors around the world sort of de facto permission to do the same with much greater consequences, because in other parts of the world journalists’ lives are in danger — their safety, their health, their survival. This is a very, very dangerous trend and we need to combat it the best way we can.
What advice do you have for students who want to go beyond the United States and report on the world? How do you break into that?
The field has changed — the field constantly changes — but in the end journalism is journalism and reporting is reporting.
You can’t actually report on a place thousands and thousands of miles away. You can have opinions, you can you know be an armchair warrior if you like, but you can’t really report. So, for journalists, you have the correct instinct, which is to get up and go to the places where news is happening.
I support them and I know it’s dangerous and in places like Russia they have been incredibly careful. But there are plenty of people who go to Russia to report, there are plenty of every kind of news organizations. So I think that it’s not impossible, but you do have to be careful. You have to be aware of the dangers.
I think it’s one of the main reasons why there weren’t that many journalists covering the terrible war in Syria, and it’s probably one of the big reasons that the war in Syria did not have the same impact on the U.S. government, on European governments that forced an intervention, like the war in Bosnia.
I think that you have to understand the value of on-the-ground reporting while also making sensible and smart decisions about safety.
You ask the questions, the difficult questions, and you don’t let the subject not answer or try to go around the question, you always bring them back to your original question.
Well, it definitely takes practice and it takes a willingness to confront and to continue and to insist on your question being answered or at least to ask enough times for people to realize that the subject is not going to answer it. Then the audience can see that the interviewee is simply avoiding giving an answer, and should draw their own conclusions from that fact.
I think that it comes with practice, it comes with experience. It comes with credibility. I hope I’ve built up a body of work that comes from an authentic place. I’ve spent my whole career in the field really putting my life and my health and my safety on the line to get to the truth and I bring that back now into the studio to talk to world leaders or those responsible in some way for the public good.
My job now is to question them and it doesn’t always need to be confrontational, but when it needs to be I mustn’t shy away from it, because I believe the people who come to my program to find the truth wants somebody like me, or anybody who’s in this position, to not let those in positions of power and responsibility get away with ducking the questions and that’s what keeps me going. That’s why I do it.
Is there anything else that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?
I always say I just wish that there were many more women in this business, and I don’t just mean in front of the camera or as reporters. As leaders of networks and newspapers and all sorts of news organizations.
I believe that our work and our health and our democracy will be much, much, much healthier if there was much more parity between men and women — not just the worker bees but in the executive suite. It would make a huge difference to the health of our society.
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