Article on school gardens

This is a rather vitriolic offering from a writer named Caitlin Flanagan. She basically rips apart the movement of incorporating gardening into school curricula. In between her character attacks and her burning of straw men in the form of bourgeois elitist local foodies and gardeners, I discern a few major threads that, when removed from her polemic style, are actually quite interesting to discuss. The author is concerned that by stressing school gardens as an organizing theme for curricula, schools are losing out in other areas. If this is so, it's an important point. Essentially Flanagan argues that schools should focus on essential, tested skills like reading comprehension, mathematics, and civics, and leave anything else for extracurricular activities. She uses the example of two schools in Berkeley, one high-achieving and testing-focused, and the other low-achieving and garden-focused, to condemn the academic merits of the nation's thousands of school garden programs.

It seems to me that there has long been a complex and valid debate between a focus on classical educational content on the one hand, and on the other hand an attempt to tie school content to tangible things, like students' communities or a school garden. I believe that this debate has not been settled, as there is a good case both for a focus on "universal, classical" subject matter, as well as a case that classical subject matter presented in a rigid form becomes irrelevant for many students. Certainly underachievement in US schools is a trend that long precedes the school garden craze, and certainly a good number of today's underperforming schools in fact employ just the back-to-the-basics prescription Flanagan is offering. In any case, her point is valid that it would be interesting to see rigorous studies comparing garden-based curricula to other curricula in terms of student achievement.

Another interesting point Flanagan broaches are the reasons behind the bad diet eaten by so many people in the US, especially the poor. She seems to believe that the idea of "food deserts" is a myth; that the poor simply eat poorly because they want to. Again, this is a thought-provoking thesis, but she neither offers much solid evidence for it (beyond one anecdote), nor does she offer any ideas as to how to address the fact that a huge percentage of our children in the US will be condemned to diabetes and early death by our present way of eating.

Mostly what jumps out of Flanagan's article is a rabid anti-agrarian bias. While her scorn for physical labor is understandable given the oil-fueled, fat and lazy US society in which she lives, she allows her irrational aversion to hard work and gardening to cloud her arguments. First off, comparing school gardens to migrant labor in California's sinful vegetable strip mines is like comparing the act of love with your spouse to anal gang rape. Secondly, Flanagan seems to be implying that the school garden movement is at heart a massive attempt to condemn the poor to a life of agricultural labor. Does she really think that local food advocates are secretly plotting to send black and Latino students to pick tomatoes? If this were so, the plot hasn't been very effective, as the vast majority of agricultural hired labor tends to be immigrants, not US-born poor people.

Flanagan's more serious claim, that by focusing on gardening instead of hard math and science schools are setting their kids back on standardized tests, would have to be equally leveled at arts, music, foreign language, and physical education classes. Her vitriol towards school gardens seems to betray some deep-seated animosity beyond her stated arguments. Again, I understand her belief that in the US the path to a good job and social ascendency has traditionally been academic achievement, but firstly she never demonstrates conclusively that school gardens hinder as opposed to fostering this outcome, and secondly, in the US I have known, good jobs are scarce, the social ladder is broken, and students would probably be best served by learning to be independent, out-of-the-box entrepreneurs, self-sufficient in precisely the ways that gardening teaches one to be!

Thurow blog on US farm subsidies

Here is an article from Roger Thurow about cutting US farm subsidies. He makes the familiar argument that these subsidies enable farmers to produce grain at a loss, and thus drive prices down for farmers in the rest of the world. I left a comment at the bottom of the article, which I'm reproducing below:

"I am not sure if the prognosis of cutting subsidies is appropriate. What about retooling them to the system of price supports and supply controls prevalent in the US before the 1970s? Basically the government was a guaranteed last-resort buyer when prices fell below a certain level, and sold off stored surplus when prices rose. This stabilized prices and grain supply, for the US and presumably for the rest of the world too. Farmers and consumers benefited from a predictable, stable price and supply. Starting in the 1970s, this system changed such that the government simply paid farmers for any price shortfalls, as opposed to actually buying low-priced grain from farmers. Hence the government spends the same amount or more as it did before, but without serving as a buffer to grain supply and prices. Farmers have a permanent incentive to overproduce, driving prices lower, world supply higher, and costing ever more to the government. The main groups that benefit from the present modality of US farm subsidies are food traders and processors, who don't want stable, reasonable commodity prices. Processors want low prices, and traders want unstable ones.

"To summarize, I would argue that the problem with US farm subsidies isn't their amount but rather their way of functioning."

Indiana Jones and archeology

This is the trailer for a special exhibition in Montreal that will later tour Europe. The exhibit explores archeology through the lens of the Indiana Jones movies. I'm a huge Indy fan, and more recently I've been lucky enough to get involved in some real archeology here in Colombia. I'd love to see this exhibit, but alas, it's not coming to any towns near me. Anyway, the website for the exhibit has some good videos and artifact photos that give you an idea of what the exhibit is like.

An ominous article about Haiti

In this article, Beverly Bell outlines some of the challenges Haiti is facing these days. Among the most frightening is the specter of a rebirth of the machine of ultra-right-wing state violence under new president Michel Martelly.

Translation of an interesting commentary on new laws for compensating victims of violence in Colombia

Peasant organizations in Montes de Maria, and the new political situation

by

Movimiento por la Paz

February 21st, 2011

Peasant organizations from the Montes de Maria region of Colombia, representing the zones of Maria la Baja, San Juan Nepomuceno, Carmen de Bolívar, San Jacinto, and Ovejas, have spent the last months sharing opinions, ideas, and proposals regarding the draft Victims Law and the draft Land Restitution Law, as well as the government's announcement that it will declare a model Peasant Reserve Zone in the Montes de Maria region.

These topics are part of our discussions because during recent years we have been working on reconstructing the trust and social fabric affected by the violence of the armed conflict. We also work to strengthen the process of peasant organization, and to increase citizen participation.

The new political juncture[proposals for laws to redress victims of the armed conflict] has generated much expectation among grassroots organizations, which receive the national government's announcements with some apprehension and especially with questions and concerns.

We must keep in mind that in Montes de Maria there are favorable conditions in terms of human and natural resources: fertile soil, water, biodiversity. It is a strategic territory for the commercialization of products, knowledge, and capacity of the peasant community, in order to advance proposals for a dignified habitation of the territory. This is precisely what the peasant community hopes for.

Nevertheless, faced with the good will expressed by the government in recent months, there arise questions framed in the reality we are living in Montes de Maria. With regards to the draft Law for Land Restitution: How will rights be guaranteed for families that, though they had no land title, had longstanding usage rights?

In the entire Caribbean region a historical constant has been informal land tenancy. Prior to the years of violence it wasn't important for families to possess official title, yet they nevertheless enjoyed access to land. Only now is land title relevant, but thousands of families have no title to their land, and violent displacement has destroyed traditional forms of land rights.

In the same sense, a large percentage of this land, even that granted to families by the State in the agrarian reform process of the 1980s and 1990s, has now been acquired under a facade of legality by people from outside the region. Currently such lands are the site of extensive ranching, oil palm plantations, and forestry projects, among others.

The question being asked by peasant organizations is what will happen to land that was bought at an outrageously low price in a context of threatened violence and displacement [for those who refused to sell]? What land can be returned to people if large businessmen have acquired the land that the peasants worked?

On the other hand, the declaration of Montes de Maria as a Peasant Reserve Zone is another announcement that has generated much uncertainty. This legal designation, created by Law 160 of 1993 as a response to the peasant movement, has among other goals the strengthening of peasant economies, a halt to the advance of latifundia and of the agricultural frontier [into virgin land], and the protection of forest preserves.

In principle, this legal figure gathers together the majority of the demands of the region's peasant community. However, the following concerns arise given the regional reality. Which specific zones of the territory would be declared Peasant Reserve Zones? Isn't it contradictory to speak of Peasant Reserve Zones in areas of ranching and agroindustrial megaprojects? What is the meaning of a model Peasant Reserve Zone as the government posits, given the government's oft-announced goal of turning peasants into small entrepreneurs? How are the Law of Land Restitution, the Law of Victims, and the Peasant Reserve Zones related?

For the organizations of Montes de Maria, access and restitution of land is not enough. More important is the issue of land use. In this sense it is worrying to see the stimulus and promotion given by the State and by national and international private sectors to the establishment of slow-growing monocultures [such as oil palm] as a response to international markets. For the peasant organizations it is clear that land should be used for food production [and not for export-driven agroindustry].

Lastly, we must consider the issue of security and guarantees. In the region there still exist armed groups that exert social and political control over territory, and it only takes small actions of intimidation (which continue to occur) to recreate a wide-ranging environment of terror that immobilizes, polarizes, and fractures the social fabric of our communities.

In this context, what guarantees can community leaders count on to advance a program of land access and restitution? What guarantees do peasants have that the painful crimes of the past will not repeat themselves? Our organizations want to have a protagonist role in this moment, in order to contribute to proposals that can guarantee the rights of the peasant community. However, will local organizations have adequate conditions to actively participate and push for a new model of development in the Montes de Maria region?

Update on Piedad Cordoba

Some months ago I wrote (and fretted) about the punishment of Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba for alleged ties to the FARC. Shortly thereafter, I linked to an article about the legal problems in the case against Cordoba. Namely, alleged emails stored on a computer seized after a Colombian army raid into Ecuadorian territory served as the main piece of evidence linking her and others to the FARC. But this computer was invalid as evidence for a number of reasons.

Anyway, it seems that Colombia's Supreme Court has ruled just this: that the computer is not valid evidence. So perhaps Cordoba will be exonerated.

David Brooks's new book

I'm linking to a scathing critique of David Brooks's new book, The Social Animal. The critic not only derides the book's poor, wooden prose, but condemns Brooks's ultimately immoral and misled vision of mindlessly comfortable, happy people sailing through a life of consumer decisions, unencumbered by conviction or mystery, trusting only in an ever-expanding understanding of how their subconscious works. At any rate, I don't think I'll be reading the Social Animal.

Drugs in Monterrey

This is an interesting article from the Nation on the escalating violence in Monterrey. It describes how with the twilight of the PRI, Mexico's long-standing single political party, drug cartels no longer operate in an orderly fashion, respecting civil authorities and one another's territory. With no more monopolistic institutional power (neither on the part of government nor of the cartels), it's open season, open warfare as greedy groups grasp for more and more territory and power. Essentially political democratization has led to hellish violence and disorder.

This reminds me of what happened in Colombia when authorities took down the major drug cartels in the early 90s. There arose more violence and chaos, as everyone from smalltime hustlers to armed leftist insurgencies now got involved in the drug game. Colombia's recent spell of relative peace and stability is welcomed by us that live here, but it's bittersweet to know that we're only in peace because the violence has been exported elsewhere. And above all, we know that things could easily change, with trafficking and violence shifting once again away from Mexico and returning to our fair country.

Chinese development aid to Africa

Here is an article from Roger Thurow comparing the US's foreign development aid to China's (especially in terms of aid to Africa). Essentially the US is still a far larger donor to international development projects than is China, and there are questions about the ethics, transparency, and modality of Chinese aid. The US also has the bold long-term vision of Obama's Feed the Future initiative to its credit. This initiative posits global food security and agricultural development as central axes of US foreign policy. However, while the US is debating drastic cuts to foreign development aid, China is aiming to steadily increase aid, especially agricultural development aid, and especially to Africa.

Unexpected nuance

Here are two articles presenting more nuanced, complex sides to issues that I though were cut-and-dried.

First is an Op-Ed from the father of John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. He makes the case that his son's involvement with the Taliban didn't represent treason against the US. Lindh had signed up with a foreign army (the Afghan army) in spring of 2001, and fought to defend the then-government of Afghanistan against Northern Alliance insurgents. Apparently he never entered combat against US forces. The father compares his son's situation to that of Ernest Hemingway, who volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic against fascist insurgents. Anyway, the situation has a level of complexity I'd never expected, as I never expected to sympathize with someone who'd been branded an al Qaeda fighter.

The second interesting article is by Peter Hessler, about the Chinese vision of Tibet. I've never known much about Tibetan history. My impression is that it's a region that has on-and-off been included in the Chinese empire, and that it has some solid and some not-so-solid arguments in favor of independence from China. Anyway, Hessler fleshed out my understanding considerably. He paints a picture in which Han Chinese see Tibet as the last undeveloped frontier of an increasingly prosperous China. Those he talks to feel an almost missionary-like duty to develop Tibet, comparing their purpose to that of the pioneers who colonized the US's Great Plains and the West. The problem is that in the case of the US, the idea wasn't to develop the West in order to improve life for those already living there (the Indians) but rather to exploit the West so as to make life better for US whites. Hessler's depiction of the Han in Tibet is not so explicitly genocidal, but all the talk seems to be about "developing Tibet", without reference to Tibetans. If this is the case, Tibetans have reason to fear, because the PRC project would not be to make life better for Tibetans in Tibet, but rather to make life better for the rest of the PRC, using Tibet for this means. At any rate, the issue is again more nuanced than I'd known, and the article did a good job of expanding my knowledge on the topic.

Paul Collier vs. agroecology

Here is an article by Raj Patel touching on a few themes I've treated in the past. Namely, Patel discusses the potential of agroecological approaches to fight hunger, and explicitly calls out Paul Collier on his naive vision of farming, which I deconstructed over a year ago.

Update on the Justice Palace massacre

I have written in the past about Colombia's 1985 army attack on the Palace of Justice, in particular the forced disappearance and murder of a number of suspected guerrillas. Recently General Arias Cabrales became the first general convicted for participating in this illegal forced disappearance.

The Church does the right thing

In a recent post I lamented the lack of progressive voices in Chicago's Catholic Church. Indeed, many of the practicing Catholics in my life are disillusioned with the Church's frequent focus on doctrinal issues over social justice.

But apparently there are still vocal progressive Catholics out there. To wit, a group of Catholic professors, as well as the US Conference of Bishops, have been speaking out over the backwards, anti-Christian slant of the Republican-led House budget proposal. These groups claim that the budget's cutting of social programs, combined with its tax cuts to the wealthy, violates Catholic pro-life morality. In particular, they seem to be applying what Chicago's late Cardinal Bernardin called a consistent ethic of life. This ethic implies that abortion, war, capital punishment, poverty, hunger, and injustice are all affronts to life, and must be simultaneously fought against.

Third World Green Daddy Part 18: Musings on culture

This is a random blog with some of my recent reflections on culture here in Colombia, especially as regards children and childrearing and agrarian livelihoods.

In our hometown I'm accustomed to people being very baby-focused. When you walk down the street, a good number of the women you see are pregnant. Babies and children are everywhere you go, but their prevalence doesn't make them an unappreciated commodity. To the contrary, people in our town are baby-crazy. When we take our baby out for a walk or to run errands, strangers play with him, talk to him, tell us how lovely he is. Even people with kids already act as if your kid is the greatest gift to the world.

This is in contrast to Bogota. On recent visits I've noticed that there are a lot fewer kids in Bogota. As part of their general attitude of ignoring other people on the street or in public places, Bogotanos don't comment on your kid, don't play with him, don't even acknowledge your or his existence. Despite my having grown up in a big city with somewhat the same school of street etiquette, I am now somewhat shocked by the coldness I encounter in Bogota. I even miss the tiresome admonitions of people from our town, who always scold us for taking the baby outside when it's cold, or ask us why we haven't wrapped him in more blankets. An exception to this general trend is an Argentine with an empanada place in the neighborhood we stay in when we're in the capital. Ever since he first saw my wife pregnant, he has always inquired about the baby, and when we recently took Sam with us to eat there, the owner genuinely congratulated us, and loved talking to the baby.

Presumably the difference in attitude towards babies is similar to the rich world/poor world split. In our town we're still in a basically agrarian mindset focused on family and progeny, while in Bogota people are more focused on professions and consumption. Lately we've laughed a lot in visits to peasant friends who talk disparagingly about Bogota. They invariably have to go to the capital for certain errands, or to visit family that's left the countryside. It's striking to hear an old woman living in a dirt-floor house in rural Boyaca, remarking on the poor quality of life in Bogota. “How can they live all piled on top of each other, like sardines? And with no work! You can't even walk on the street in Bogota without spending money. How do they live?”

I suppose my wife and I straddle the two worlds, agrarian and professional. We're constantly traveling about and going to different work meetings with people, but often these people are farmers or advocates thereof. We usually take Sam along to our meetings, something that would be totally inappropriate in the shiny offices and bourgeois bustle of Bogota. But in our context, Sam is actually a professional aid. His presence defuses tension, breaks the ice, and helps us win the trust of the local people we deal with in different places. I imagine they reason that someone out to cheat them wouldn't bring along his family, wouldn't expose that side of his personal life. My wife Caro has even had requests from work associates that she shouldn't come to meetings without Sam!

Lately I have been negotiating to do some contract work in agrarian development in Haiti. The deal I arrived at with my employers is that they'll withhold the cash honorarium for my short-term assignment, instead assuming most of the costs to have my wife, child, and stepchild visit me. Initially they seemed a bit surprised at the suggestion, but I think in the end it will be a great experience, both in terms of exposing my family to a new place and culture, and in terms of exposing my employer to a more family-oriented way of doing things!

Along the lines of our region's traditional focus on family, my wife recently had an unorthodox reflection on dealing with troublesome adolescents. She noted that silly, wild, self-centered teenagers quickly fix their ways if they get pregnant. They simply no longer have the option of being irresponsible—the new baby forces them into adulthood. Obviously in many cultures having kids young means that the adolescent won't go on to college, but in Colombia most of the teen mothers we know have gone on to study and lead a successful professional life.

Of late my wife and I have been saddened by health problems that various friends were going through, especially baby problems. One friend lost her baby at nine months of pregnancy, another had a baby with weak lungs that will require surgery, a workmate detected a grave birth defect in a sonogram. I don't think it's due to our living in the Third World—these problems have affected middle-class friends in Colombia (even a doctor who was obviously doing everything a pregnant woman is supposed to, keeping up with checkups, etc.), and friends in the US. My mom had a friend who just died of cancer, and an old college mate was also diagnosed with cancer at 28 years of age or so. I don't know if this prevalence of problems is just a coincidence, or if I'm getting to an age where my peers stop being healthy youths and start suffering health problems, or if the world is in the middle of a turning point where all the benefits of modern living start to be overshadowed by the long-term damage we're doing to our environment and our health. Either way, we've felt a lot of empathic pain lately, though we've also been amazed at the resilience of the people going through these ordeals. It seems the human creature is innately conditioned to overcome adversity.

My reading material these days has been my great uncle's memoirs. They follow a fascinating life, from a prosperous agrarian Kansas, to the Dust Bowl, to fighting in Guadalcanal, and even to a post-war soil conservation job in Nigeria! It is fun to learn about my family's history, and to get to know better an uncle I only met once. The book also makes me nostalgic. My great uncle describes an era when small agrarian towns were prosperous and self-sufficient. The wealthy ran grain elevators or ag equipment stores, the middle-class were farmers or craftsmen, and the poor were farm laborers. But even the poor weren't destitute, and there didn't seem to be a huge gap between farm laborers and respectable families. Town families had a few cows, an orchard, a vegetable garden to supplement their regular jobs. You could have a car for no more cost than a few dollars and the smarts to fix it up. Though my great uncle and many others like to talk about how hard things used to be when everything from milking cows to starting a car to heating a house involved manual labor, I for one would much prefer an age of hard work leading to prosperity, over today when everyone's fat and at ease, but there's no work nor money to be had. Another reflection from my uncle's memoirs is a really positive role for the government. While my great uncle speaks somewhat negatively of FDR's welfare programs, his employer for almost his entire life was the federal government. First in the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression, then in the Navy Construction Corps, then in the Soil Conservation Service (after studying on the government's tab to become an agricultural engineer). My uncle lived and worked in an age when the government was healthily involved in improving farming, livelihoods, education, and the natural environment for lots of people. Luckily he retired in 1972, just as the government was starting to sell out the welfare of farmers and the populace in general.

Anyway, I wish the US today had more in common with the US my great uncle grew up in (without of course the lynchings, the immigrant sweatshops, and the environmental pillaging). I wish people were more connected to their livelihoods, whether agrarian or not, as opposed to today's prevalence of a sub-sub-sub-contracted workforce in retail stores and offices providing services of dubious social value.

Here in our part of Colombia, I appreciate that people are more or less socially equal, and that many earn their living from their own small businesses. There are farmers, food processors, and a whole army of small artisans and repairmen serving the needs of our cities and towns in Boyaca. There are also larger employers in the steel, mining, and cement industries, another aspect of the US workforce that has long disappeared.

For instance, a week ago we had a baby mattress made to order for a friend. The man who made it has his mid-size workshop and his house in a semi-legal industrial park on the outskirts of our town. There he hand-makes mattresses using Colombian fabrics and recycled cotton and foam stuffing. With this work (in which he is aided by his family and a few hired workers), he is able to secure a decent living for his family, and apparently to send his sons to school. This is a real accomplishment in a world where so many can't feed themselves, and even compared to other regions of our country, in which often people don't even have the basic means to employ themselves and contribute to society. For me, this vision of small, self-sufficient business owners is what we should be aiming for, in Colombia as in the rest of the world. There is of course a place for larger enterprises and high-tech sectors, but we in Colombia shouldn't make the mistake that my great-uncle's generation made in the US, of replacing humble yet stable and productive enterprises with an economy so sub-divided and high tech that there are no more jobs, and no more connection to the actual fruit of our labor.

The other day, during a stroll in Bogota, we ran across the Doctors without Borders office for Colombia. It's located in a nice, calm historic neighborhood near my sister-in-law's house. Seeing the office, I recalled how I've felt when I've worked in exotic tropical locales like Benin or Haiti. In my experience, it's always a treat to return to a well-furnished office or residence in the capital city after a long spell in the field. I wonder if the Doctors without Borders people feel the same way, seeing Colombia as this hot, exotic, dangerous country that they need an occasional break from. It's funny to imagine an outsider viewing your home as a weird, out-of-the-norm place. We locals spend our days buying groceries, getting our car washed, fixing things around the house, going to work, without appreciating how new and exotic our own surroundings may seem to others. In Benin I've been the outsider coming in and marveling at a wild new place, and now in Colombia I've been the boring mundane person feeling like my place isn't that new or wild. Surely it would be interesting for people on both sides of the relationship to interchange impressions. I feel that in Latin America such an exchange is a bit easier. We're essentially a Western culture, with plenty of literate people to describe the local reality to outsiders. On the other hand, much of Africa still consists in semi-literate peasants that cannot easily make their voice heard by others. Even Africa's burgeoning crop of new writers hails largely from the literate, urban existence that is alien to most of their countrymen. This is of course changing, as even rural Africans access the literacy and the media that allow them to communicate with the rest of the world, and at the same time as Africa becomes more middle-class and urban, such that urban writers are speaking to a larger part of the reality. I certainly look forward to hearing from the African Garcia Marquez, the African VS Naipaul!

World news

In response to yesterday's blog on my disappointment with media non-coverage of important issues, a friend asked if I believed that MSNBC was any more or less genuine as a news source than other news networks. I must admit that I'm not a big watcher of cable news. I grew up with the local Chicago newscasts on network TV (which were basically a procession of local weather, silly local interest stories, and the day's rundown of all the murders of little kids on the South and West Sides), and nowadays I rarely watch TV at all, even though we have cable TV in our house now.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I'll say that yes, I do believe there are better news networks than MSNBC. It seems that a good deal of MSNBC's programming is talking heads mixing opinion and real news, as Ted Koppel lamented in an article a few months ago. While I might agree with certain viewpoints, like Keith Olbermann's spirited advocacy for a national health care policy, it's not news. Fox is even worse than MSNBC in that it is a circuslike opinion-fest filled with vitriol and misinformation, only for idiotic cryptonazis as opposed to MSNBC's audience of caricatured postmodern liberals. CNN at least deals mainly in news and not opinion, but its coverage seems to me very superficial. They don't get down to the fundamental issues of stories they cover, just a 24-hour loop of the same bland headlines. I don't believe I've ever watched the BBC on TV, but their radio World Service is a source for excellent, in-depth coverage of things going on all over the world. NPR's Morning Edition also seems to me a good mix of headlines and deeper stories, and other NPR programs like the World do good nuanced coverage of national and world trends and issues (though NPR doesn't have a TV outlet, so maybe it's not fair to compare to the other channels here). I haven't seen Al Jazeera English's regular news, but their exposes for example on the Haitian earthquake were well-done. Likewise I've only seen a few special investigative reports from TeleSur, the pan-American channel out of Venezuela, but they were decent. Lastly, there's a French news channel called France 24 that I watched sometimes while I was in Africa, and they had really good coverage of world events.

I guess the summary of the above paragraph is that stations with some public financial support, and presumably a more explicit mandate to serve the public interest (NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.) fare better in my assessment than the for-profit stations like MSNBC or Fox News.

At any rate, thinking about this gave me a new idea for a news channel. It would broadcast only news, without opinion or commentary. There would be correspondents in maybe ten regions of the world (East Asia, North America, sub-Saharan Africa, etc.), with seven correspondents in each region. So for example in Oceania there could be two correspondents in Australia, one in New Zealand, three flitting about the South Pacific, and one for New Guinea. Every day there would be ten hour-long programs, one from each region, covering major headlines and an in-depth investigative report. Each program would run two times in the day, making for 20 hours of programming. To fill the other four hours, there would be an hour-long summary cast of all the day's news from the different regions, run four times a day. For a given region, each correspondent would be in charge of one program a week, meaning he or she would spend the week preparing an in-depth half-hour report on some relevant topic in the sub-region, and the day of the broadcast of that report, the correspondent would also do a half-hour summary of the entire region's news headlines.

This way, with a staff of seventy regional reporters and their associated production teams, plus whoever would do the daily summary broadcasts, you would get a great worldwide coverage of relevant news. I don't think it would cost that much, compared to the polished studio productions and high-paid stars of the pseudo-news networks. There would only be eleven hours of new programming every day, and the repetition of shows wouldn't be a big deal, since all the other news networks usually just keep repeating the same damn thing anyway.

So that's my idea. It sounds simple--reporting world news with real reporters--but it seems that many networks have gotten away from this model. It's like MTV, which as far as I know hardly shows music videos anymore because they're so busy with other programming. Surely the profit motive has led to this state of affairs, where news networks focus on non-news, but I have to believe that a network catering to the "niche" of people who want real, hard, unembellished news might be able to make a go of it.