Who needs reporters?

This title of an op-ed piece by Frank Bruni in the June 1 New York Times caught my eye, since I sometimes serve in the role of reporter. But it also raises an important issue we all should address: the role of reporting the news in order to hold leaders of various kinds accountable to their constituents.

Bruni notes that in recent months, Michele Bachmann, Anthony Weiner and Hillary Clinton used carefully made online videos to make important announcements.

You may ask, What’s the big deal? It’s one more example of politicians trying to control their image so they look good. And it follows the example of corporate America, which has been doing this for a long time.

“But corporations answer only to shareholders and customers,” Bruni writes. “Politicians answer to all of us, and have a scarier kind of power, easily abused. So we must see them in environments that aren’t necessarily tailored to their advantage.”

Someone needs to point out where the Emperor has no clothes. Someone needs to question the pretense or the image being manufactured. These leaders are accountable to us citizens? The Fourth Estate (the press) is one major way they are held accountable.

Such need for accountability applies to many other contexts, including Mennonite congregations, conferences and Mennonite Church USA. We are to hold each other accountable, by whatever method works best. That aligns with the Anabaptist “rule of Christ” (Matthew 18:15-20).

Unfortunately, reporters are becoming a rarer breed and losing influence. An editorial called “Empty Calories” in the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review, addresses the growing popularity of social media for getting news.

The Pew Research Center reports that 72 percent of all U.S. adults say the most common way they hear about news from family and friends is through “word of mouth.” And 23 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say they primarily get news from family and friends via social media.

Many people get their news from social media, from bloggers and those who scrape together items from various sources. But what kind of news are they getting? How do they know what’s true? asks the editorial. “How can they get beyond the superficial updates about Justin Bieber’s monkey or Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy?”

As “more and more journalism shops that underwrite enterprise reporting are starting to lock their wares behind paywalls,” says the editorial, “someday, in the not-too-distant future, it seems, there will be very little credible news for the bloggers and scrapers to aggregate.”

A key word there is “credible.” Reporters are trained to ask probing questions and get quotes from various perspectives in order to try to get as accurate as possible description of an event.

Social media may provide this at times, but how do we know? Or do we just go to those sources who agree with our point of view? This is what Eli Pariser has called a “filter bubble.”

Too much of what’s out there, says the editorial, consists of “empty calories.” But “general-interest media, at least, take [readers] beyond the bubble (they might come for Kim but then discover Syria).”

As we seek to find what’s credible and hold our leaders accountable, let’s pay close attention to the news we consume and where it comes from.

We all need reporters.

What if we treated gun crime as a disease?

Amid all the verbal furor over gun rights and crime, at least one state is having some success by treating gun crime as a disease. However, most states won’t be able to follow suit.

Writing in the May/June issue of Pacific Standard, senior editor Vince Beiser discusses the Armed Prohibited Persons System, a program in which California officials comb through mountains of data to find people who have lost the right to own guns, then send agents to take those guns away. According to Beiser, “The agents are looking for people who bought guns legally but were later convicted of a felony, put under a restraining order or were deemed seriously mentally ill—any of which bar them from owning a firearm.”

In California, that list includes almost 20,000 people who hold more than 38,000 handguns and 1,600 assault weapons. Last year, agents with the California Bureau of Firearms confiscated more than 2,000  illegally owned weapons.

This information exists in part because of the work of Garen Wintemute, a doctor and researcher at the University of California, Davis Medical Center. “He is one of a number of academics and activists,” writes Beiser, “trying to get people to look at gun violence not just as a criminal-justice issue but as a public-health one.”

“Whether it’s cancer or traffic accidents, you ask the same questions,” says Wintemute. “You identify the high-risk groups and then look for interventions.”

One such high-risk group is pistol-owning ex-cons. “People with serious felony records are barred nationwide from owning guns,” Beiser writes, “but research shows that such folks are nonetheless relatively likely to commit new crimes—with a gun.”

Statistics support this. Federal data show that about 40 percent of felons surveyed who were convicted of gun-related offenses were prohibited from owning firearms when they committed the offense. Researchers studying people charged with homicides in Illinois found similar results.

This probably doesn’t surprise anyone. What the prohibited-persons program does is pretty straightforward: It enforces existing laws by taking the guns away. And apparently, this works.

Wintemute and a team of researchers gathered records on people who bought handguns before a ban took effect in 1990 and those who tried to buy handguns after the ban but were turned down. Over the next three years, the researchers found, “the risk of committing new nonviolent crimes was about identical [for both groups],” Beiser writes. “But in the group that was banned from buying handguns, the risk of new gun and/or violent crimes went down by about 30 percent.”

These kinds of results have a bipartisan appeal. The bill that created the program was introduced by a Republican and was supported by the National Rifle Association.

Wintemute estimates that as many as 180,000 people nationwide should be on a prohibited-persons list, but it’s unlikely other states will set up similar programs. Why? “California is essentially the only state that has the data to make the program possible,” Beiser writes.

For example, he writes, “California allows only licensed retailers to sell handguns—there’s no ‘gun-show loophole’—and has recorded those sales since 1996.” And don’t expect the federal government to set up a centralized gun-tracking system. It’s prohibited by law from doing so.

While rhetoric flies around social media about gun rights, and though gun crime is a complex issue, there are rational approaches that have proven helpful in reducing it. Unfortunately, rationality rarely prevails in our polarizing culture.

An old antiwar film from Japan

We tend to pay attention to recent films, but it’s good to recognize that many good films have been made over the years that offer much to enrich our perspectives. Netflix is one source for viewing older films, and I regularly venture into these past treasures to explore what they offer.

This week I watched a Japanese film from 1956, The Burmese Harp, directed by Kon Ichikawa. It won several prizes and was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film. While any film from another country and another period of history offers particular insights into other worlds and other lives, The Burmese Harp is especially moving in its antiwar themes.

One way the film startles American viewers is that it is told from the perspective of Japanese soldiers stationed in Burma at the end of World War II. These soldiers are not the inhuman monsters American propaganda portrayed them as. In fact, this group of soldiers is led by a captain who is trained in choral singing and has his soldiers sing to raise their morale. One soldier, Mizushima, is designated to play the harp for the group.

The war ends, but one group of soldiers continues to fight. Mizushima volunteers to go to them to deliver news that the war is over and Japan has surrendered. A British captain gives Mizushima 30 minutes to convince these soldiers to surrender before he orders them shelled. The soldiers refuse to surrender, and all of them are killed in the ensuing shelling. Mizushima, however, survives and is nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk.

He dresses in a monk’s robes and wanders the countryside, begging for food. He returns to where the soldiers were killed and goes about burying them.

His own company, meanwhile, believe he is dead, until one day they see a monk on a bridge who looks like Mizushima. But the monk says nothing to them. The film portrays these men’s care for one another and strong desire for Mizushima to rejoin them when they eventually receive permission to return to Japan.

However, he stays in Burma to live as a monk, but he sends them a letter that includes this beautiful sentence: “Our work is simply to ease the great suffering of the world, to have the courage to face suffering, senselessness and irrationality without fear, to find the strength to create peace by one’s own example.”

The film is shot in black and white and includes some stunning shots. It shows the horrors of war without overdoing it, as in today’s films. But it also shows the humanity of the Japanese soldiers. Clint Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) does this as well.

There are many excellent antiwar films, such as Grand Illusion (1937) and Paths of Glory (1957), that are worth watching. The Burmese Harp is one more to add to that esteemed list.