justinpope:

I’ve been hanging out a bit in a coffee shop in central Moshi in the afternoons and buying a newspaper or two from George or Jonas, two vendors who wander with their stash through some of the places expats frequent. They sell the English-language Kenyan and Tanzanian dailies and, for a bit more, a Guardian from London. On special occasions they they’ll flash you an Economist, like some kind of samizdat, from the back of their pile. It goes for around $8, which isn’t bad at all, but I’m still saving for a special occasion.
This is actually one of the few places where my negotiating is relatively successful, for the simple reason the price of the newspaper is printed on the front page. We’re starting to repeat a little ritual where he offers me a copy of one of the dailies for 3,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $2.25) and I point to the published price of 800, and he feigns surprise, like he doesn’t know the list price of the product he sells (and we usually settle on 1,000).
As I curse my 50 KBPS Internet connection at home (all those ESPN.com graphics look great at home; here they are torturous) I try to console myself with the thought that the one advantage of a country virtually devoid of broadband Internet is a vibrant newspaper culture. It’s reassuring to see newsstands with a variety of options for sale. Obviously I’m not reading the Swahili ones. On the English side,  there’s the Daily News, which apparently is more the government organ, and the more independent Citizen. Interestingly, the wireless network at KCMC Hospital that I occasionally tap into blocks the Citizen site and not the Daily News. There’s also a Tanzanian version of the Guardian, I think just on weekends.
It’s hard to know so far if de facto freedom of the press matches the de jure (certainly people have warned me if I end up reporting here to be very careful). But the main problem with the English dailies doesn’t seem to be that they’re censored; it’s that they’re incredibly boring. Even in the Citizen, the MO of stories is very bureaucratic, with lists of public officials involved and procedures undertaken and government reports and plans but very little writing that offers any kind of synthesis or grabs a reader. Yesterday a story recounted a parliamentary question as to whether a professor whose government contract wasn’t renewed was being punished for his political beliefs and activities. What were his activities? What was he doing for the government? No explanation. And here’s the gripping lead from the top A1 story in the Citizen last Tuesday: “The passing of the Electronic and Postal Communications Bill, 2009, has been construed by investors and analysts as a continuing trend of policy uncertainties that might hurt Tanzania as an investment destination.”
What’s frustrating, of course, is there are a million great stories in the country and countless opportunities for investigative and crusading journalism. One that has gotten some attention — on the front pages of several papers the last few days — concerns a leading television invetigative journalist, Jerry Muro, who has been arrested for allegedly trying to extort money from a local public official in exchange for refraining from exposing him in a corruption scheme. Muro has reportedly made a name for himself exposing corruption among traffic police officers; now he is accused of soliciting a bribe to keep a district accountant’s name out of the story.
This is a tremendous story and admittedly gets big play on A1 (imagine if an Anderson Cooper or a Morley Safer were charged with corruption in the practice of his journalism, and compound it to take place in a country where corruption is endemic and the thought that not even the press is above it would seem devastating). But the story itself — and others like it — is largely an account of the proceedings at an initial hearing.  Several paragraphs in there is a comment from the Media Council of Tanzania calling for a comprehensive investigation to establish the truth but little exploration of the reason behind their comment: the suggestion that he may have been set up by the police in revenge for exposing them in other stories.
In either case an important institution in Tanzania looks terrible — either a leading investigative journalist is corrupt, or the police have set him up. But it’s essentially up to the reader to deduce the importance of this, and appreciate what’s at stake in determining which of those two truths is the case. From scanning the papers for a couple days it doesn’t seem like anybody is trying too hard to figure it out (or perhaps they’re getting stonewalled).  On the op ed page meanwhile, a couple of incomprehensible columnists riff about the need for Haiti to watch out for do-gooders (an intersting instinct given the huge NGO presence here) and why Obama’s popularity is slipping. It’s the feeling I get when I see some a small-town paper in the U.S writing editorials about the Israelis and Palestinians or the Sudan — that is to say it’s fine on occasion, but perhaps better left to others when there are important issues in your coverage area that nobody will editorialize on if you do not.
Yesterday I picked up a Kenyan paper, the Nation, which suffered some of the same faults but was altogether better — more interesting, more hard-hitting, better written. It raises again the “Kenya envy” question and I wonder how much of its relative prosperity might be attributed to more effective newspapers. People who work in health care here talk constantly about a lack of accountability pervading the medical system and country as a whole; is the media cause or effect (and to make an obvious concession: Kenya has not exactly solved its corruption problem)?
I mull these things having just finished former London Sunday Times editor Richard Evans’ thoroughly enjoyable memoir “My Paper Chase,” which I recommend highly to jaded fellow journalists requiring some reinvigoration about the work we do. Evants recounts his battles over transparency and press freedom with the British government. To be sure neither there nor in the United States does the press always push public policy in the healthiest possible direction, but the occasionally expressed opinion it does more harm than good in those countries is beyond naive.
That said, on the positive side, at least there is something of a newspaper culture here, which isn’t something the West can neccesarily say anymore. And in Tanzania there is some value in most people reading a relatively finite range of newspapers — there is a common set of issues and stories to process and discuss and little of the echo chamber effect fueled by the Internet and that’s now so prevalent in the United States and is whacking away at civil society. But without consistent high quality that hardly seems a worthwhile tradeoff.
It’s hard to see how a very poor country could possibly develop without a press that is not only free but hard-hitting and skillfull  (though I guess there are some examples, in Asia for instance).  In thinking about development, the question people always return to is where to spend the marginal dollar (or $1 million, or $1 billion). What form of assistance gives the most bang for the buck long term? There is certainly no lack of choices. But having gotten some glimpse of the truckloads of medical supplies piling up at the hospital because administrators can’t solve a turf battle and deliver them, and of the large number of small organizations working here on some problem but lacking the scale to do anything systematic about it, I keep coming back to the press. I don’t know them well and am not sure whether they could efficiently process large amounts of Gates-scale money. But just to imagine a hypoethical world where ROI of various forms of aid could really be measured accurately, I’d bet on a strong showing for organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Press Institute, which develop capacity and shame governments that curtail press freedom. I plead guilty to professional narcissism, but stand by it.

A male friend e-mailed once asking if I had read Eat, Pray, Love, and if I had, what I had thought of it. The argument that started that day still has not ended. I thought it was good, I told him. The first section (Eat, Italy) was great, the second (Pray, India) good, the third (Love, Indonesia) barely OK, but I appreciated that the book existed. It can be extraordinarily painful to rebuild your life from the ground up and not simply use the model you’ve been provided, and I’m glad a massively bestselling book said that. And him? Oh how he hates Elizabeth Gilbert. And he hates that women are reading her. If a man wrote a book about ogling young Italians and abandoning a spouse back home to run away with a much hotter Brazilian, my friend argued, he would be pilloried for being a misogynist asshole. To which I responded, Do you honestly think that book has not been written in different forms by men, over and over again? Have you read any 20th-century literature?

This is a great article. I forgive Jessa for all of her grumpy contrarianism for pieces like this.

I love all of Matthew Sweet’s Altered Beast so, so much, but when I get to “Someone to Pull the Trigger” I fall into a full-body swoon.  I’m not posting the song here, because it’s one I can’t stand to listen to on the computer.  Ya gotta have high-quality audio for all that perfect heartbreak.  If you’ve got ‘em, smoke ‘em…

from Boy Culture, w/r/t Madonna:

“I’m not going to say a word on the cheeks anymore unless they burst or something; they will be like the new Niki and Donna to me—always there, rarely warranting comment.”

But if the Man-Machine is still only an invention of the pen, it is no less true that, without having human form, the machine is already assuming such a multitude of tasks that, whereas once it aroused admiration, it is beginning to inspire fear.  Around the comfortable hearth of the American workman stalks the specter of the Robot.