Image: Naaz Cinema in Mumbai, India/Shutterstock
As part of our training at Columbia University in New York, we introduced our academics to the concept that supporting journalism and obtaining quality data is imperative for society and helps maintain democracy.
Students in our journalism school are acutely aware of the norms and traditions of the Fourth Estate – and the important role the press can play in holding those in place to account – while academics in other departments of the university are not.
But society’s understanding of the role of the media influences the willingness of governments and the public to help and protect quality journalism. Therefore, it is imperative to teach the importance of journalism and why it is important.
The portrayal of hounds in videos has, over the years, helped other people perceive what journalism is and what hounds do, even if Hollywood, of course, has glamorized, satirized, or oversimplified it. So last year, we taught a course on “journalism in film. “
Each week, we assign feature films and documentaries from around the world to help our students better understand what journalism is, what it can or can be, and how society’s perception of media has evolved. We enjoy featuring the elegance of the inspiring and courageous hounds whose paintings we admire and use the films to communicate about the need to monitor investigations, the ethics of journalism, and lax speech laws.
We open our classroom to scholars from across the university and host undergraduate and doctoral scholars, film studies scholars, journalists, and master’s scholars from the School of International Affairs and Politics. They came from all over the world, including Cambodia/Mexico, Saudi Arabia. Arabia, China, India, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. In addition to watching films, they blogged and about journalism in their own countries or profiled critics around the world whom they had studied and interviewed. Our semester encouraged us. We are convinced that this may simply be an old course for our students.
We find the well-known films, in which elegance had never before noticed: “The Front Page” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” covered very well part of the history of journalism in the early twentieth century in the United States, such as the evolution towards professionalism and the point of view of the bloodhounds demanding accountability. But he began reporting on screen from a broader global perspective, assigning films from around the world and inviting some administrators and manufacturers to a course.
Below is a variety of our favorites outside of the U. S. Some glorify the hounds and show their courage and tenacity, others satirize the complicity of business owners and governments and the relentless pursuit of attention and clicks. This is an initial list that complements a recent GIJN article on must-read investigative documentaries from around the world. Send us your favorites.
This documentary covers the life of Mo Amin, Africa’s leading news photographer, who covered many of the major events of the 20th century on the continent. Led through Amin’s son, Ibrahim, the audience gets a front-row seat to the Ethiopian famine, the rule of Uganda’s president-for-life, Idi Amin, and other ancient events covered by a charismatic but confused TV journalist.
Through the struggles they face through Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of the Philippine newspaper Rappler, this documentary exposes how populist autocrats suppress independent journalism through “a thousand clippings”: harassment lawsuits, relentless trolling, insults, threats, and lies. that undermine the legitimacy of monitoring reports.
Pressure on the Indian media has increased tremendously since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since then, the hounds have been investigated, threatened, and killed. This documentary examines those attacks through the lens of the country’s last independent primary television channel, NDTV. The film chronicles the career of veteran journalist Ravish Kumar and the courage of his colleagues as their lives unfold. Kumar helps him keep his eyes on the stories that matter and is the target of organized harassment, while the newsroom loses staff to make the farewell cakes seem regular. .
This documentary is about an intrepid all-female media outlet, Khabar Lahariya, founded in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 2002. Citizen journalists, armed with mobile phone cameras, persist as they investigate and report on debatable issues such as local elections, rape, and illegal mining. The filmmakers followed Meera Jatav, who runs the newsroom, and several other journalists as they were fired, harassed, and even groped while reporting in rural India. Even more impressive: these inspiring women journalists are self-taught; He had never used a cell phone in front of citizen journalists and comes from the Dalit castes, teams that face widespread discrimination in Indian society as “untouchables. “
An organization of Romanian sports journalists reveals the country’s corrupt and collapsed fitness formula after the fall of communism, proving that rarely the most in-depth reporting is done not through journalists on the court, but through those who assume a factor from the outside. The journalists began by interviewing burn victims after a fire at the Collective nightclub and ended by exposing the pervasive formula of corrupt procurement processes. Despite the outrageous misconduct uncovered, the audience’s reaction to the briefing was mixed and reminds us of the challenge of backlash when. Sometimes, top-of-the-line polls can inadvertently give the public the impression that the formula is hopelessly rigged and discourage active civic participation, or even push citizens into the arms of autocrats who exploit mass discontent.
This documentary features the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who used YouTube and other bureaucratic social media platforms to expose corruption and abuse of force during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. This story about Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation led academics into the new bureaucracy. of denigration led by non-traditional journalists and activists, who combine social media and open-source information techniques to locate evidence of wrongdoing.
Bollywood loves remakes, and this is a clever Indian edit of the 1951 American film “Ace in the Hole,” directed by Billy Wilder and based on a true story that took place in the 1920s. Based on the tragedy of farmer suicides in India, the film portrays Natha, an Indian farmer who plans to end his life so that his family can get payment from the government. Hitale takes over the country and chaos ensues after an amoral journalist encourages Natha to go all the way to deliver a more sensational story. . It’s a funny, unhappy, colorful black comedy.
A dark comedy directed by Mexican director Luis Estrada about a corrupt Mexican governor who hires a fictional TV station to appear smart after being filmed accepting a suitcase of money. Money laundering, dual baby kidnapping, as well as blatant lies and media. Manipulation ensued. There are no smart guys in this film, which explores the interplay between the endemic corruption within Mexico City’s status quo and the outright corruption of local politicians in this small town.
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones witnessed the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s and bravely published dozens of articles about the great famine in the region (a result of Soviet agricultural policy), all of which were ignored. The film produced in Poland shows us the limits of research. journalism and the time when the sleuths who write the first draft of the story are only hired later for writing the story correctly. The film vividly captures the contrast between Jones and the now-disgraced Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who frequented Communist Party leaders. and art collected to cover up the famine.
Even after classes were over, we came across movies that we wanted to watch and talk to our students. This film, set in 2003, just after the SARS outbreak, is hard to find, as the Chinese government censored it shortly after its release. It tells the story of Chinese journalists who investigated widespread discrimination against other people with hepatitis B and exposed the cottage industry of fake medical reports that emerged at the time.
Dr. Anya Schiffrin is director of the Technology, Media, and Communications Fellowship at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Sheila Coronel is the director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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