HKS Panel Debates News

A group of foreign correspondents, radio hosts, and museum curators emphasized the importance of global citizenship while also taking the tastes of local audiences into account in two panel discussions at the Harvard Kennedy School yesterday.

The program, entitled “Bronzes and Broadcasts” and sponsored by the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, began with a discussion of the challenges generated when national news outlets disseminate information to the rest of the world.

“We’ve recognized that if you’re a national program, you’re an international program”, said Robin Young, host of WBUR’s Here and Now.

While discussing the importance of social media in today’s reporting, Young added that WBUR was able to produce some of the first reports from Egyptian civilians in Cairo’s Tahrir Square protests by using Twitter rather than waiting for correspondents on the ground.

But audience expectations can also have a negative effect on news coverage, said current Nieman Fellow Jennifer Eccleston.

Eccleston, a CNN foreign correspondent currently based in Rome, acknowledged that CNN often assesses the market value of a story to their audience and tailors their broadcasts accordingly.

“[CNN’s reporting] remains painstakingly objective”, she said. “But the audience for un-garnished news is getting smaller each year.”

Catering too much to audience reaction, national news can end up frustratingly incomplete in comparison to international news, Eccleston said.

In the second panel, four panelists discussed a dilemma facing museums in an ever globalizing world: how to grow their audiences while serving their local and global communities.

Teresa A. Carbone, director of the Brooklyn Museum, said her museum continuously caters to the local community. Founded as a populist institution, it attempts to serve the whole of a diverse community through a variety of exhibitions and the juxtaposition of objects from different cultures.

“Our job is to find a compelling enough reason to make every person in our community come to our doors,” she said.

However, Dan L. Monroe, CEO and Executive Director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., said that in many museums there is still an inherent bias against non-Western art that is often overlooked.

For example unknown compositions of African Art are often attributed only to a specific tribe, ignoring the fact that an unknown artist, not a whole culture, created it.

Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, explained that artists from all over the globe are brought to her museum to both create art and teach to local children.

She and her fellow panel members emphasized that it was important to expose children to museums with a global scope early in life.

“We’re both very local and very global,” Hawley said.