Has the internet been good for democracy? An Ira Basen documentary
Our navigator of the worldwide web, Ira Basen, looks at the promise and the perils of digital democracy. What happened to the dream that the internet would bring power to the people? Facebook and Twitter were touted as new vehicles for ordinary citizens to engage with politicians and each other. People imagined a new age of accountability, transparency and citizen empowerment. What has happened to the dream of digital "power to the people" ?
Ira Basen's documentary is called "Tools of the Game."
https://www.cbc.ca/andthewinneris/2012/06/26/spin-cycles-episode-one/
Spin Cycles (six-part series)
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 | Categories: |
(AP Photo/East Valley Tribune, Tim Hacker )
And the Winner Is Spin Cycles - Pt 1
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2249231298
Spin Cycles - Pt 2
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2250010532
Spin Cycles - Pt 3
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2250013589
Spin Cycles - Pt 4
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2250483716
Spin Cycles - Pt 5
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2260054324
Spin Cycles - Pt 6
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2262328117
https://www.fims.uwo.ca/research/fellowships_chairs/asper_fellowship/ira_basen.html
Ira Basen
CanWest Global Fellow in MediaSeptember 1, 2012 - April 30, 2013
Teaching and ResearchDuring his tenure as CanWest Fellow, Mr. Basen taught a graduate elective, “The Future of Journalism in the Digital Age,” and he pursued research that brings together his interests in the future of news in the age of social media, the growth of “brand journalism,” and the future of local news.
Mr. Basen also moderated a panel titled, "Digital Boon or Digital Doom? The Virtual Future of Higher Education," on January 16th, 2013. The panel discussed the possible benefits and pitfalls associated with online and distance education through universities, and featured panelists: George Siemens, Athabasca University; Jonathan Schaeffer, University of Alberta; Elizabeth Hanson, Queen's University; Doug Mann, Western University; Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University.
Profile
Ira Basen has enjoyed a distinguished career in radio, particularly with CBC radio where he served as senior producer for Sunday Morning and Quirks and Quarks. He was also involved in the creation of the network programs, This Morning, The Inside Track, and Workology. More recently, he has produced several one-hour documentaries for CBC’s Sunday Edition, including “Occupy Next,” about the future of the Occupy movement.
Mr. Basen has also written for Saturday Night, Maisoneuve, and The Canadian Journal of Communication, and he is the recipient of numerous radio awards, among them several New York Radio Festival Awards. He has taught previously in the MAJ program, and he has also taught at Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, and at McMaster University.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ira-basen-23b0658/?originalSubdomain=ca
Ira Basen
producer at CBC radio
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Experience
https://rrj.ca/a-qa-with-ira-basen-on-the-power-of-spin/
A Q&A with Ira Basen on the Power of Spin
But if you speak to Ira Basen, a Ryerson journalism school lecturer and the former senior producer of CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, he’ll give you a different take. Basen was involved in creating the special CBC series Spin Cycles, a six-part look at how PR and journalism intertwine. On top of Basen believing that PR and journalism should maintain a different relationship, he believes it might also be possible that Journalism and PR need each other more than ever.
I spoke with Basen to understand why we should shift our perspectives, and how PR and journalism are becoming more alike than we might realize.
Sierra Bein: How did you start reporting on PR in journalism?
Ira Basen: In the late ‘90s, I was the executive producer of a national morning show. It took up the time slot that’s now occupied by The Current and Q… I was struck by how many people came on the program that had obviously been media-trained because they knew how to respond to a question without answering it. I found it rather frustrating, because the two things you’re trying to do if you’re putting something on the radio is educate people and inform them, and entertain them as well. So, we were not doing any of those things.
Has PR and journalism always been considered rivals?
Public Relations was (in the late 1800s)… essentially managing strategic relationships… It would be a conduit that would allow the organization to express its opinions to the public and the public could then express its opinions back to the organization. But it was not about selling, it was not about marketing. Public relations took on that marketing function later on.
There are certainly friends of mine who are still purists and who get very upset when you try to link marketing with public relations. What they say is that all marketing is communications, but not all communications is marketing.
I’ve heard people say that “If PR fails, journalism fails.” Do you think that’s said because they’re so intertwined?
I think that there’s an increasing lack of trust in the media… One of the consequences of that is that people will treat information they get from a journalist with the same amount of skepticism as they do a PR person.
There is a different purpose in PR than there is in journalism—and that’s fundamental—but I think that is getting blurred a lot, partly because of things like native advertising. So I think that if we reach the stage that I think we’re heading towards, where people see media as no more trustworthy than PR, that’s a dangerous place to be.
One thing we’ve talked about before is something people don’t talk about—how PR people understand our job very well, but we don’t understand their job and we don’t talk about it in the newsroom. What effect does this create?
There’s a large percentage of people in PR who were either former journalists or were trained as journalists and never went into journalism, so they know how the industry works.
The result is that smart PR people understand what a story is, they understand what deadlines are, and they understand what makes a journalist tick and what makes them think, and the ones who do that can be very effective at their jobs. But on the other side, since most journalists don’t really understand how PR people work and what they think, and they continue to have these stereotypes, they’re not as effective as they should be.
They should be able to sort out where public relations people can actually be helpful to the job they do and where they can be an obstacle to their job. But I think that if journalists knew more about it, they would be able to understand how to work with public relations people to get their story, because public relations people are not always the enemy of that story.
About the author
Sierra is a freelance journalist from Toronto. Her main interests include digital and visual journalism, and maybe you'll find a fun opinion here and there.
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