A Million Miles Away
Recktenwald says his SIU students are less like the Medill students he observed back in Chicago than they are like the journalists in Tanzania. “Our journalism school is filled with kids who aren’t from the upper class,” he says. “They’re nice, hardworking kids who are eager to learn, and they listen to you. There’s a difference between a person who works his way through college cleaning toilets and one who comes from a place where he doesn’t have to worry about cleaning toilets. Most of our students work. And many, in fact, do clean toilets and mop halls and work in the food service. They’re going to college because they want to go to college, and they’re going to take entry-level jobs in little newspapers and work their way up.”
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In Tanzania every paper is little. Corruption is a tradition there and independent journalism still a novelty. “They’re coming out of a time when there wasn’t a free press–there was a paper that told the government’s view, and that was all,” says Recktenwald. “Now there’s a thriving press. Up and down the street you’ll see news kids standing on the corner selling seven or eight different papers. None of them I think are even 15 years old. Some of them don’t stay operating very long.
“I told them lightheartedly about Jane Byrne,” he says. “I told them to keep calling and to find other places to get answers. And where there’s more than one side of a dispute, tell all sides or tell the readers why you can’t. When the free press is less than a decade old they haven’t learned these things.”
And if you know something’s wrong, why not say so in your article? Reckten-wald says news stories in Tanzania are full of the reporters’ personal opinions, and he had his hands full trying to explain why they shouldn’t be.
Recktenwald has created a Web site that consists mostly of links to other sites he thinks would be useful to his SIU students. But he’s also posted his bio there–of his 12 years with the Better Government Association, 7 of them as chief investigator, followed by 21 years with the Tribune. Among the high points with the BGA was his work on joint undercover investigations of vote fraud and corrupt ambulance services that helped the Tribune win a couple of Pulitzers in the early 70s.
