Seeds of Peace youths say public skepticism needed toward media
BY STEPHEN KAUFMAN | NEW YORK Young people growing up in regions of conflict have told the international media that it must dedicate itself to factual accuracy, while the public needs to exercise a healthy amount of skepticism towards media reports from conflict areas.
Those messages were contained in a declaration to the world’s media after 125 alumni of the Seeds of Peace program gathered in New York October 10-16 to discuss how conflicts are reported in a conference entitled “Breaking News, Making Headlines.”
The document, read by Seeds of Peace participants at the October 16 closing session, recognized the power of the media to sway audiences and said the public must hold the media accountable to rigorous standards of fairness and accuracy. The document said the main objective of the media is to “provide fact, on the basis of which we can make our own choices.”
“In our opinion, the role of the media is not to tell people what to think, but to tell them what to think about,” they said in their declaration. Meanwhile, the public has a responsibility to be “engaged, curious, skeptical, and willing to examine” its news sources, and to seek out different views and forms of media in order to gain a wider perspective, said the participants.
The Seeds of Peace teenagers came to the New York conference from Afghanistan, the Balkans, Cyprus, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Palestinian areas, as well as from the United States.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Al Hayat’s Raghida Dergham, CBS’s David Letterman, former State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb, ABC’s David Westin and former Clinton administration press secretary Mike McCurry were featured speakers.
Seeds of Peace President Aaron David Miller told the participants “the media is neither your friend nor your enemy.” It is shaped by divergent factors such as economic self-interest and ratings, but also ethics and professionalism, he said.
Miller advised the teens to hold the media “to the standards that you think are important: fairness, reasonableness, balance, [and] objectivity,” but not to expect them to solve their regional conflicts.
“That is not their business. Rely on yourselves to do that,” he said.
As part of the conference, the teens were divided into ten workshops where they partnered with leading media organizations and corporations, including ABC News, the New York Times, YM Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Ruder Finn, CBS Radio, and the Sesame Workshop in order to produce projects on different media formats.
The ten workshops offered a “hands on” introduction into the world of television, radio, photojournalism, op-eds, educational media, magazines, the internet, newspaper reporting, public relations and writing a declaration statement.
The conference culminated in a presentation of the projects by each of the workshops October 16.
The public relations workshop organized the presentations as a catered media event, while the group tasked with writing the declaration statement formally presented its product to the Seeds of Peace staff and guests.
The other groups produced a television segment with ABC news, educational public service announcements on peaceful co-existence with the Sesame Workshop, radio features with CBS, op-eds with the New York Times, newspaper features with Wall Street Journal, an advertisement on peacemaking with YM magazine, a photo slideshow with the International Center of Photography, and drew their own political cartoons.
Seeds of Peace is a non-profit, non-political organization that helps teenagers from regions of conflict learn the skills of making peace. John Wallach founded Seeds of Peace in March 1993 to provide an opportunity for the children of war to plant the seeds for a more secure future. The program focuses on Arab and Israeli teenagers from ten nations in the Middle East but has also brought youngsters from Cyprus, the war-torn Balkans, India, Pakistan and other regions of conflict to its unique coexistence program.
Before founding Seeds of Peace, Wallach was the foreign editor of the Hearst newspapers from 1968 to 1994.
Miller said Wallach, who died in 2002, “would have been proud” of what the participants had accomplished.
The “Breaking News, Making Headlines” conference was the third Seeds of Peace international youth conference. In 1998, some Middle East alumni gathered in Villars, Switzerland where they offered suggestions for resolving the conflict between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab World.
At the second conference, held in New York two months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Seeds of Peace participants discussed the root causes of hatred and violence and drafted a “Charter on Uprooting Hatred and Terror” which they presented to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Miller promised that “a major conference on a critical issue of the day” would now be held every year for alumni participants.
Two organizations, the Sesame Workshop and the Daniel Pearl Foundation, presented the organization with new opportunities for its Israeli and Palestinian participants. The Sesame Workshop, which produces the television children’s program “Sesame Street,” offered to train Palestinian and Israeli seeds how to teach co-existence to four and five year old children. The Daniel Pearl Foundation announced that ten internships with Palestinian and Israeli media would be available in 2004 for youths who are interested in pursuing a career in journalism. He said the foundation, named for a Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed by extremists in Pakistan, hopes to extend the opportunity to other regions.
Jordan’s Queen Noor, an active supporter of Seeds of Peace along with her husband, the late King Hussein, now serves on the organization’s advisory board. She remarked that the conference represented a convergence of founder John Wallach’s two worlds—Seeds of Peace and his career in journalism.