Writing on the wall

People are used to bemoaning the problems in the news, or what we might call the ills — social, political and economic — paraded across screens and pages. Public relations experts have made a living by reminding us that we're only hearing about one side, the bad stuff, the problems. We don't hear what a great job some of our school districts are doing, or how hard our law enforcement agencies are working. We hear about the shortcomings of these institutions.

In wartime, problems in the news, the problem of warehouses of grain incinerated, of shards of cluster bombs that look like relief packages, the problems of quagmire and the historical baggage that kind of rhetoric carries, threaten to turn the news itself into a problem — the problem of the news.

Perhaps, emotionally overloaded, we turn off our television sets or close our newspapers. It becomes simply too much to keep up with. Who is dying, and in what numbers? Who is taking off from where, and where are they landing? And still, another set of seemingly unanswerable and yet worrisome questions emanates from the discovery of anthrax in first Hamilton Township and now West Windsor. Begrudgingly, we sense too much mystery in the limitless flow of information.

But perhaps, the problem of the news is not so much a matter of substance, but form, not an emotional overload, but a sensory overload. Perhaps we're turned off and turning off because we can't see straight anymore, a problem the Bush Administration wants to fix with the unabashedly declared "war of words and images." We seem to be getting more news on news, most of which simply adds to what has become the problem of news in a media glut.

If Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld '54 is concerned that the current 24-hour news cycle is allowing the Taliban to beat the Voice of America in the race to the ears, eyes, hearts and minds of the Arab and Muslim worlds, International Center director Paula Chow and a number of concerned international students have a different concern. As they see it, there are too many voices saying the same thing.

For this diverse group of Princetonians, the problem of the news calls for a diverse group of perspectives. It calls for a quality of coverage, a substance, not communicated in the form of the news as it reaches campus. Concerned with this lack of communication between the outside world and Princeton University, under the auspices of the International Center, a group of students that includes Varanya Chaubey '04, Ronny Dosenbach '04, Adura Selamat '04, and Alexandra Gliga '04, maintains its own news outlet in the buzzing Frist Campus Center.

The set of three triptychs entitled "International and Diverse Perspectives Following September 11" rests against the convenience store, in front of the Vivian Cafe. Coverage and commentary from the Sydney Morning Herald, The Times of India and the United Kingdom's BBC News decorate the board. There is a section labeled "scholarly commentaries" as well, where the work of Raimond Gaita of King's College London can concur or conflict with the work of any number of Princeton scholars. It is part of an effort to give voice to provocative minds and create a form of media outside the realm of The New York Times dispensers and big-screen television of CNBC and Fox News. Yet, as a triptych heading that states the name of the aforementioned newspaper attests, the board is also a conventional attempt to assert unconventional voices.

"It's not that we're peaceniks," says Chow, "but that we're trying to make people understand what strife is really like. What we think the world thinks is not what the world thinks."

When the world thinks, it speaks. It writes, and any member of the campus community on the receiving end of such a message has the opportunity to post a clipping on the board and wedge open the dialogue. But just like you will not see anyone spray painting their personal maxims alongside those of Toni Morrison and Woodrow Wilson on the brick walls that line Frist's north entrance, you probably will not see anyone stapling to the International Center's board images of George Bush with his cheeks blown up like a chimpanzee. Chow receives and reviews the submissions solicited from the campus community and beyond.

"Faculty members suggest articles, and international alums send information," she said.

However, that is not to say that only the most elegant statements are allowed. The board is not exactly the physical manifestation of a Whig-Clio debate. You cannot miss an article from the infamous onion.com likening the ascendance of youthful experimenter George Bush to the presidency to the rise of international playboy Osama Bin Laden to command of a vast terrorist network, precisely because the piece, "Privileged Children of Millionaires Square off on World Stage," swings from a single tack across an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle's sobriety in the telling of a story about a colloquium at the University of Maryland in which Fulbright scholars from Arab nations butted heads with Maryland graduate students over U.S. responsibility for misery in the Middle East may infringe upon our enjoyment of the hysterical, neighboring piece where it dangles playfully, but the combination of the two in the University's most central location is a great accomplishment.

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Sure it's media madness, a sign of discontinuous and interrupted messages stretching across the palette of the board, but it's proof of the success of this form of impromptu media. It's an unlikely visual and ideological marriage that proves we have a forum in this board where we can entertain a diverse set of news and opinion with out turning that forum into something we want to turn off or throw in a recycling bin.

"In many ways, this board seeks to complicate the way we see 'us' and 'them,' the war and its implications," explained Chow, suggesting the inadequacy of our convenient dichotomies in the war of words and images in which real people die.

In fact, if one reads from left to right, the board begins with the "quintessential New Yorker" Edward Said '57. Remember, begs the interviewer, how much Said, an ardent critic of U.S. support for Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza, also loves opera and classical music. The Columbia University professor of comparative literature has long clung to teaching the great, traditional literary texts of Western Civilization found on the syllabus of "great books" courses like Princeton's HUM 203.

In this article, Said describes the immeasurable effect this magnificent, mourning city called New York has had on his criticism. With a voice like Said's, Chow and her group certainly "complicate the way we see 'us' and 'them.'" In the Oct. 18 issue of the 'Prince,' John Fleming, English professor and lecturer for last spring's HUM 203, commented that last year, "There were perhaps more books published in Princeton than in Egypt," as proof of the intellectual poverty of the Muslim world, or rather the world of which the wisdom of Egypt is emblematic — the world beyond rationality, and it would seem to be implied, literacy.

Ironically, Said's particular brand of secular internationalism has prompted an investigation of his autobiography, accounts of which place a childhood spent in Cairo, Egypt in a key position in his intellectual development. Here, things get complicated: the "quintessential New Yorker," the "quintessential Egyptian or Palestinian . . . or Princetonian."

While the board of diverse and international perspectives has proven practical, sliding its way around Frist's various tabling constituencies, strictly conventional media still blares louder than the study hall on the third floor during midterms week.

An average Princeton student peeking at the big screen in Frist must often sort through four levels of color, text, and even a frighteningly disorienting diversity of movement, at times violent and incomprehensible, to "get" the news. Or opting to snag a stray The New York Times, the same student finds behind a crowded front page, an impregnable special section devoted to the war effort, "A Nation Challenged." A nation may be challenged, but a student is too.

Yet, Ms. Chow and her group of students intend to use the full diversity of media available in the Frist Center to broaden the scope of coverage. Phillip Davidson '02 and members of the computer science department hope to transform the often-confusing multimedia wall adjacent to the convenience store into a readily digestible stream of international web media. One scheme displayed ABC.com in Spanish, the BBC News online, the Jerusalem Post, and a Russian language news portal.

There are even plans to play tapes of International Center produced television interviews on the big screen T.V. Cable news exchanged for forums with titles like "Islamic Political Thought," or "Terrorism, Politics, and Progress," a new approach to news at Princeton University.

"We're hoping that people pass by, stop, and watch," Chow said.