James Walker, Knight international press fellow, was in Mongolia for 6 months to the end of April. He came here to teach student journalists and also to work with journalists at various television stations. This organization sends journalists, television reporters, graphic experts to emerging democracies around the world. His 1st fellowship was 3 months in Belgrade, another 3 months in Zagreb, Croatia.

Q:Could you introduce your work in Mongolia?
I brought 3 cameras for the students to use at the Press Institute NGO. I worked with the students at the Press Institute and did some training with Eagle TV reporters. I talked to them in their newsroom and I also went out on a few stories with them.

I worked at the new channel “One”, which is supposed to go on the air yesterday, today, tomorrow. I spend a lot of time working there. And I stopped because it was proving to be a greater challenge than I could meet. These are journalists who are young journalists and it was their 1st job. And it was very difficult to suggest to them there might be a better way to do television reporting. And then for about the last 6 weeks (3 days a week, sometimes on Saturday and Sunday) I’ve been working with reporters at Mongolian Public Television (i.e. MM Agency).

Q:What did you teach to your journalists?
The challenge there is that some of the reporters maintain that there is a cultural difference and that the way they do television news in Mongolia is proper, a proper way to do it in Mongolia and would not work in the USA, and that the way we do television news in the west would not work here. I do not agree with that. I think that if you do stories, your stories should be based on facts. There is a disagreement about that. There is also, if quoting everybody I’ve talked to, definite political bias in favor of the MPRP /Mongolian Public Revolution Party /, which is now the government. I tried to say to everybody that when it comes to reporting, you are not a Republican or Democrat or a MPRP member or Democrat. You are only objective. So I brought 3 cameras, and my idea was that I would get 3 students assigned as a team two each camera, and one would be the reporter, and one would be the producer, and one would be doing something else, and they would go out and shoot stories. That’s the way we did it. My goal was to teach them 2 things at roughly the same time. One were the principles of western-style reporting, again reporting based on fact: we do not give our opinion, we just give the facts. And that in every story you must have two voices: one voice is pro, one voice is against. But the reason why we do it this way is so that we can out of respect for the viewers we can build a piece so that the viewers can make up their mind whether the government’s policy is helpful or whether it’s good or whether it’s bad, whether it should be changed.

Q:Could you give an example?
For example, recently, a few months ago the bus fares went up. The question was: how do you do that story? Well, I like to tell all stories through the people who are involved. So you go and find somebody who uses the bus every day and you introduce them, and you explain where they are going and how long it takes them to get there and why the bus is important. Then you say to them: what do you think of the fare increase, do you think it’s fair, do you think it’s too much, how are you going to get the money? By building a piece like this, it gives the viewer a better understanding of the impact that this fare increase will have. I think too often you just see that journalism in Mongolia is just long text and that even longer sound bite in an interview. If I do an interview with you, the interview lasts, let’s say 3 minutes. I will choose what I want to choose as a professional journalist, may be 12 seconds that’s all. So I have to think beforehand of what I want you to say. In Mongolia this interview with you, the sound that I would choose, would be 60 seconds long or more. So, this is not an interview, it’s sort of I give you a speech. I don’t think that’s the best way to use journalism. Because I am a professional journalist so UI decide what is the story that I want to tell about web-editing. I have to decide that first, and I have to decide what are the pictures that help me tell that story. I will decide what is the best or interesting thing that you say. As Jargal was saying, too often I see interviews that are 60 or 80 seconds long.

Q: What else did you observe among Mongolian journalists”
We have spent a lot of time at the Press Institute talking about ethics, because this the most important issue for a journalist. The training here for journalists and the professors is also . Most of them were trained in Russia. You have to think about what that means. As an American journalist, when I start to do a story , again I am not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat. Here, the Foreign Ministry for example, calls the journalists in, it speaks to them and expects the journalists to write down everything and then to repast it. It’s like propaganda. That’s going to take time to change, and I’m not quite clear how that will change. But it’s going to. You have 5 television stations now in UB. Next year you are going to have 11 or 12. The audience is still small, but hopefully there will be jobs and hopefully there will be one TV station that decides that it’s going to broadcast honest journalism. Who is the owner of TV9? Who is the owner of the new channel “One”? Nobody knows, this has to stop. The ownership must be transparent so that everybody knows everything about it. There are broadcasting on the public airwaves, so the public should know everything about the station.

Q: What should we do to ensure that transparency?
You have to have laws that are enforced, communications laws that require that. And journalists must be honest, they must be honest in their reporting. Journalists must stop taking money for stories. Everybody tells me that TV 9 is owned by the President, that you can call up and say ‘I have a story’, and the journalist will say ‘ok, give me 10 thousand Tugrik’. I know one mining company guy here who said that they wanted a thousand dollars to print the story. It’s a way of life, every time an NGO opens its mouth, it talks about corruption, the US embassy here talks about it repeatedly. How can the people believe or be expected to believe anything that a journalist says, when they know that the journalist is either biased towards one political party or another, or he has been bribed or accepted a bribe to make the story. So when I worked with my students, I talked a lot about ethics. The biggest question which is the hardest to answer: if you were my editor and you say I must do this story this way what do I do? I want the job, it is not easy to get jobs here. Even though it is low-payed it is not easy. That’s a very tough question. And I’ve got these 9 students who are great. They are excited to learn, they ask tough questions. I hope that when they get jobs, they will have the chance to use what they have learned on Mongolian television.

Q: What was the topic of the course?
Anything you want. I am a journalist. I was a correspondent with the ABC news for 26 years. So, I traveled all over the world. I brought my cameras to teach them how we report news in the west, in the USA in particular, how we take pictures, how do we build TV news stories. Its not very sexy, but that’s about it.
I’m trying to teach them the way we do reporting honestly, objectively, independently and fairly, and also how do you shoot TV news stories.
The problem is that the editors are MPRP /Mongolian Public Revolution Party/, there is no other way to say it. It’s a small country that is build on relationships. Always relationships, that’s what counts. You have to depend on people in a country like this. If you watch the stories about all these demonstrations that have been going on for a long time, they are just giving MPRP’s side. They are showing the demonstrators, but they are not really talking to the demonstrators or discussing the reasons why they there, or the bury the story. On. the 2nd day there were more demonstrators, it should have been number 1, instead it was only the 4th or 5th story.

Q: What is needed for Mongolian journalists to upgrade their skills?
I only know about television journalism. I don’t know about print. First of all, there are a couple of different things that have to happen. The job of a journalist is to represent the people. Because of that, it’s our obligation to be honest and to be fair and to always tell the truth. That’s what is most important. Journalists in UB, a lot of them want to do, a but a lot of them can’s because the TV stations, management and editors won’t allow it. They’ve been trained in Russia, they’ve been trained the old Socialist style of journalism: the truth is whatever the government says.

More information:http://www.pressinst.org.mn