The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 13

THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2003 The Boston Globe Opinion Altf Joan Vennochi Jeff Jacoby Back to the basics for journalism Bigotry and the Mideast road map rather than to be the story, or even worse, like Jayson Blair, to become the story. I actually learned what I believed to be the basic journalistic mission at Boston University and what was then called the School of Public Communication. At the risk of sounding hopelessly retro, not to mention naive, the mission, as I under- this latest BU crisis stems from "a rift between the college's faculty and BU administrators over whether the school should be revamped to give more emphasis to liberal arts and less to professional studies." As Silber explained to the Globe, "I wanted an elevation of the intellectual component of the program." If that is a fair assessment of the controversy, put was rewarding the triumph of basic journalistic skills the knocking on doors to convince people to talk and, from that information, the building of a credible foundation, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, story by story, until the world could not ignore the picture painted on the front pages of The Washington Post A courageous party gossip and chitchat, an eye for what color looks good during TV appearances has little to do with the basic building blocks of competent, credible journalism. Journalism is more than holding up a mirror to your own face. It should reflect the world around and beyond you.

Context comes from knowledge about history or economics, politics or literature. In that regard, Silber is right. Another news writing course doesnt provide that; getting beyond economics 101 is at least a beginning. As for a commitment to accuracy and truth, to the story, rather than to stardom at any price if you dont come to journalism with that, it is difficult to learn it in college or anywhere else. Correction: In the interests of truth and accuracy, please note: MCAS stands for Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, not Massachusetts Comprehensive Achievement System, as written in Tuesday's column.

A liberal arts focus is not all that is needed at BU, but it is a start. editor and publisher were also part of the basic journalistic equation. They demonstrated me for once on Silbers side despite the ugly process of elimination at the College of JOHN SILBER is correct. Competence in jdurnalism requires jnuch more than knowing how lay out a front page. Silber, chancellor of Boston University, set off another academic uproar when he fired khe dean of the CoUege of Communication, Brent Baker.

A department head was also pushed tout after he called Silber and pfo allies a "cabal of misfits." The college's associate dean also Resigned. This latest BU contretemps sounds like another "Silber fehocker." The chancellor, who first came to Boston University jn 1971, has a long history of alienating faculty with an imperious and imperial style, a willingness to chill academic freedom, and a penchant for not just chilling but freezing basic freedom of speech. But at this particular post-Jayson Blair moment in time, believers in the mission of journalism, as opposed to the business of journalism, might want to focus on the message here, not the madness. According to a Globe report, Communication. The substance of this debate is more important than the style.

A greater focus on liberal arts is not all that is needed at BlTs College of Communication or any other institution that hands out journalism degrees. But it is a start. While publishers focus on circulation and news editors focus on demographics or is it the other way around? someone, somewhere, has to focus on what else is needed to produce journalists whose job it is to tell the story stood it, was to observe carefully, gather information accurately, and present it in a compelling but above all truthful manner. Context is critical always look to history, always check the clips. The story, not the writer, is the story.

Watergate broke during my college years, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who brought down a president, went on to become celebrities. But remember, during the earliest celebration of their success, the profession courage not only by printing the stories written by Woodward and Bernstein but by holding them accountable for every bit of information in them. The reporters did their own interviews and legwork, by the way. That often unglamorous work produced a Pulitzer Prize and a newly glamorous profession. Understandably, its current practitioners are eager to get to the glamorous part as quickly as possible.

But so much of what gets a person there glibness, a talent for cocktail Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi globe.com. IIMIIIIIIilllMIIIMIIIMItMIMIIIIIIIMIIIIIIIIItllllllltllllllllllllllMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIMIIIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIillllHIIIIIIHIIIMIHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIII George F. Will Hefs triumph 1 5 1 SF, 4 epmm -fTV I Vs 1 jjTtega mmtmummmMm- -r --41 PEDRO X. MOLINA ILLUSTRATION A HOLE WAS torn last week in the international "road map" to Israeli-Palestinian peace when Mahmoud Abbas insisted that Yasser Arafat remains the unchallenged ruler of the Palestinian Authority. "Arafat is at the top," Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's prime minister, told Egypt's al-Mussawar weekly, according to Reuters.

"He's the man to whom we refer, regardless of the American or Israeli view of him. We do not do anything without his approval." Abbas's words should have ignited a firestorm. After all, a prerequisite of US support for the road map, spelled out clearly by President Bush last June, was an overhaul of Palestinian civil society, beginning with "new leaders not compromised by terror" and committed to building "a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty." Abbas, an Arafat henchman of 40 years' standing, was scarcely such a leader. Nonetheless, the White House hailed his appointment as a harbinger of Palestinian democracy and as proof that its policy of freezing Arafat out was having the desired effect. But now Abbas has made it clear that Arafat is as influential as ever.

The Palestinians are no nearer to democracy today than they were a year ago and never will be so long as Arafat retains his grip on power. Does anyone care? If Bush truly believed that Abbas was the key to a democratic, tolerant and Arafat-free Palestinian Authority, he ought to be fuming now. If he didnt believe it or if he didn't really mean what he said about Palestinian democracy being essential, the media should be lambasting him for having pretended otherwise. Either way, it should be clear to all that the road map, which is predicated on top-to-bottom Palestinian reform, is already at a dead end. And yet the road map isnt being written off as a nonstarter.

The absence of Palestinian democracy the lack of even the first stirrings of a democratic awakening is getting little if any press attention. No spotlight shines on the long list of measures the Palestinians are expected to undertake in the road map's first phase from drafting a democratic constitution to holding "free, open, and fair elections." It is as if nobody really believes that the Palestinian Authority will become "a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty," so why waste time and breath talking about it? And what is that attitude if not a kind of bigotry? Let us be honest How many Western journalists or politicians or diplomats could care less whether or not Palestinian society becomes a democracy? How many of them think Palestinians are capable of replacing Arafat's corrupt and brutal despotism with enlightened self-rule? How many lose any sleep when Palestinians are deprived of civil rights not by Israelis but by their fellow Arabs? In another context Bush has spoken of "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Isnt that a fair description of his own administration's attitude toward the Palestinians? True, his remarks last summer conditioned peace on democracy and tolerance. But has he done anything to make it clear that he meant it really meant it the way he meant it when he said the Iraqi people would be liberated from tyranny? Bush was quick to embrace Abbas, a man with a long record of supporting terror and few credentials as a democrat. He has several times repeated his "vision" of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel. But where are Bush's strong words emphasizing that tolerance and democracy must come first? Where is his embrace of the few brave and beleaguered Palestinians who dare to criticize the corruption and ruthlessness of the Palestinian Authority? Where is his demand that the Palestinian Authority begin cleansing its public institutions that it stop broadcasting hate videos on its television stations, for example, and rewrite the schoolbooks that extol suicide bombers? Much attention was devoted in recent days to whether Israel would accept the road map.

Israelis, for their part, are focused on how the Palestinians will fulfill the road map's very first proviso crushing the terror groups that have murdered and maimed so many innocents. Both attitudes are understandable. But in the long run, nothing is as indispensable to the rooting of peace than the transformation of Palestinian society into something more decent than the violent and backward thugocracy it is today. That will not happen without a lot of interest and pressure from outside. For anyone who cares about peace, for anyone who cares about the Palestinians, nothing in the road map is more important Correction: Because of incorrect information supplied by the state Department of Education, my May 22 column misstated the growth in the number of public school teachers in Massachusetts.

The department now says that there were 57,586 teachers in 1991-92 and 76,157 in 2001-02, an increase of 32 percent not 108 percent David S. Ludwig and Kelly D. Brownell Severe acute apathy syndrome cation. Such influences contribute to the creation of the "toxic environment" faced by every American child and supremely designed to cause obesity. How has the nation allowed this situation to develop? Two habitual rationalizations for inaction are that obesity is caused by many factors, hence it is unfair to "demonize" any food or company, and that obesity is an issue of personal responsibility pushing away from the table is the way to solve the crisis.

These arguments are specious where children are concerned and have failed utterly in addressing the nation's deteriorating diet. The obesity epidemic threatens the foundations of our society as would a massive SARS outbreak. We recommend that action be taken to restrict food advertising directed at children, improve IMAGINE THIS front-page news story: "SARS epidemic infects 60 million Americans, with economic losses exceeding $1 trillion. In Generation XL response, government an- nounces a massive public health campaign, industry pledges full cooperation regardless of cost, school districts agree to take all necessary measures." Fortunately, SARS hasn't reached these proportions, but obesity has. How will government, industry, and the schools respond? The figures have become depressingly familiar.

The prevalence of obesity has increased threefold since the 1960s. Two-thirds of adults and one-third of children are overweight or obese, leading to an estimated 300,000 deaths in the United States each LOSANGELES ASKED HOW it feels to have won, Hugh Hefner pauses, looks down, and almost whispers, "Wonderful." Then he says: "I guess if you live long enough Fifty years ago he was pecking at a typewriter on a card table in his Chicago apartment, preparing the first issue of a magazine he planned to call Stag Party but, because there already was a magazine called Stag, he called it Playboy. The first issue appeared in December 1953. It bore no date because Heftier was not sure there would be a second, such were the troubles the first issue caused with the post office and other defenders of decency. Four years later, in the nick of time, Searle pharmaceutical company introduced Enovid "the Pill." Back then Hefner, the tuning fork of American fantasies, said he wanted to provide "a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age." But three emblematic books of the supposedly repressed 1950s "Peyton Place," "Lolita," and "The Kinsey Report" 5 (professor Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University was another Midwestern sexual subversive) showed that more than geopolitical anxiety was on the mind of Eisenhower's America.

By 1959 the post office was delivering millions of copies of Hefner's magazine. Playboy's rabbit-head logo is now one of the world's most recognized brands, even in inscrutable China, where Playboy merchandise sells well but the magazine is banned. Hefner's daughter Christie, who was born 13 months before the magazine, says Playboy was "a great idea executed well at exactly the right time." A no-nonsense executive, she now runs the Chicago-based business she joined 27 years ago, fresh from earning a summa cum laude degree from Brandeis. When she arrived, Playboy was primarily an American magazine publisher. She has made it into an international electronic entertainment company.

The magazine, the 1 2th-highest-selling US consumer publication, sells 3.2 million copies monthly. That is slightly less than half its 1970s peak, but its 18 international editions sell an additional 1 .8 million copies a month, and it remains the world's best-selling monthly men's magazine. Still, it provides only about one-third of Playboy Enterprises' annual revenues of $277.6 million. Playboy owns six cable networks that deliver to 38 million North American households movies of a sexual explicitness that would have been instantly prosecuted in all 48 states in 1953. The magazine, the mere mention of which used to produce pursings of lips and sharp intakes of breaths, is still Hefner's preoccupation but has been overtaken by the libertarian revolution he helped to foment In 1953 Playboy magazine was pushing the parameters of the permissible, but it is hard to remain iconoclastic when standing waist-deep in the shards of smashed icons.

Born to "puritanical" (Hefner's words) parents in Chicago, city of broad shoulders, Hefner founded an empire based on breasts. What is it about that protean city? Chicagoan Ray Kroc, entrepreneur of McDonald's, did his Army training with Chicagoan Walt Disney two prodigies of mass marketing, the creator of the Big Mac and the creator of Mickey Mouse, in the same Army unit. Then Chicago produced the Henry Luce of the skin game Hef, as everyone, including his daughter, calls him. The Chicago boy recalls that the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue another Chicago innovation was called "a dream book" because it brought "the dream of urbanity to rural communities. Playboy, for young, single men, is a variation of this." Recently, dressed in his black pajamas and merlot-colored smoking jacket it was 1 p.m.

he looked a bit tuckered, but he had been living what Teddy Roosevelt called "the strenuous life," although not as TR envisioned it Hefner's recent 77th birthday party had rambled on for more than a week, during which he took to dinner simultaneously the seven ladies he is currently dating. As F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing of Jay Gatsby, suggested, "Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures." An llth-generation descendant of William Bradford, who arrived on the Mayflower to begin a religious errand in the wilderness, Hefner says, "In a real sense we live in a Playboy world." He lives here in a 30-room mock-Tudor mansion that sits on six acres of posh Holmby Hills decorated with wandering peacocks among other fauna. He says, "I grew up in the Depression and World War II, and I looked back to the Roaring Twenties and I thought I'd missed the party." The party turned out to be a moveable feast. quality of school lunch programs, ban soft drinks and unhealthy snack foods from schools, fund mandatory physical education classes, regulate political contributions from the food industry (in light of disproportionate political pressure on national and international nutrition policy), improve health insurance payment for obesity prevention and treatment and subsidize the sale of healthy foods with small taxes on soft drinks, snack food, year.

Obesity in children creates numerous, immediate, and in some cases life-threatening complications, including type II diabetes. What's causing this public health crisis? Historically, obesity was viewed as a weakness of character: Gluttony is equated with avarice, envy, and pride among the "seven deadly sins." Recently, a genetic basis for obesity has been discovered, with at least 250 genes that can affect body weight Howwill America respond to the epidemic of obesity? and fast foods. These measures will have short-term costs and require sacrifice. However, the costs would be dwarfed by the long-term consequences of inaction. Obesity accounts for more than $100 billion in economic expenditures and losses each year, which might mean the difference between stability and bankruptcy of Medicare or between universal health coverage and growing numbers of uninsured.

Further, these calculations do not include the human toll. By their late 20s, obese adolescents with type II diabetes can face amputations, blindness, kidney failure requiring dialysis, and high mortality rates. To avert an impending calamity, public health must take precedence over private profit action must replace apathy, and passiveness must give way to protection of our children. However, our genes havent changed over the past several decades. The environment is driving this epidemic.

It's no secret what these environmental influences are: invasion of our diet by fast food, sugar-sweetened drinks, and other high-calorie, low quality junk foods; substitution of physical activities with sedentary pursuits, especially television and computer; and busy lifestyles that leave little time to prepare healthful meals and obtain exercise. Fast food and soft drinks account for a remarkable 25 percent of calories in the typical child's diet Daily physical education in school, once universal, is now rare. Few families regularly dine together. These trends have been promoted in part by special interests motivated by financial gain. The food industry spends $12 billion each year to influence the eating habits of children practices labeled inherently deceptive and exploitative by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

School districts, under financial pressure, sell soft drinks and junk food to students while at the same time curtailing physical education classes. Communities favor land development to preservation of open space for recreation. The health insurance industry reimburses poorly, if at all, for preventive nutrition edu- Dr. David S. Ludwig is assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children's Hospital in Boston.

Kelly D. Brownell is a professor of psychology, epidemiology, and public health at Yale and director of the university's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is George F. Will is a indicated columnist..