{"id":22971,"date":"2010-10-15T09:30:59","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T13:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=22971"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:40:30","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:40:30","slug":"taking-western-traditions-of-journalism-to-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/10\/taking-western-traditions-of-journalism-to-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Western Traditions of Journalism to Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walk into the office of journalism professor Timothy Kenny<\/a> and you are greeted by an eclectic collection of artifacts, the culmination of a fascinating career.<\/p>\n

Stacks of newspapers and recent article clippings litter his desk; a child\u2019s finger-paintings are featured on the wall under the window that looks out onto Mirror Lake; a collection of Russian nesting dolls shares the shelf of a bookcase with 20mm bullet casings and a palm-sized piece of green, yellow, and red painted <\/strong>concrete. Each item reveals a bit more about the man than you might guess at first sight.<\/p>\n

\n

\"<p>Timothy<\/a>
Journalism professor Tim Kenny at the International Club in Kabul, Afghanistan. The guesthouse, which is surrounded by 10-foot high walls topped with razor wire, with AK-toting guards inside and out and blast film on all the windows to keep flying glass to a minimum, provides a refuge in a war-torn country. Photo courtesy of Tim Kenny<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kenny\u2019s most recent sojourn abroad was earlier this year in Kabul, Afghanistan. He spent three weeks there in May to work with Internews<\/a>, an international non-profit agency that trains journalists in developing nations, usually in countries of former Soviet influence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were working with local Afghan journalists to help them to improve, develop, and assess what they were doing,\u201d says Kenny, an associate professor of journalism in UConn\u2019s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>. \u201cAs you might imagine in a country that has had 30 years of war, the level of journalism is not as high as you might want it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kenny\u2019s own journey into the world of journalism began after he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1969 with a bachelor\u2019s degree in English. At that time, he thought he was going to teach high school.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t end up doing that \u2013 there were no jobs,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I kind of just dabbled for a couple of years. I was a tree-trimmer for a while; I worked at a hospital for emotionally disturbed kids. It didn\u2019t take long for me to realize that that wasn\u2019t for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deciding against a future of hopping from job to job, Kenny went back to school to earn a master\u2019s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1972.<\/p>\n

By the time he arrived at UConn in 2004, Kenny had had wide <\/strong>experience: he had worked for 23 years as a newsman \u2013 most recently at USA Today<\/em> \u2013 and traveled widely through Central and Eastern Europe. He has filed stories from more than 35 countries,<\/strong> including Russia, Bosnia, Croatia, Northern Ireland, Israel, Nicaragua, Panama \u2013 and the list goes on.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nesting dolls are all from time I spent in Russia,\u201d he says, when asked about his office d\u00e9cor. \u201cThe bullet casings are from Sarajevo \u2013 one, I just picked off the ground; the other, somebody gave me. And yeah, that there is a chunk from the Berlin Wall. The paintings,\u201d he adds, \u201care from my daughter, Caitlin Alexandra, age four.\u201d<\/p>\n

He acknowledges that nothing in his office is from Afghanistan, however, since he was urged to \u201ctravel light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recalling his time there, Kenny relates that Afghanistan is a tribal society. He says the way Afghans look at the world is based on the tribal connections people have \u2013 not on the more Western journalistic idea of trying to walk the fine middle ground.<\/p>\n

\n

\"<p>Timothy<\/a>
Professor Tim Kenny outside the Kabul Golf Club in Qargha, Afghanistan. Kenny wrote a story for the Christian Science Monitor about a golf tournament while he was there. Photo courtesy of Tim Kenny<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a huge social disconnect between what we would do as western reporters and what Afghan reporters might find acceptable,\u201d says Kenny. \u201cWe try to teach them to be objective, or at <\/strong>the least disinterested and fair, but it\u2019s a tough notion to try and get people to wrap their heads around. They try, but they just don\u2019t have 250 years of journalism to build upon, and it\u2019s extremely difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war has had a major impact on the region\u2019s journalism, Kenny notes, especially in terms of what is deemed newsworthy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember this one day I was standing in front of the non-profit that I was working with, and there was this huge explosion off in the distance,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had been talking with a local reporter at the time, and we kind of just stopped and listened. Another blast went off a few seconds later, and the guy says, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s too far away, we don\u2019t have to worry about it.\u2019 And that was that. He wasn\u2019t even concerned. He was so used to that kind of thing happening that to him it wasn\u2019t a story. I\u2019m trying to figure out, you know, what was it? Where did it happen? But he didn\u2019t have that kind of interest. And this guy was a journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kenny says the people have developed a remarkable resilience to the violence of war.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say there\u2019s a bombing,\u201d he continues, recounting one such event. \u201cHelicopters come flying in to take the injured to the hospitals, and other people come out to basically sweep up the body parts. There\u2019s a brief cessation of activity on the streets, but within a matter of minutes \u2013 maybe 15 or 20 minutes \u2013 you see people crossing the street again.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople begin to go about their daily business again,\u201d he says. \u201cThey just pick up the pieces and keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a society undergoing pressure and stress like Afghanistan\u2019s, says Kenny, it is easy for fair news and ethical considerations to go out the window. Good journalism, he contends, helps bring important issues to light; it seeks to make society and government transparent. But in a war zone, and in Afghanistan in particular, <\/strong>that can be a difficult task.<\/p>\n

\u201cNations around the world are facing the same problems when it comes to journalism,\u201d Kenny observes. \u201cAfrica, South America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia \u2013 it\u2019s not just the Middle East. As a journalist and a professor, it\u2019s my duty to foster what I see as good journalism in places that don\u2019t have it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s both a task and a mission for him \u2013 Kenny is planning to spend Thanksgiving break at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. There he intends to work with the Open Society Institute<\/a> to create a more Western-style curriculum for student journalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Kenny spent three weeks in Afghanistan helping train local journalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-22971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 18:49:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22971"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37209,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22971\/revisions\/37209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22971"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=22971"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}