Nieman Foundation drops plan to train China Olympic officials
Journalism program criticized by alumni
Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism announced yesterday that it is withdrawing from a program to help train Chinese officials to interact with the media during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Nieman curator Bob Giles said he changed his mind after a furor erupted when the issue surfaced during last weekend's reunion of Nieman fellows. The program for senior Chinese officials had been slated for late June and was sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, and the Harvard University Asia Center. A statement from the foundation yesterday said the program might continue under other Harvard sponsorship.
''We thought we were trying to do something good here," Giles said in an interview, acknowledging he was surprised by the intensity of opposition to a project which he said would have improved journalistic standards. ''Clearly to me it had become a question of thinking about whether this put the Nieman Foundation's reputation at risk.
The decision to cancel was greeted warmly by some Nieman alumni who voiced concern about the foundation, the nation's preeminent midcareer program for journalists, training people how to interact with the media and dealing with officials from a nation with a record of repressing free speech.
''I'm very glad," said Lucinda Fleeson, a 1985 Nieman fellow who was helping to coordinate a petition drive to pressure the foundation to drop the project. ''The Nieman Foundation should stick to journalism. . . . There are so many other organizations that do training of public policy figures and how to deal with the press."
A passionate exchange erupted after Sunday's contentious discussion of the matter at the reunion. On Tuesday, former
The next day, a letter posted on the site from the 2005 Nieman fellows lauded Giles's stewardship of the program and said the face-off at the reunion was ''less a family feud than a reflection of a generation gap" between the current class and its predecessors. At the same time, Nieman alumni began circulating the petition asking the foundation to cancel the program. Organizers said they had collected more than 100 names.
One key factor in Giles's change of heart was a meeting with the current Nieman class that took place Tuesday. According to several fellows who attended the session, the tone was friendly and cooperative, but opposition to the China project was raised.
Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a member of the Nieman Foundation's board of advisers, had agreed with Giles that the China project was a way of seeking constructive engagement with that nation. ''The thing that really changed [Giles's] mind was that he took very seriously the things the former Niemans said, and he had a real heart-to-heart with the current Niemans," Jones said. 