BY ED OTTE
What is brown envelope journalism?

Ann Imse and Peter Eichstaedt host Dec. 11 Fireside Chat at Denver Press Club

According to Peter Eichstaedt, who has worked as a reporter and journalism teacher in Africa, it is a common practice to give reporters money in brown envelopes to cover events or to slant their stories.

Eichstaedt and Ann Imse discussed training foreign journalists and international reporting at a Fireside Chat on Dec. 11 at the Denver Press Club. The event was sponsored by the Colorado Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

“They expect bribes, ” Eichstaedt said. “African reporters wouldn’t go to press conferences unless they knew they would get envelopes. That’s the way it’s done.”

Eichstaedt is the former country director in Afghanistan and former Africa editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. He worked in the Balkans, eastern Europe and covered the African war crimes trials in the Hague, Netherlands.

Bribery is only one of the troubling characteristics.

A former Moscow correspondent for The Associated Press, Imse said, “News organizations have sponsors. Political and business sponsors want news coverage to show them in a positive way and their rivals in a bad light.

“Ethics are an issue. I asked them: What if their readers or viewers learned what they did with bribes and sponsorships?”

Objectivity is affected by a personal feeling of liberation as well, she said.  “When freedom of the press came, it was their first chance to express their opinions. And journalists didn’t hold back.”

When he began teaching journalism in eastern Europe, Eichstaedt said, “The writing was rants and raves. It was like the kind of American journalism around the time of the Civil War. Newspapers espoused their own political views.”

Both said they teach fact-based reporting while emphasizing the credibility problems with bribery and sponsorships.

Another challenge is teaching basic newswriting, Eichstaedt said. “They came from a completely different point of view on reporting. Their background was literature, they didn’t understand AP style. They looked at me like I was nuts when I explained how you structure a news story with a lead and put the lesser details lower in the story. They said, ‘If you do that, people won’t read to the end of the story.'”

A constant problem, Imse said, is that freedom of information isn’t linked with freedom of the press. Open government laws are a significant tool for U.S. news organizations but not in the countries where she and Eichsteadt have worked.

“Absence of open records laws is the biggest difference from American reporting and what you see in these countries,” she said. “Politicians can lie with impunity because you can’t check on what they say.”