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| Four German Broadcast Journalists Learn about UGA, Athens and Georgia | |
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They toured the city, the campus, the library, the journalism building
and its various offices. They lectured in undergraduate and graduate classes. They ate pizza with
graduate students and southern barbeque with faculty, students and staff.
They visited CNN, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Martin
Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta. They hiked in the north Georgia mountains.
They visited shops, cafes and bars in downtown Athens. Four German broadcast journalists, guests of the Cox Center and the University
of Georgia and participants in a five-week exchange program for German
and American journalists, got to know a little about Georgia and its flagship
university in the last days of October and first week of November. The four, Uwe Jahn from Leipzig, Pit Lehman from Dresden, Annette Moll
from Pottsdam, and Dirk Waldrich from Hamburg, were part of a 13-journalist
team of visitors to the United States sponsored by RIAS Berlin Commission
and RTNDF, the foundation arm of the Radio Television News Directors Association
in Washington.
The Cox Center, in collaboration with the Department of Telecommunications
in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, hosted the
four journalists during their stay at the University of Georgia. Faculty
and students from the Department of Journalism in the Grady College also
participated in the program. The four visitors were asked about changes in Germany since the fall
of the Berlin Wall in October of 1989 and the unification of the two German
states on October 3 a year later. They also were asked about German tolerance
of foreigners and about the differences between the media in Germany and
the U.S. The four found themselves comparing the newsweeklies Der
Spiegel and Time in a magazine editing class, coverage of
sensational news in an introductory telecommunications class, and the
impact of commercialization of the media in Germany in a class on broadcasting
production and management. "We have to tell those in the East about the West and those in the West
about the East," Moll said in explaining the role of journalists in bringing
the peoples of the two German states together. "I would say that everything in the former GDR was more regulated and
less free," Lehman said in explaining attitudes in the former communist
east German state. "My parents would say that normal people had much more
in common then than now. If you did everyday things you could have a quite
normal life." "Journalists have to explain values and where they come from," Waldrich
said. "The main thing is to get the people working together democratically."
The program was designed to involve the visiting journalists in the instruction
of the Grady College, and particularly the Telecommunications Department,
so they could learn from the classes and contribute to them, Cox Center
Director Lee B. Becker said. "From what I have heard, there was a good
deal of back and forth communication in the sessions." "I love it to have those discussions with those young folks," Jahn said.
"I really, really like it." The visitors had a chance learn how students produce a broadcast news
program in the Grady College. They also were given a showing of a student
produced AIDS documentary, visited the independent student daily, The
Red & Black, and toured the offices of the Peabody Awards Program,
administered by the Grady College. The four also heard ABC's Deborah Roberts, a 1982 graduate of the Grady
College, give the McGill Lecture, an annual event at the College. The
four also joined faculty and staff in a luncheon for Roberts following
her lecture. The program organizer, RIAS Berlin Commission is a binational organization established in 1992 to maintain German-American understanding in the field of broadcasting. The Commission is the descendant of Radio in the American Sector, which broadcast in Berlin during the partition of that city. RTNDF is a nonprofit journalism training institution.
Click here to see the program organized by the
Cox Center for the four German journalists. |
