`We need to broaden our aperture'

Award-winning news producer Justin Kenny talks about journalism

By Sophie Hagen
Posted 12/6/16

By SOPHIE HAGEN Peabody and Emmy Award-winning news producer Justin Kenny returned to his alma mater Bishop Hendricken High School on Friday. Over the course of a packed morning, Kenny spoke with four classes on topics ranging from politics to academic

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`We need to broaden our aperture'

Award-winning news producer Justin Kenny talks about journalism

Posted

Peabody and Emmy Award-winning news producer Justin Kenny returned to his alma mater Bishop Hendricken High School on Friday. Over the course of a packed morning, Kenny spoke with four classes on topics ranging from politics to academic support, culminating with a class of AP seniors who he urged to strive for a more balanced media diet.

“We’re consuming journalism the way we do sports teams,” he told the seniors. “We care about ‘loyalty and brand reinforcement’ and look for outlets that ‘line up with our political ideology.’ We need to broaden our aperture,” he said. “There’s ‘fact-based journalism’ out there, but you have to seek it out.”

Kenny has generated quite a bit of that fact-based journalism. A former producer for PBS NewsHour, Kenny received the Peabody, a highly coveted award for storytelling in electronic media, for PBS’s “Desperate Journey” series examining the European refugee crisis. His segments for PBS on the Chinese government’s involvement in the takeover of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, and on underwater mines in the Philippines both won Emmy Awards.

Peter Thomas, Bishop Hendricken’s director of advancement, spoke warmly of Kenny’s visit to the school. He said that Kenny’s address to the students on academic support had been “emotional” and moving.

“It feels great to be back,” said Kenny, who had returned to Bishop Hendricken only once since graduating. “I’ve been pretty busy for the last 20 years,” he said. But he was trying now to give back to institutions that had helped him on the road to his current success.

That included a stop in October at Marymount University, a Catholic institution close to Washington, D.C., where Kenny obtained his bachelor’s degree in mass media communications and English. This year, Marymount chose Kenny to deliver the endowed Marya McLaughlin Lecture. Marymount selects a “journalist of national stature” for the annual lecture, and Kenny is the first alumnus of the school to be chosen.

During Friday’s visit to Bishop Hendricken, he was particularly glad to have spoken to a class of students on academic support about his scholastic struggles. Kenny, who carried a 0.8 GPA his freshman year, advised the students to find a passion, to “hang in there and try to turn things around.” This ethic had helped him carve a path to a career in international journalism.

There were some detours along the way. Back in high school, Kenny says his mindset was “fairly insular.” His goal as a budding high school reporter was to cover the National Basketball Association, and he managed to nab some work in the Providence Journal’s sports department. He then spent two years as a sports writer at Marymount.

One day in college he was sent to interview Gheorghe Muresan, a recent draft pick for the Washington Bullets (one of the tallest players in NBA history, Muresan stands 7 feet 7 inches tall). After interviewing the Bullets’ coach, Kenny made his way to the team’s locker room where, to his chagrin, he discovered that Muresan, a Romanian, couldn’t speak English. Kenny asked Muresan’s teammate, Pervis Ellison, to translate for him, as both Ellison and Muresan could speak French. Ellison refused, tossing a remark in French to Muresan who, along with Ellison and a crowd of middle-aged men in the room, began to laugh.

“This isn’t for me,” Kenny thought to himself. “I didn’t want to be a 42-year-old kissing some 19-year-old’s butt.”

Steering away from sports, Kenny took an internship at PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, which sparked an interest in international journalism. Next came an internship at the D.C. bureau of Independent Television News, the “main rival of the BBC,” and a brief stint at ITV’s London bureau during a semester abroad. Soon after graduating, Kenny was working at Reuters, where he would spend the next 10 years.

He’s now a freelance contributor to PBS. His staff position as NewsHour producer involved 70 hours a week of work, and with three kids he was burning the candle at both ends.

“If you’re a really good editor, you should be working 70 hours a week,” Kenny says.

Part of the desire to leave and work as a freelancer was to “allow that job to get the attention it deserves.” He sells his freelance work to PBS piecemeal.

He speaks fondly of his former employer. He and his colleagues there, he says, held diverse political ideologies, but put them “on the shelf” to do their work. While publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal tend to lean more centrist, he says, it is much more difficult to find comparable evenhandedness in TV news.

“We’re fed a diet of things we want to hear to reinforce our arguments,” he argues.

Even in the context of the social justice issues he explores, he doesn’t believe it’s necessary to present an explicitly political point of view. Op-eds, he says, continue to do that important work, even though he’s “worried and scared” that mid-size print publications are not long for this world (though the giants will be fine, and the local papers will always find an audience). Certain facts are unassailable – “Terrorism does exist,” he says – and ignoring them to prove a political point is foolish. But “we do need to pay attention to people suffering overseas,” he says. It’s “not just Islamic fundamentalists” in the Middle East. His ideal coverage? A selection of speakers from the “left, center and right.”

There’s “more garbage out there” now, he warned the students. It’s more difficult than ever to combat the media bias toward presenting two sides of every story, even without facts to substantiate one of them. Gwen Ifill, former co-anchor of PBS NewsHour and moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week” who passed away on November 14, often spoke of the need to combat a false sense of equivalency, Kenny says. The two were close: Kenny tears up recalling how he sat at Ifill’s deathbed half an hour before she died.

Aside from all the poor coverage, though, there’s also “more great journalism,” he assured the students, all much more accessible than during his college days, when he had to frequent specialty bookstores in order to read foreign magazines.

Kenny’s two career goals, at this point, have been met: to shoot some of his own stories, as he’s doing with his newly founded production company Small Footprint Films, and to work in longform, which he’s now exploring as a documentarian. He recently produced a documentary in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies about attacks on healthcare workers and hospitals in the midst of armed conflicts. As a result, Kenny may be back at Hendricken before another 20 years have elapsed. That documentary will be coming out in January and February, and the school might be treated to a special screening in the spring.

Going forward, Kenny looks for distribution for the documentary, including at the United Nations. The work of producing it has allowed Kenny to practice making a feature-length documentary, and he hopes to make more of them on topics of social justice and international issues and pitch them back to PBS.

What’s next for this visit to Warwick? New York System wieners, and he’s made sure to pay Bill’s a visit. Clam cakes and chowder are “foreign food to the rest of the country,” Kenny says, “but I love it.” As a translator of foreign phenomena for an American audience, perhaps Kenny can convince the rest of the country to give Warwick’s best a try.

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