Communication 273
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Memo to the class:
At many homes, there comes the moment when one by one the children and adults tell about something for which they are thankful. That's a tradition at many Thanksgiving dinners, and yet I am always a little uncomfortable with it. For one thing, the parts of your life for which you give thanks often are intensely private. For another, those things can be hard to explain in a minute or two. I have in mind an editor I met a couple of summers ago in the northern Thailand city of Chiang Mai. I do not know how I would talk about him at the Thanksgiving table. I had gone to Chiang Mai to give a speech on press freedom, and beforehand there was a lunch with local journalists. Among them was this editor named Amnat Khunyosying. His paper, Pak Nua Raiwan, was highly critical of local officials and he was warned to lay off. Amnat kept digging at the truth, and one day as he was getting into his pickup truck, someone pulled up alongside. A gunman pushed a 9-mm pistol through the window and opened fire, severely wounding Amnat. The army is never far from Thai politics, and Amnat's assailants turned out to be four low-ranking soldiers. They were quickly apprehended, but the local prosecutor was afraid to bring charges. If it hadn't been for the insistence of other local journalists, he might have dropped the case. On the day we had lunch, the police told Amnat that a couple of out-of-town thugs had been spotted in Chiang Mai. Watch your back, the cops said. But there at the lunch, Amnat was holding forth against official corruption as if it were the easiest thing in the world to talk about. The motto of his paper, by the way, is "Every drop of ink builds the future, builds the truth." In that moment, I was truly thankful for him and for the brave men and women around the world whose daily struggles are a testament to the power of an idea -- that the freedom to think and to write and to speak is the dividing line between liberty and slavery The journalists at the table that day had many stories to tell of physical and economic intimidation. Such things are a part of their professional lives. They asked if American journalists faced similar threats, and I had to say that while our work is not always easy, it rarely is what anyone would call dangerous. They seemed to think that our First Amendment protected us from threats and assassination attempts. It does no such thing, of course, though in other ways its protections are incalculable. Exactly what the First Amendment means has been subject to interpretation over the years. Like the rest of our Constitution, it is a living document. But its unique blessing has been to stand as a guarantee that the power of government must not be used to suppress or interfere with the ability of the people to speak or write what is on their minds or in their hearts. I believe this is what we as journalists have most to be thankful for, today and always. Many of us seem to think that the amendment was written for the press, rather than for the people. We imagine that it confers upon us special privileges or rights that are not given to others. I think that assumption is part of the problem of the media's arrogance, about which people understandably complain. There is almost no phrase used by journalists that I dislike more than "the public's right to know." So often it justifies every excess, intrusion or abuse that we commit. So far as I know, the Supreme Court has never precisely articulated a public's right to know, though you can find its spirit in some decisions. You'll learn about them next quarter. But a public's right to know does not carry with it an unfettered right of journalists to do whatever they wish in reporting a story. Some years ago, a journalist and lawyer named John M. Lofton wrote a book called "The Press as Guardian of the First Amendment." Lofton was also one of my editorial writers at the Post-Dispatch. His book examined how the press performed in those moments of American history when First Amendment principles were threatened. He looked at the sedition laws after the Revolution, the Civil War, wartime pressures in this century, the Red Scare, the Cold War and so forth. You might imagine that Lofton found that the press was ever alert to assaults on the First Amendment, that the Great Watchdog never slept when free press and speech were on the line. And in fact, the press has been vigilant -- whenever its own the interests are involved. At other times, Lofton found, newspapers have tended to support efforts to suppress deviations from prevailing social and political orthodoxies. Mostly, the press has not been supportive of dissent. Look at the coverage since September 11. Over the years, the polls have shown our business steadily falling from the public's grace. You hear editors talk about "reconnecting with our communities." What that mostly suggests to me is a wish to associate their papers with orthodoxy and the status quo. A few years ago, the American Society of Newspaper Editors set up something called the Journalism Values Institute. Its purpose was to rededicate journalists to the "core values" of their profession. Core values presumably are better than ordinary values, just as some "new and improved" detergent is said to be better than the stuff in our laundry rooms. The ASNE's journalism values handbook, in fact, recommended that news stories focus on the "profoundly ordinary" as well as on the good and the bad. But too much of our journalism already is about the profoundly ordinary, which is another way of saying orthodoxy. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to hear a speech by the novelist Salman Rushdie at the last ASNE convention I attended as an editor. That was in 1996, and Rushdie had been living under threat of death from Iran. His novel "Satanic Verses" was said to be disrespectful to Islam. Rushdie spoke about "respect," and a few lines from his speech are my Thanksgiving gift to you. Rushdie noted that "Fine as the word sounds, truth is all too often unpalatable, awkward, unorthodox. The armies of received ideas are marshaled against it." We live in a censorious age, he observed, and one of the most prominent weapons of censorship is a new concept of respect. Once respect meant consideration and serious attention. Now respect means agreement. Any dissent from someone's position -- indeed any inquiry into it -- is regarded as disrespect. Disagree with people and they say you've dissed them. Editors know that there is almost no story that someone will not find "disrespectful" Citizens of free societies and democracies do not preserve their freedoms by pussyfooting around their fellow citizens' beliefs, Rushdie said. They are not timid about challenging even those that other people most cherish. A free society, he said, is not a calm and eventless place. Those are the kind of "static, dead society dictators try to create." Free societies, he said, are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, full of radical disagreements. Of course, he is right. And he told us, the editors of America: "It is the disrespect of journalists -- for power, for orthodoxy, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity -- that I would like to celebrate this morning, and that I urge you all, in freedom's name, to preserve." In some news organizations today, a curious kind of courage prevails. It is the courage to be popular. It is the courage to recklessly reflect the conventional view. It is the courage to fearlessly exalt the profoundly ordinary. Salman Rushdie was talking about a different kind of courage, and it is the one I commend to you. That courage requires disrespect. It results in the relentless search for truth, no matter what the consequences; for without truth, men and women cannot really be free. Without truth, no democracy can endure. I think my friend Amnat in Chiang Mai would understand. He was willing to take terrible risks for it, and on this Thanksgiving Day I shall be thinking about him. Regards, Bill Woo |