The Other Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one that comes before the second amendment we hear so much about. Like all 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, it is composed of a single sentence, and it is one of the most extraordinary sentences I have ever read, prohibiting the federal government from regulating the private beliefs of its people. The rights may seem unrelated, but to me those 45 words follow a simple and straight line: the government may not tell me what to believe; it may not interfere with how I express my beliefs; and it may not stop me from joining peaceably with other people to protest government activities which I think threaten those beliefs. It protects my thoughts, my voice and my body. This is the foundation of our democracy. If there is an “American Exceptionalism,” it is embodied in the first amendment.

The fact that “the press” is in there is not accidental, and yet so often these days we treat it as a remote, often adversarial, body, rather than the extension of our speech that the framers intended.

The press is under fire in a lot of places: In Turkey, for example, the government has jailed 120 journalists since July, closed 150 news organizations, and pressed for deep-pocketed loyalists to buy what’s left. Things aren’t so dire in this country, but the threats to a free press are pervasive. Some of them are self-inflicted. Some are economic, as revenues at traditional news outlets continue to decline. Some stem from the digital revolution (almost two-thirds of Americans get all or some of their news from social media). Some are because the press has become politicians' favorite whipping boy.

This is dangerous, and I have reached out to people I know in the news business to see if we can talk about what the issues are and ways we might address them. I will be writing about this in future posts, and I hope you will join the conversation in the weeks and months ahead.

Smiley

Colleagues called him “Smiley” because he almost never smiled.

David Gilkey, a photographer for NPR, died Sunday in southern Afghanistan when the Taliban ambushed the convoy in which he was riding and incinerated his vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade. He was 50 and had covered conflicts around the world, as well the earthquake in Haiti and Ebola in Africa.

As the presumptive Republican nominee ratchets up his denunciations of the press, calling its practitioners “sleazes” and “unbelievably dishonest”, let’s remember Gilkey and Afghan interpreter and journalist, Zabihullah Tamanna, who were killed while embedded with Afghan Special Forces in one of the world’s most dangerous places. They were seeking to tell a story they believed was important and largely untold. And they knew the dangers. Gilkey and Tamanna brought the number of journalists killed since 1992 to 1,193.

After covering the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Gilkey said: “It’s not just reporting. It’s not just taking pictures. It’s do those visuals, do the stories – do they change somebody’s mind enough to take action?”

And there is the fine line of good journalism. You don’t risk your life, time after time, simply to entertain. You do it because you believe that the stories need to be told, that the images need to be seen. So you go where others can’t or won’t in the hope that you can arouse an often indifferent world. And in the case of David Gilkey, you send back images that evoke, not just the horrors of war, but the pathos of our common humanity.

Tip of the Volcano

Iceland is magical place.

Geologically, it’s the youngest country on Earth: its newest volcanic island erupted from the ocean in the mid-1960s. It’s a land filled with raging waterfalls and bubbling roadside hot springs, which together create a nation powered almost solely by renewable energy. The Althingi, founded in 930, is the oldest national parliament in the world; and its wonderfully named poet and political leader, Snorri Sturluson, was murdered in 1241 by the King of Norway to make way for Iceland’s annexation.

A normally conservative people, with the world’s highest literacy rate, Icelanders fell hard for privatization in the early 1990s. They went on a debt-fueled spending spree, as their per capita wealth exploded and the country’s three banks became casinos for foreign money. In 2008 the banks defaulted and the economy collapsed. Icelanders kicked out their government, let the banks fail, indicted the bankers and handed out mortgage relief. It worked. The country recovered, presumably sobered.

Yesterday, Iceland’s prime minister resigned, the first victim of the Panama Papers – and certainly not the last.

The just-released numbers are staggering: 214,000 offshore accounts; 14,000 clients; over 200 countries and territories (not bad, as there are only 196 countries in the world); “leaders” from every walk of life; 11.5 million documents; 2.6 terabytes of data. Putin’s favorite cellist is worth $100 million, and FIFA is back in the news.

The 1% – or 0.1% – is not an American exception but a worldwide disgrace, uncovered by the kind of investigative journalism that has become an endangered species.

I think Bernie’s on to something.

The Pen and the Kalashnikov

The only thing more destructive of democracy than censorship is self-censorship, more destructive ultimately than two brainwashed jihadists with machine guns. In fact, while the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and their police protectors (one a Muslim) is an attack on free expression, the killers seemed more intent on punishing those who had insulted Muhammad than making a statement about press freedom – although it’s hard to imagine in whose holy book their act would constitute “an eye for an eye.” The result, when the civic squares have emptied and the symbolic pens put down, will be a greater public commitment to free speech and an increase in small acts of self-censorship.

With censorship, at least, you know who your enemy is, even if you feel powerless to fight it. For the press, censorship comes in many guises. The worst is that of governments, and almost the first act of any totalitarian regime is to shut down the independent media. But it is more ubiquitous: threats to pull advertising; political demagoguery; a rock through the window.

But the threat of murder makes us pull our punches. Do I really need to write that?

“[W]e don’t want to publish hate speech or spectacles that offend, provoke or intimidate or anything that desecrates religious symbols or angers people along religious or ethnic lines," an AP executive told The Washington Post.

That’s a broad brush.

Charlie Hebdo is publishing next Wednesday. Not its usual run of 60,000, but one million copies. That’s commitment.

Why We Need Poets

The most poignant and searing reporting I have read on the Islamic State’s treatment of hostages was written by a poet. Rukmini Callimachi is a Romanian-American poet and journalist who has covered the aftermath of Katrina, hunger in West Africa and al-Qaeda. Yesterday The New York Times published her article on the two-year ordeal and last days of James Foley – and the other 22 hostages held by ISIS in Syria. In it, Callimachi transcends the video pornography of much current Middle East reporting to focus on the human tragedy of the hostages. In doing so, she confronts the absolute evil of ISIS. This is why we need poets. It is remarkable to see the hostages, who often have only their suffering in common, build a community and tell stories to survive under the most awful conditions – as humans have done over and over again in the face of evil. For there is no other word to describe ISIS. This is not about cultural differences or historical grievances. It is an assault on our definition of humanity – infinitely more so when we realize that films of good people being beheaded have become tools for enlisting fighters from across the globe. Almost all those kidnapped have been aid workers and journalists, people who came to help the afflicted and inform the world. Some say they shouldn’t be there, that they are pawns in a deadly game. I think they embody the human kindness and courage that ISIS seeks to destroy.

Affirming Life

I am tired of bad news, about the way it has come to define our world and our relationships with each other, about the numbing relentlessness of headlines depicting war and disease and disaster that make us feel helpless in a hostile world. I don’t even know how to react anymore. When a French oil executive’s private jet clips a snowplow driven by a drunk Russian worker and crashes on a Moscow runway, absurdity trumps tragedy. When ISIS films its beheadings of innocent people, our horror deadens our humanity. When we dress Ebola health workers head-to-toe in Hazmat, and then learn that one flew round-trip from Dallas to Cleveland, while another turns up on a cruise ship off Belize, misfortune turns into farce. Our tendency, or mine anyway, is to stick my head in the sand, to withdraw to a safe place where I can keep the bad news at bay.

In the 1970s, New York’s Central Park was considered too dangerous to enter after dark, and so when the sun set we ceded it to gangs and criminals. A friend of mine, a man of unimpressive physique and noncombative ways, refused to comply, saying simply, “That’s our park.”

To retreat from the world is to give in to the forces that seem so threatening to us. Those forces are real and dangerous, but they are not the whole story. We need to publish other stories, the ones that affirm the only world – and the only lives – we have.

Innocent Blood

In addition to the horrific manner of their murders, the three men beheaded by ISIS shared the status of non-combatants, a status protected by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “violence to life and person,” hostage taking, “outrages upon personal dignity” and arbitrary execution. So much for the Geneva Conventions.

Steven Sotloff and James Foley were freelance journalists covering events in Syria. David Haines was bringing humanitarian aid to a Syrian refugee camp. These are dangerous – and critical – roles in war zones, and those who perform them knowingly put themselves at great risk. But to be singled out for torture and public execution is a sign that the rules of war do not apply. It also raises the question of why we have rules for wars which have always brought disproportionate destruction and death to innocents.

ISIS has made a mockery of those rules, and we have hastened their demise with our justification of torture and failure to close Guantanamo.

And now Foley, Sotloff and Haines are being blamed for their own deaths. They had no business being there, we are told, as if they were seeking only their self-aggrandizement. But the world needs, more than ever, men and women who will risk their lives to bring aid to the suffering and report what is happening to the rest of the world. We cannot build walls and turn our backs.

I do not know what motivated the three men, but I admire their courage and their commitment.

Redemption

Last month the Colorado River crossed the Mexican border for the first time in years. It is on its way to the Gulf of California amid hopes that it will revive its delta, which Aldo Leopold described in 1922 as an ecological paradise but which is now a barren, saline desert. In the midst of the worst drought in the region’s history, prolonged negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico – spurred by scientists and environmentalists – have brought water back to the southern Colorado, and there is hope that the once-grand river, destroyed by economic forces bent on extracting every drop of its water, will flow again to the sea. For the past 13 years, John Trotter has been documenting that story in his photographs. He first went to the Colorado after the attempted-murder conviction of a street gang leader, who had orchestrated a beating so severe that John was “left for dead in a pool of blood.” He had been taking pictures of children playing for the Sacramento Bee.

Still traumatized, he sought relief in something “bigger than my own experience.” He started at the bottom, in the delta where the river is only a dry bed, and he found a landscape as damaged as he was, its people eking a living out of dead land. He empathized. He taught himself Spanish. He kept returning. He watched people working for years to bring water to the delta. It had become, for the Colorado and for his own life, “a redemption story.”

All The News That’s Fitting

When Ben Richardson resigned from Bloomberg News on Monday, he became the third newsperson to quit since the company allegedly squashed an investigative report on big money and politics in China. China plays hardball – as Bloomberg found out in 2012, after it published an article on the staggering wealth accumulated by China’s political elite, and the Chinese government cut off subscriptions to the company’s services. Bloomberg has annual sales of $8.5 billion, and China figures prominently in its future plans. So maybe this gives China some potential leverage over news coverage – as Bloomberg’s Chairman Peter Grauer suggested last week when he said his editors “should have rethought” articles that “wander a little bit away” from the organization’s core business reporting. This is one slippery slope. Yes, the financial stakes are unusually large in China, but news organizations have always had to navigate between commercial needs and editorial integrity, at least in countries that pay lip service to a free press. The press is both a private business and a public trust, and the pressures from the former – to write a puff piece on car dealer, to stop pummeling the bank chairman – have always been relentless. That’s why there was once a “fire wall” between the two sides. But that has eroded as old-fashioned publishers have given way to corporate flacks interested only in profits. It’s easy to beat up on Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, but the deeper threat to press freedom is much more subtle than those guys.

And All That Jaz

As we all know, Al Jazeera is not really a news organization; it is a terrorist group. At least that’s what former co-President Cheney insisted during the Iraq war, calling it “a platform for terrorists.” In 2003, a U.S. jet fired on Al Jazeera’s Baghdad studio, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. So you wonder what Cheney was thinking yesterday afternoon when Al Jazeera America launched its daily cable television news program from New York City. Despite the Bush administration’s demonization, Al Jazeera has long had an international reputation for balanced, innovative and on-the-spot reporting. It was the only news channel to have live coverage of the outbreak of war in Afghanistan. It is known for airing dissenting, and often controversial, views on its Middle Easter stations. And both Salon.com and Hilary Clinton called its coverage of the 2011 unrest in Egypt superior to that of the American press.

Al Jazeera’s aim for its new channel is to “air fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news.” Its competitors seem unfazed by a challenger offering 14 hours of serious news each day to an audience that is hooked on entertainment, celebrity sightings and reality TV. But the deeper question is whether a channel with an Arabic name and an imposed reputation for Islamic bias will have any appeal to an increasingly insular and nativist America. We live in a world bathed in American brands, from Coke to The Wall Street Journal, and in a country awash with Japanese cars and Chinese clothes – and yet remain disturbingly closed to “foreign” ideas.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Two of the oldest and best newspapers in America sold this week for a fraction of their recent value. Jeffrey Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, bought The Washington Post for $250 million the day after Red Sox owner John Henry bought The Boston Globe for $70 million. In 1993 The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for The Globe. That’s quite a drop. It’s also a trend, as scores of once-venerable papers have gone bankrupt, shut down or sold for a pittance. So the question is: where we will get our news? For even as they close far-flung bureaus and slash budgets, newspapers remain our primary source of independent reporting. The idea of non-partisan news reporting is relatively recent. Nineteenth-century papers were blatantly one-sided, usually little more than mouthpieces for political parties. Then two critical firewalls developed: one between editorial content and advertising; the other between news and opinion. The pressures against those walls were relentless – advertisers wanted only good coverage, politicians only editorial support – and they have collapsed in recent times, as publishers seek to appease advertisers, politicians and, yes, readers, by putting platitudes above professionalism. Now we have thousands of outlets where readers get only what they want, and ever fewer where trained journalists are trying to give us what we need. Whatever you may think of the opposing editorial positions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, both news staffs are committed to piercing the political and corporate veils of bluster and secrecy in search of the true story. Without them, who will watch our “custodians?” Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Nameless Ones

The byline caught my eye. Beneath an incomprehensible headline about an increasingly complicated and bloody war (“In Besieged Area of Syria, Bitterness of Sunnis Points to Rending of Sects”), I read “By an Employee of The New York Times and Anne Barnard.” Anne Barnard is an experienced foreign correspondent for the Times. But who is the unnamed employee, and why is he or she nameless? Even the dateline is vague” “Near Qusayr, Syria.” Clearly Barnard is outside Syria, but the lead reporter is traveling with a rebel group in an area of the most intense fighting. Yesterday, as the Syrian army was recapturing the town of Qusayr, the nameless reporter described a people in misery and a landscape laid waste.

The reporter gives us, when he can, the names of the fighters and the victims. To humanize an inhuman existence, he has put his own life in peril, for in this war, as in so many like it around the world, there is no sanctuary for correspondents. Nor is there for others who work anonymously in the midst of carnage to ease the suffering. Red Crescent (The Islamic Red Cross) workers care for victims without regard to their status or politics. Doctors treat all the wounded, operating in makeshift basements without anesthetics or drugs. In a war in which the combatants have become unbendingly sectarian, killing those who are different because they are different, these medical workers, volunteers  and reporters risk their lives on behalf of our common humanity.

Father and Son

Haynes Johnson died on Friday.  He and his father, Malcolm, are the only father-son duo to win Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. Haynes won for his reporting from the deep South during its reign of terror in the 1960s, when he traveled the region for months, reporting on the fears, aspirations, disappointments and triumphs of Southern blacks during and after the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Malcolm’s Pulitzer was awarded in 1949 for a 24-part series (that is not a misprint), “Crime on the Waterfront”, which chronicled the murderous alliance between the International Longshoreman’s Union and organized crime that ruled over the New York waterfront with a bloody fist (and led to one of the great movies of all time). This was journalism at its best: committed, courageous and thoughtful. It started at the top, for the pressures on publishers and editors to go easy or look the other way were relentless, and the costs of producing such efforts were enormous. But it was the reporters who really put their lives on the line. In 1965 Selma, Alabama, was a violent place where both public officials and private vigilantes used intimidation and murder to enforce the local order. The same was true of the waterfront, where people named Anastasia and Costello, Lansky and Luciano only made death threats they were more than happy to keep. These were the beats of Malcolm and Haynes Johnson, places where they were not welcome, places where people disappeared without a trace, places that had stories they believed must be told.

The First Amendment

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . Anthony Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist best known for his pioneering coverage of the Supreme Court, did not believe those words granted special status to the media. The press, in his view, referred, not to institutions but to the printing press itself, which in his view was simply an extension of speech. “It’s a great mistake,” he said “for the press to give itself a preferred position.” I had never thought of that until I read it yesterday in Lewis’ obituary. As a long-time First Amendment absolutist, I believed it gave journalists unique protections to report the truth and required, in return, a singular commitment from publishers and other media owners to the public trust.

Yet Lewis’ view has inspired me. The decline of the traditional media, both in terms of dwindling revenues and diminishing public respect, is in many ways self-inflicted. The journalism of Fox News and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s abysmal empire are tough to reconcile with a belief in a free and responsible press: “Gotcha” journalism; wiretapping and gross invasions of privacy; putting the bottom line before the public interest – and then wrapping it all in the First Amendment – this couldn’t be what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

But the protections that all of us have, not just to speak our minds but to publish our thoughts  – even on this blog – without government censorship or fear of arrest, now that is a right worth standing up for.

Scarfed

Note: If the cartoon doesn't appear in email, you can see it at www.jamesgblaine.com Gerald Scarfe’s cartoon in last Sunday’s Times of London is not especially funny, and its publication on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day was bad timing. But it is hard-hitting and makes a clear and important point about Israeli activities in Palestine, which is what newspaper opinion pages are supposed to do.

Predictably, the backlash from the Israeli government and its supporters was immediate: they accused Scarfe of anti-Semitism, including “blood libel” (the accusation that Jews use the blood of murdered children in religious rites). Equally predictably, it was effective: Scarfe’s newspaper threw him under the bus within hours of publication.

First up was the publisher: “Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch, whose commitment to the principles of journalism is an inch deep. “Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon.” The paper followed its leader: After a hastily convened meeting with “representatives of the Jewish community,” the Times “apologises unreservedly for the offence we clearly caused."

 Israeli elections: Will cementing peace continue?

While the reaction was less frightening than the fatwa issued in the wake of the 2005 “Mohammad” cartoons, it was no less insidious. It illustrates the proclivity of the press to bow to the powerful and censor itself.  If Scarfe wasn’t speaking for the Times, why did the paper pull his cartoon (whose publication date is set by the editor, not the cartoonist)? Does it only publish opinions that agree with its own? Has the Times of London finally become the British version of Murdoch’s American flagship, Fox News?

A Noble Profession

The day Gene Patterson died, Greek anarchists set off bombs in the homes of five journalists. There was no direct connection between the legendary editor’s death in Florida and the explosions in Athens. But it focused my attention on the state of modern journalism and the vulnerability of those who practice it. Patterson was a giant: as editor of the Atlanta Constitution in the 1960s, he became the conscience of the South, demanding justice for Blacks while explaining the complexities of his region to the rest of the country. Later, at The Washington Post, he oversaw the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. He was a man of enormous courage. In Greece, journalists are being attacked from all sides, part of a worldwide assault on the press. Three issues are combining to create the lethal situation. The first, and by far the most serious, are attacks on the press and its practitioners, fomented by sitting governments and marauding thugs. The attacks are political, psychic, physical – and effective: 70 journalists were killed last year and six already in 2013. The second is the profession’s own self-destruction, as bad reporting, crass partisanship and corporate greed have shattered public respect for the institution. People wanted to kill Eugene Patterson, but they never questioned his integrity. Finally, the old economics of journalism no longer work. As the only business specifically protected by the Constitution, journalism is a unique combination of private enterprise and public trust. If we neglect the second part of that equation in pursuit of the first, the dead reporters will have died – and Gene Patterson will have labored – in vain.

Retail Hypocrisy

Yesterday Wal-Mart had what Judith Viorst would call a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” The folksy retailer with the heartland twang, which is known for “always low prices,” as well as the nation’s lowest-paid corporate workforce, the destruction of the small towns whose values it pretends to champion, and, just last week, shooting an alleged shoplifter to death in its Houston parking lot, was the subject of an in-depth report on its corrupt practices in Mexico in yesterday’s New York Times. In addition, after early reports that it would pull the “Bushmaster Sporting Rifle” from its shelves, the company announced “we have made no changes in the assortment of guns we sell in our stores.” Lack of demand caused Wal-Mart to stop selling guns in most stores in 2006, but the sagging retail market brought them back five years later. Wal-Mart is now the largest gun seller in the country. As for Mexico, The Times spent months tracking down obscure leads as its reporters methodically unmasked systematic corruption. This wasn’t about having to do business in a shady world, the paper reported. “Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance – public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.”

Wal-Mart likes to sell itself as the quintessentially American company. It’s scary to think it might be right.

Obama’s America

In an interview on NPR, noted conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza discussed his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which is playing in over 1,500 theaters around the country. D’Souza argues that Obama is intentionally implementing policies that will weaken America as he pursues the anti-colonialist dream of his Kenyan father. In the interview, D’Souza said that, in his autobiography Obama explicitly laid out his view that the key to a more equitable post-colonial world lies in diminishing the domination of the West and expanding the opportunities of the developing nations. D’Souza seems bent on recasting “birtherism” in intellectual dress – unlike the less subtle bumper sticker I recently saw: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for the American.” But inadvertently or not, he raises important questions: How will we integrate a planet of 7+ billion people who are in constant and deadly conflict over limited resources? How will we close the global gap between rich and poor?

The current model is based on continual economic growth and resource extraction in the belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” It is also based on fear, symbolized by our obsession with fences, walls and gates – with us on the inside trying desperately to keep them on the outside. Those two components contradict each other. Yet as the doctrine of unending growth appears to have run its course, those who have benefited most from it build higher fences, thicker walls and more heavily guarded gates.

We need to make more universal Ronald Reagan’s demand that we “tear down that wall.”