[Dialogue] Journalists As Truth-Tellers

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 by The Nation
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/moyers>  

Journalists As Truth-Tellers

by Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers delivered these remarks in Washington, DC April 3 at the fifth
annual Ridenhour Prize awards ceremony, sponsored by The Nation Institute
and the Fertel Foundation. Moyers received the Courage Prize.

Thank you very much, Sissy Farenthold, for those very generous words, spoken
like one Texan to another-extravagantly. Thank you for the spirit of
kinship. I could swear that I sensed our good Molly Ivins standing there
beside you.

I am as surprised to be here as I am grateful. I never thought of myself as
courageous, and still don't. Ron Ridenhour was courageous. To get the story
out, he had to defy the whole might and power of the United States
government, including its war machine. I was then publisher of Newsday,
having left the White House some two years earlier. Our editor Bill McIlwain
played the My Lai story big, as he should, much to the chagrin of the owner
who couldn't believe Americans were capable of such atrocities. Our readers
couldn't believe it either. Some of them picketed outside my office for
days, their signs accusing the paper of being anti-American for publishing
repugnant news about our troops. Some things never change.

A few years later, I gave the commencement at a nearby university, and when
I finished the speech, a woman who had just been graduated came up to me and
said, "Mr. Moyers, you've been in both government and journalism; that makes
everything you say twice as hard to believe." She was on to something.

After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in
journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the
journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to
reality. Over the last forty years, I would find that reality in assignment
after assignment, from covering famine in Africa and war in Central America
to inner-city families trapped in urban ghettos and middle-class families
struggling to survive in an era of downsizing across the heartland. I also
had to learn one of journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying to tell
the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as
complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We
journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission
is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go
blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last
detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take all of the slings
and arrows directed at you by the powers that be-corporate and political and
sometimes journalistic-there is no use even trying. You have to love it and
I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government's lies
and contradictions, "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." Journalism
101.

So it wasn't courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck. When
the road forked, I somehow stumbled into the right path, thanks to mentors
like Eric Sevareid, Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of producers,
researchers and editors who lifted me to see further than one can see unless
one is standing on the shoulders of others.

The quintessential lesson of my life came from another Texan named John
Henry Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the University of Texas. He
served in the Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army
during World War II, and came home to become a celebrated raconteur and
popular national radio host whose career was shattered when right-wingers
inspired by Joseph McCarthy smeared him as a communist. He lost his sponsors
and was fired. But he fought back with a lawsuit that lasted five years and
cost him every penny he owned. Financial help from Edward R. Murrow and a
few others helped him to hang on. In the end, John Henry Faulk won, and his
courage helped to end the Hollywood era of blacklisting. You should read his
book, Fear on Trial, and see the movie starring George C. Scott. John
Henry's courage was contagious.

Before his death I produced a documentary about him, and during our
interview he told me the story of how he and his friend, Boots Cooper, were
playing in the chicken house there in central Texas when they were about
twelve years old. They spotted a chicken snake in the top tier of the nest,
so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it, "All of
our frontier courage drained out of our heels. Actually, it trickled down
our overall legs. And Boots and I made a new door through the hen house."
His momma came out to see what all of the fuss was about, and she said to
Boots and John Henry, "Don't you know chicken snakes are harmless? They
can't hurt you." Rubbing his forehead and his behind at the same time, Boots
said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you so bad you'll hurt
yourself."

John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson. I'm always ashamed when I do.
Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we're always
finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority,
secrecy, the claims of empire. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we
were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he
said the press is "the weak slat under the bed of democracy." The slat broke
after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor:
establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing
warmongers flying the skull and bones of the "balanced and fair brigade,"
administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies-all
romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.

Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later,
most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still
prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition
than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day's
temperature. The biblical injunction, "Go and sin no more," is the one we
most frequently forget in the press. Collectively, we don't seem to learn
that all it takes to transform an ordinary politician and a braying ass into
the modern incarnation of Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on the
Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the invocation of national security.

There are, fortunately, always exceptions to whatever our latest dismal
collective performance yields. America produces some world-class journalism,
including coverage of the Iraq War by men and women as brave as Ernie Pyle.
But I still wish we had a professional Hippocratic Oath of our own that
might stir us in the night when we stray from our mission. And yes, I
believe journalism has a mission.

Walter Lippman was prescient on this long before most of you were born.
Lippman, who became the ultimate Washington insider-someone to whom I
regularly leaked-acknowledged that while the press may be a weak reed to
lean on, it is the indispensable support for freedom. He wrote, "The present
crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism. Everywhere men and
women are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more
intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand.
Increasingly, they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are
not quickly and steadily available. All the sharpest critics of democracy
have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and
relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty,
panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people denied an assured access
to the facts."

So for all the blunders for which we are culpable; for all the
disillusionment that has set in among journalists with every fresh report of
job cuts and disappearing news space; for all the barons and buccaneers
turning the press into a karaoke of power; for all the desecration visited
on broadcast journalism by the corporate networks; for all the nonsense to
which so many aspiring young journalists are consigned; and for all the
fears about the eroding quality of the craft, I still answer emphatically
when young people ask me, "Should I go into journalism today?" Sometimes it
is difficult to urge them on, especially when serious questions are being
asked about how loyal our society is to the reality as well as to the idea
of an independent and free press. But I almost always answer, "Yes, if you
have a fire in your belly, you can still make a difference."

I remind them of how often investigative reporting has played a crucial role
in making the crooked straight. I remind them how news bureaus abroad are a
form of national security that can tell us what our government won't. I
remind them that as America grows more diverse, it's essential to have
reporters, editors, producers and writers who reflect these new rising
voices and concerns. And I remind them that facts can still drive the
argument and tug us in the direction of greater equality and a more
democratic society. Journalism still matters.

But I also tell them there is something more important than journalism, and
that is the truth. They aren't necessarily one and the same because the
truth is often obscured in the news. In his new novel, The Appeal, John
Grisham tells us more about corporate, political and legal jihads than most
newspapers or network news ever will; more about Wall Street shenanigans
than all the cable business channels combined; more about Manchurian
candidates than you will ever hear on the Sunday morning talk shows.

For that matter, you will learn more about who wins and who loses in the
real business of politics, which is governance, from the public interest
truth-tellers of Washington than you will from an established press tethered
to official sources. The Government Accountability Project, POGO, the
Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common
Sense, the Center for Responsible Politics, the National Security Archive,
CREW, the Center for Public Integrity, just to name a few-and from
whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never
flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.

Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he came upon the truth of My Lai. He
was in the Army. He later became a pioneering investigative reporter
and-this is the irony-had trouble making a living in a calling where
truth-telling can be a liability to the bottom line. Matthew Diaz and James
Scurlock, whom you honored today, are truth-tellers without a license,
reminding us that the most important credential of all is a conscience that
cannot be purchased or silenced.

So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young people: "Journalism still makes a
difference, but the truth matters more. And if you can't get to the truth
through journalism, there are other ways to go."

To The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation, to the Ridenhour judges
and to all of you, thank you again for this moment and, above all, for the
courage of your own convictions.

* * *

Bill Moyers is a journalist and president of the Schumann Center for Media
and Democracy.

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/09/8170/

 

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