|
|
Looking
Back, Going Forward
JOURNALISTS
AS PATRIOTS
BY
MICHAEL HOYT
 Where
were you? I was on the George Washington Bridge watching smoke
curl from the top of the north tower but certain that the woman
on the radio had misspoken when she used the word "airliner."
She meant "airplane," surely, as in a small one. I worked
my way toward the office through the anxious city and strangers
told me other impossible things. A man with a cell phone spoke
of a second airplane; I thought, Why would anyone spread such
a rumor? Then a security guard wanted me to know that a tower
had imploded. You mean exploded, I said. The blast when the airplane
hit.
No, he said.
No.
As it happens we were working on a special issue here at cjr when
the planes hit the towers some five miles to the south. The issue
was to be about the course of American journalism over the forty
years of the magazine's life, the issue you hold in your hands.
The publication date was locked in, which seemed unfortunate at
first.
But as time went on it did not. The circumstances made our glance
back at journalistic history seem more timely and resonant than
before. As people keep saying, the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon mark the end of one period in history
and the start of another. And before moving forward into unknown
territory it is best to consider where you've been.
This edition of cjr is full of stories about reporters, editors,
and owners who did (or made possible) the kind of work that has
supplied oxygen to American democracy for the last four decades,
and those seen in these pages represent many thousands more. At
a time when the media are held in low esteem, journalists rarely
get the credit they deserve as a pillar of the republic. That
pillar held up well after the towers collapsed. In the days following
the attacks, the U.S. press rose to its full stature, informing
the country when information was so needed, then helping its citizens
mourn and begin to think through the response.
As you page through the issue you may be reminded of how other
moments of crisis often spawned great journalism -- the reporting
on Watergate, on Vietnam, on the civil rights movement, for example.
This is not merely because of the dimensions of the events. People
needed us to explain things and some of us stepped up. What's
going on down in Selma? Over in Hue? Why would a president distribute
hush money? Who can explain the attraction of stock car racing
or this new electric music? Why would our best boxer embrace a
religion that doesn't seem to like white people? What is really
happening in this drawn-out war? Journalists took on large questions.
We were independent and useful, qualities that go hand in hand
with citizenship, patriotism if you will. The journalists didn't
always get things right, and sometimes when they did get it right,
the public didn't appreciate it. David Halberstam and Malcolm
Browne, two of the reporters who shed light on some dark corners
in Vietnam, come to mind. Their patriotism was questioned, and
still is in certain quarters. But they were reporting difficult
truths that the nation needed to know, and it is hard to think
of a more patriotic thing for a journalist to do.
A look at forty years of American journalism will not be all celebration,
obviously. It will unfortunately confirm something that people
in newsrooms know in their bones. Something is missing. Here we
sit with our amazing digital equipment and our college-educated
brains, backed by corporations of great reach and power, and we
spend a summer chasing the likes of Gary Condit. Journalism has
been under pressure in recent years. We have been undermined by
marketing and profit pressures. And even that is something of
a copout. We have not been all that engaged. The political currents
and agonies of distant foreign nations, for instance, seemed so
. . . distant. Big questions didn't much matter.
Well, they do now. It is hard to think of a time, even in the
toughest moments of these past forty years, when the country was
more in need of an independent press that is both measured and
aggressive, wise and brave.
Here we are as a nation in a part of the world we barely understand
where every action has an unknown and potentially deadly reaction.
At a balancing point between a new engagement with the world or
a new xenophobia, between a new appreciation of our freedoms and
a willingness to trade some of them away for security, between
blind vengeance and calculated justice. And with unknown numbers
of terrorists out to kill us.
It is hard to come up with a set of better reasons to reverse
the journalistic trends of the last few years. And to sustain
that direction as long as possible. For editors and reporters
this is a good moment to remember why we got into the business
in the first place. For owners it's a time to think about the
real bottom line. Our work is not as risky as that of cops and
firemen, but it is as essential. To be a wise and skeptical American
journalist these days is to be a patriot.
Michael Hoyt
is executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review
|
|
|
