"The US Army announced yesterday that it was blocking access at all Army facilities across the world to the Guardian website in response to the NSA stories. And apparently the soldiers in the Army are old enough and mature enough to risk their lives to fight in wars but not mature enough to read news articles that the rest of the world is reading. But the reason I say that that’s flattering and I mean it. That is very flattering—is because I’ve long looked at journalism through this prism that defines the two polar opposites of what I consider journalism to be. One of those polar opposites has long been defined for me by this speech that the great war correspondent David Halberstam gave in 2005 to students of Columbia Journalism School and he was asked by the speech organizers to speak about his proudest moment in his journalism career. And what he said was his proudest moment in his journalism career was when he was stationed in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 as a very young war reporter he would go out into the field and see what was actually happening. So when he went to the press conferences of the US generals that afternoon and they made all sorts of claims he knew that they were lies and instead of disseminating those lies as truths he was standing up at these press conferences in the middle of Vietnam and war zone and very aggressively challenging these generals and saying to their face that he knew what they were saying was false to the point where those generals went to the editors of the New York Times and demanded that he be removed from his position of covering the war. That was his proudest moment in journalism, when he so angered the government officials that he was covering. That episode stands in stark contrast to what I consider to be the other polar opposite, which was this interview Bill Keller gave, who was the executive of the New York Times throughout the Bush Administration, in which he was talking about the newspaper’s publication of some of the materials that they received from WikiLeaks. He was giving a BBC interview and he was very eager to distinguish between what the New York Times did and from what WikiLeaks does, which makes sense on one level since I don’t recall WikiLeaks ever publishing a bunch of false articles that led the nation to the war. That wasn’t actually that Bill Keller was referring to. Bill Keller was trying to say that the New York Times is radically different than what WikiLeaks does because unlike WikiLeaks, which simply publishes whatever it wants, the New York Times under Bill Keller went to the Obama administration ahead of time and said these are the things that we think we ought to publish, do you think we should? And if the US government said you shouldn’t publish this and you shouldn’t publish that and you shuldn’t publish this other thing because to do so will endanger national security Bill Keller proudly said the New York Times didn’t publish it. He was beaming like a third grader who just got a gold star from his teacher. He said in this BBC interview the Obama administration has continuously said we have been very responsible in how we published. The reason to me that seems like polar opposites is because David Halberstam viewed the measurement of good journalism as defined by how much you anger the people in power that you’re covering whereas Bill Keller defines good journalism—and I think most modern establishment journalists define it this way as well—by how much you please the people in power that you’re covering. And for me if you are pleasing the people in power with the things that you are disclosing, you may be very good at your job but your job is not journalism. So, I’m going to print out this article that talked about what the Army did and I am going to have it laminated and framed and hung very prominently on my office wall very proudly..."
Posted on: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 00:53:09 +0000
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