When Journalism Dies :Sebastian Junger
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/when-journalism-dies/
It’s hard to know what to make of the international press corps. Overwhelmingly white and college-educated, most have presumably ignored professional opportunities that pay orders of magnitude more money than journalism — and generally don’t get them killed. If you’re smart enough to tease the truth out of the confusion, nuance, and outright propaganda of most war zones — and most countries — you’re probably smart enough to do pretty well on Wall Street. Or in the restaurant business. Or flipping houses in Florida. And yet, every year, idealistic and ambitious young people troop off to make almost no money reporting on the world’s tragedies and failures. I hardly have a friend in the business who hasn’t been shot, kidnapped, blown up, detained, or threatened with execution. And yet they persist. I’ve lost one close friend and numerous acquaintances to war.
If you ask my fellow journalists why they do it, many will resort to the tired piety that someone must bear witness to the world’s horrors, but let’s have some honesty here. Journalism is one of the most important jobs in a democracy, and my involvement in the profession is a source of profound pride, but we don’t need to pretend selflessness to have merit. No other profession — lawyer, logger, preschool teacher — bothers to, so why should we? Journalists are some of the most ego-driven people I know, as well as some of the most principled, and they’re willing to risk their lives on both counts. Their supposed addiction to adrenaline can be thought of more accurately as an addiction to having a life of great meaning and consequence. What’s addictive is feeling different from everyone else, cut from a different cloth. Which indeed many of them are.
I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue out of the way. Many people will tell you — or scream at you — that objectivity is a myth and journalists are just partisan hacks trying to advance their own agenda. Fair enough — some are. But such people aren’t actually journalists; they’re something else. News hosts who put on enormous amounts of make-up to make enormous amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by lying about reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of this article. Now that that’s out of the way we can state that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.
Truth-tellers are everywhere in our society because we rely on them to survive. Trial judges, weather forecasters, safety inspectors, structural engineers, and radiologists all provide unvarnished opinions so that we can lead safer, better lives, and the press is no different. The liberal press was scathing about President Biden’s pullout from Kabul even though he was “their” president and dangerously wounded by their work. Likewise, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, then of Fox News, asked uncomfortable questions and delivered unwelcomed facts despite the anger they risked inciting in their conservative audience. When Fox News Decision Desk director Arnon Mishkin shocked viewers and mortified Fox executives by calling Arizona for Joe Biden during the 2020 election, he was acting as any oncologist would while looking at a patient’s X-ray: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you have cancer. Telling you otherwise would be a disservice to both you and my profession.”
One can tell the relative objectivity of a news organization (“integrity” may be a better word) by its willingness to report stories that are unflattering — or even devastating — to its preferred candidate. Even a cursory examination of cable-news websites reveals who ranks where in this regard. Why a society would need such radical truth-telling should be obvious, but the following anecdote from Afghanistan makes the point nicely. I first went to Afghanistan in the summer of 1996, when I saw part of the Taliban’s final conquest of the country. After America’s entry into the war in 2001, I rushed back to document the liberation of Kabul and the fall of the Taliban regime. I was a “believer,” in a sense: I believed that after 9/11, America had a legal and moral right to go after al-Qaeda, and that we could do a lot of good for this poor, beautiful country that I had fallen in love with. My belief in the mission, however, did not prevent me from calling out American missteps and failures. I was a journalist, after all — not a Pentagon press spokesman.
And then we invaded Iraq. Although I was drawn to the sheer magnitude and drama of the war, I didn’t cover it because I was personally so against our decision to invade that I didn’t think I could be objective. I still had high hopes for Afghanistan, but my optimism didn’t survive long. I spent a year embedded with a platoon from the 173rd Airborne in the infamous Korengal Valley, and our outpost was attacked almost daily. After one particularly fierce firefight, a special operator shook his head and said, “We’re never going to win this war until we admit we’re losing it.”
What he said shocked me: It was 2007, and questioning the war was still considered unpatriotic heresy. If you didn’t believe America was right and honorable in all things and would win any war it fought, you were basically siding with the terrorists. And yet here was a highly experienced soldier questioning exactly that. And that is the proper role of the press: to provide the kind of honest and brutal assessment that generals, politicians, contractors, and second lieutenants can’t because they’ll lose their jobs. The simple truth is that if you’re against the working press, you’re against protecting American soldiers from faulty weapons and bad decisions. No military or government will publicly examine itself for failures. Only the press — and internal whistleblowers — can do that.
Journalism is important because reality is important, and reality is something that many generals and politicians have a complicated relationship with. The powerful do not willingly embarrass themselves, so the press must do it for them. In 2004, as the Iraq War started to deviate from the quick and easy success foreseen by President George W. Bush, journalist Ron Suskind interviewed a senior administration official (rumored to be Karl Rove) for the New York Times. Suskind wanted to know why the Bush administration was refusing to acknowledge the setbacks in Iraq, but the official just dismissed journalists as being stuck in the “reality-based community.” “We’re an empire now,” he supposedly said, “and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Watching reality refuse to conform to someone’s ideology would be more gratifying if it didn’t involve over 7,000 dead American soldiers and an estimated 350,000 dead Iraqis. (Most Iraqi civilians were killed by insurgents, but the invasion unleashed a level of violence that U.S. forces could not counter.) It fell to the press to inform the American public about all this because the Bush administration could not be trusted to do so, and the American public deserved to know every detail. It was their tax dollars paying for it, after all; their sons and daughters dying for it.
Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to covering up failures; just listen to Biden officials on the disastrous Afghan withdrawal. Journalists investigate such things not because they are for or against a specific policy — though they might be — but because they are generally against dishonesty and abuse of the public trust. That is the very point of their existence, the entire rationale for what they do. When journalists cite biology to refute the idea that gender difference is merely a social construct, they are not standing up for cisgendered Americans but rather for the idea that objective truth matters and will come after us one day if we ignore it for too long. The same can be said about the Mexican-border crisis, the national debt, climate change, election denial, and anything else that threatens this great nation. Some are conservative issues, some are liberal ones, but all deserve a fair and unbiased accounting.
For better or ill, the press is the only place to get such a thing. Being human, journalists have lied, plagiarized, distorted, and made mistakes, just like the people they investigate, but their sins are generally investigated by the press itself. If there were a more reliable alternative to the press, I would tell you to throw your arms around it and never let go, but there isn’t. Small-town newspapers are particularly important for public accountability, but they are dying out at an alarming rate, and as they go, a certain ground truth about the American experience goes with it. In fact, a Boston-based nonprofit called the GroundTruth Project is dedicated to preserving our nation’s local press and seeding “news deserts” with reporters and photographers.
“The crisis in local reporting has become a crisis for our democracy,” says founder Charles M. Sennott. “In news deserts, three things occur: Voter participation plummets, polarization surges, and bond ratings drop as banks do not want to invest in communities where no one is watching the store. And into the barren terrain, toxic misinformation seeps into the soil and further divides an increasingly uninformed population.”
Much of the blame can be laid on the internet, which radically changed the economics of news reporting by using algorithms to simply confirm peoples’ views and biases rather than challenge them. This shift amounts to a kind of intellectual death spiral in which true believers on both sides insist on self-serving opinions that have no basis in fact and allow for no legitimacy on the opposing side.
Journalists are easy to vilify in such a hyper-partisan environment because they keep uncovering problematic facts, but an America without any press at all is hard to imagine. Or rather, it’s easy to imagine, but terrifying. Think how much worse this tragedy would have turned out without a functioning press: By 1967, American soldiers in Vietnam had been struggling for years with M16 rifles that jammed constantly and were utterly unreliable in combat. The M16 was a new design, based on the civilian AR15, and both the rifle and the new, smaller-caliber ammunition it used were ill suited to jungle combat. Soviet-made AK-47s, on the other hand, worked in almost any conditions and gave Vietcong fighters a significant firepower advantage over American soldiers. Over and over, American soldiers were found dead next to jammed rifles, often with the cleaning rod shoved down the barrel in a desperate attempt to clear a shell casing from the chamber. In some units, 30 or 40 percent of rifles jammed within a few minutes.
According to C. J. Chivers, author of The Gun, American soldiers eventually took to carrying AK-47s taken off dead Vietcong as backup guns. One Marine preferred to go into combat with just a grenade launcher and a .38 caliber revolver that he bought off a man who was at the end of his tour. A Marine commander told his men to fix bayonets before firefights so that at least they could stab the enemy. Before getting overrun and wiped out, one unit had time to radio, “Out of grenades, all weapons jammed.” The men’s bodies were found the next day, the stocks of their guns smashed from having been used as clubs.
Both the U.S. military and the manufacturer, Colt, knew about the gun’s problems but refused to fix them or even acknowledge the issue. “MACV told all information officers . . . that the M16 was not a topic for discussion,” an information officer from the 25th Infantry Division later testified. (“MACV” stands for “Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.”) “Newsmen were not to question soldiers about the weapon. No stories about the rifle jamming or malfunctioning were to be written. . . . At the same time the Army launched an all-out propaganda campaign to make GIs in Vietnam more confident in the weapon they basically mistrusted.”
Finally, a young Marine lieutenant named Mike Chervenak borrowed a chaplain’s typewriter and, along with his company commander, wrote a polite but firm letter detailing the M16’s flaws. He sent one copy of the letter to the Barnesboro Star in his hometown of Barnesboro, Pa., and another to the Washington Post. A third copy went to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a final letter went to Richard Ichord of the House Armed Services Committee. Representative Ichord quickly convened a subcommittee to investigate the problem, but the military stonewalled him so shamelessly that it was able to avoid any accountability whatsoever.
And then the Washington Post published Chervenak’s letter. The Marine Corps was furious, launching an immediate investigation into Chervenak himself, but the ensuing uproar eventually forced Colt to fix the problems. By then, though, scores of American soldiers were dead because of weapon malfunctions. The Washington Post and one very brave lieutenant had accomplished what the U.S. Congress could not: accountability at the highest levels of the U.S. military.
I have no idea whether my own work has had such a stark and immediate impact on my country — I doubt it. Information moves in strange ways, though, and the truth has a quiet ability to bear fruit many years later. When I was 22, I drove around the country with my best friend, John, in an old Subaru station wagon. I wanted to be a journalist but had no idea how to go about that, so I just wrote down anything that seemed significant. Driving south from Miami one night, we stopped in Big Pine Key to get coffee at a Circle K, and I went to use the men’s room in back. The walls were covered with exceedingly ugly anti-immigrant graffiti — mostly directed against Cubans — but a single anonymous response caught my eye. I asked the cashier for a pen and piece of paper and went back to write it down. “Thank God the rest of the people in this country are warm and caring and welcomed me in ’62,” the man had written. “I fought in Vietnam for you to say that. I love you like a brother.”
The very worst things about America were on that men’s-room wall, and the very best. The proper work of journalism is to remind us of both. That Cuban man may still be out there somewhere, a decade older than I am and maybe not even remembering that he stopped at a Circle K in Big Pine Key, Fla., in the mid 1980s and wrote what he did on that bathroom wall. But a young man who wanted to be a journalist thought it was important enough to copy onto a piece of paper that he kept track of for the next 40 years. Maybe their work is not done yet, those 34 words; maybe they have only just now begun showing this country how truly great we can be.
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