All the News that’s Fit to Print: World Free Press Day

May 3, 2015:

All the News that’s Fit to Print: World Free Press Day at All Souls Unitarian Universalist of Putnam County

A few months back my sister—she and her family live in Mexico City—wrote to me that her eldest son—my nephew Scott—had found a picture on line—a picture of our father from the night our brother Scott died in a fire. That night, on the heels of the gentle and good police officer—who’d taken my Dad to identify the body and poured whiskey on their return—three “reporters” knocked on the door. They said they could help with the “investigation.” They had us looking for photographs, and asked questions—the answers to which no longer mattered.
The next day, they published a photograph taken at “the scene,” Dad standing in the dark with smoke still floating up from the fire that had consumed his only son.

That’s the photo my nephew found, and I’m pretty I’m the one who posted it—along with a rant about heartless journalism.

Often, too often, I dip my broad brush into that night—and judge the free press by it. I forget that Walter Cronkite essentially ended our role in the Viet Nam war—with words. With words, and images, the free press ignited the battle against Chicago’s cruel slaughter houses and continues to question our human role in this interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.

Journalists still risk their lives every day—to bring us, all of us, the truth.
Then there’s Fox News. I gave up television years ago, and had only heard about Fox News. I’ll be honest…I thought it was the on-air version of the Enquirer. I didn’t think anyone took it seriously until a visit to Gainesville’s after-hours clinic. While I was filling out the paperwork, Glen Beck was spouting off on the office’s television. When I turned in my forms, I sheepishly told the administrative person at the desk—“By the way, you have Fox News on.” Rather than leaping up in horror and changing the channel, the young woman leveled her eyes into mine and said “I suppose you’d like to have CNN on.”

I sat down and tried not to look or listen but like a train wreck, I couldn’t turn away—ending up exchanging horrified but silent glances with a young Southeast Asian man who was waiting with his wife.

In 1897, New York Times owner Adolph S. Ochs coined the phrase: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” in essence covenanting with the reading public to report the news impartially. In 2015 the phrase “All the News That’s Fit to Sell” resonates.

Still May third is the day we celebrate the "fundamental principles of press freedom—to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession.”

Around the world we find journalists sentenced to ridiculous prison terms and murdered—for telling the truth—for proclaiming the truth. Words…and images.

In February 1968, Walter Cronkite closed saying:

“…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
Overnight war became a dirty word.

The soldier was no longer a buttoned-up portrait but a multi-dimensional character in a nation’s morality play.

The power…the beauty…of a free press is that it holds a mirror up and says “Look!” We see the good, the bad…and the ugly.

One could argue that Cronkite broke the impartiality covenant. But I believe he was being honest—it wasn’t about ratings.

Today we might still be in Viet Nam, as we are in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A friend and fine journalist, Jeff Klinkenberg, reminded me of the words of Eugene “Gene” Patterson:

“At its simplest, a free press keeps people free. 
No society can stay free if its rulers go unwatched. For power corrupts. Given secrecy, people with power can do as they please, and seize yet more power until they crush any who differ.
A free press stands vigil on their acts and tells the public what they’re up to.

So the public can identify the rascals and, with the free vote, turn them out.

Blind the people to scrutiny of its leaders and they will saddle it with tyranny as surely as history foretells the future.
Every authoritarian regime that has oppressed a people has first hushed its free press.

No people informed by a free press will long accept oppression.

Remember this always when foolish citizens grow impatient with imperfections of a free press. Their chance to stay free rests on its right to be wrong.”

I get most of my news online, although NPR is usually playing in the background. And although a transplant, I’m a true Floridaphile baptized in swamp cathedrals and driven past the edge of sanity by no-seeums.

Until quite recently I fed my currently indoors-too-much self by reading Jeff Klinkenberg’s Florida tales published in the Tampa Bay Times. I didn’t subscribe. He posted the stories to his facebook page. I think I still have one or two saved to read later.
Then he announced his unexpectedly early retirement.

What is it now?
Three or four corporations own all of our media outlets?

When I spoke with Jeff the other day, he said the current trend had him in fear for our democracy.

I’m scared too.

The power of the press is indisputable.

In 1950, J. “Ding” Darling drew a cartoon—two tiny key deer pursued by huge dogs and hunters. Although I’ve heard them described as six-pointers that fit in your cooler, no one hunts for key deer anymore.
Given today’s social media, there’s a chance that that cartoon could—for better or worse—end hunting altogether.

When the press gets it wrong, things can get very wrong. On the way over this morning I was listening to the Bob Edwards show memorializing May 4—the shooting at Kent State. Turns out because a local news outlet assumed a Guardsman had been shot, they announced it, and rumors of student snipers went rampant. Even after the truth had been revealed, because of that first impression, more than half the public believed the students were responsible for their fates.

Have you thought about the power you wield with your mouse?

Has social media replaced the free press? From Arab Spring to Ferguson and now Baltimore, social media—facebook, twitter, Instagram—is the fuel that feeds the flame of truth…and untruth. Have you seen the stuff the creationists post? Or the tea party? Or the White House? The Unitarian Universalist Association? All Souls?

Who’s going to tell us what’s true and what’s false?

I remember watching an interview with Connie Chung. She said that the initiation for young reporters was to show up at the cemetery on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s death in the hope of “running into” Rose Kennedy. I thought that a macabre ritual.

But you know what? I would have read that story.

In 2014, sixty one journalists were killed, and I don’t think we have a handle on how many are imprisoned or otherwise captive. Men and women, reporters, photographers, cartoonists, publishers risk their freedom and their lives to tell the truth…in words and images.

With the exception of interacting with some of Florida’s more colorful flora and fauna, my friend Jeff Klinkenberg wasn’t risking his life—but he was telling the truth about Florida to a public that thinks of Florida as Disney World, condos, and spring breakers. He chalks most of what’s going on to brutal economics. I shared at least a dozen of Jeff’s stories with my facebook friends. I wish I’d subscribed—I wish my friends had too. 

Reporters and photographers for local and national newspapers are being cut. And I know they’ve all cut the editorial staff—I can hardly read some articles for the typos.

Have you thought about the power you wield with your mouse? With your dollars?

Sure Faux News gets it wrong most of the time, but when CNN is almost as bad—it’s time to speak up.

“At its simplest, a free press keeps people free.”

In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its fulltime photographers. They published the photograph of my father. I still have it. My father must have cut it out of the paper and saved it. For forty-four years I’ve been so angry with the three men who came to our home after being at “the scene.” How could someone snap a photo of a man’s heart breaking?

I took the now-fragile newspaper clipping out again this morning, after reading the sixty-one names of journalists killed last year. Forty four years—and I saw it today for the first time.

I wonder.

I wonder how many fathers held their sons just a little bit closer, talked to their daughters a little while longer, and held their spouse’s hand a bit tighter.

I wonder.