May 11, 2005

Iraq? Oh, yeah, Iraq.

Answering my own question from below, here's a proud journalist. She spent ten months reporting in Iraq, and she's brought back a few lessons:

  • Many journalists in Iraq could not, or would not, check their nationality or their own perspective at the door.
  • Our behavior as journalists has taught us very little. Just as in the lead up to the war in Iraq, questioning our government's decisions and claims and what it seeks to achieve is criticized as unpatriotic.
  • To seek to understand and represent to an American audience the reasons behind the Iraqi opposition is practically treasonous.
  • The gatekeepers -- by which I mean the editors, publishers and business sides of the media -- don't want their paper or their outlet to reveal that compelling narrative of why anyone would oppose the presence of American troops on their soil.
  • What it's like to be afraid of your own country.
She concludes:
We still have the freedom in this country as individuals and as journalists to defend the rights enshrined in the Constitution, to defend the values that we as individuals still hold dear -- so why aren't we doing it? Are we scared? If we're scared, then who will be there to defend those rights and values when it is proposed that they be taken away?

I still believe in that country that I love so dearly, the place I think of when the words "freedom," "opportunity," "liberty," "justice" and "equality" are spoken on lips, but I want it to be a country I see, hear and feel every day, not one that lives in my imagination.

It's time we looked in the mirror and began to take responsibility for what our country looks like, what our country is and how it behaves, rather than acting like victims before we actually are.

Or do I need to start facing the reality that all I love and believe in is simply self-delusion?

This op/ed should be required reading in every newsroom in the country.

Via Atrios.

Posted by Linkmeister at May 11, 2005 09:26 AM
Comments

Molly comes from an exemplary family of forthright newspaper people. Her father, Barry Bingham Jr, edited the Louisville Courier-Journal when I lived there in the late 1970s. The C-J was a wonderful paper, standing up for civil rights, good government, the environment, peaceful progress.

Unfortunately, nutty sister Sally fomented a family crisis that eventually led the Binghams to sell the paper to Gannett. Barry Jr angrily stormed off, and the city now has a newspaper indistinguishable from any other.

My ex had a very close friend who was a sorta-nanny for Barry Jr. She never had anything but the utmost of respect and praise for him.

Geeze, I'm all-of-a-sudden realizing that that friend must have been the sorta-nanny for Molly. She's 34, which means that she would have been about 6 or 7 at the time I'm thinking about. Now I'm feeling oooooold.

Posted by: N in Seattle at May 11, 2005 07:44 PM