It is said that when James Thurber, as a young newspaper reporter, was told by an editor that his story’s first paragraph, what newspaper people refer to as the lede, suffered from wordiness, he handed in a rewrite whose opening paragraph was, in its entirety, “Dead.”
There followed a second paragraph: “That’s what the man was when they found him with a knife in his back at 4 p.m. in front of Riley’s saloon at the corner of 52nd and 12th streets.”
Trump has been good for the media, but bad for journalism. The electronic media-sphere reeks of all Trump all the time, from the partisan jousting of the knights of cable, CNN and Fox, to a cornucopia of websites and podcasts leaning left or right, to Trump’s social media lodestone, Twitter.
As always with the interwebs, there is more noise than substance. That is what legacy news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post are supposed to provide. And they do. For a hefty meal of hard-core investigative reporting, belly up to the hundreds of column inches filled by the Times just a week ago about Trump’s heretofore hidden tax returns – a high-calorie carbo-load of facts, truths and documents. The challenge for the big-boy newspapers is that Trump doesn’t stand still. He is a Rube Goldberg machine of perpetual news, outrage and scandal. What is Page One today is gone tomorrow (or even this evening). Look how Trump’s current Covid adventure relegated the Times’ blockbuster tax reporting to the morgue.
How then, in this gopher-on-a-wheel news cycle, does a staid, old-school, war-horse of a reporter like Bob Woodward, the inventor of a form of book-length journalism best described as anonymous-sources-meet-my-daily-diary-meet-the-telephone-book-meet-C-SPAN, write a recounting of the Trump presidency that has any currency?
In part, the answer is the short lag time between Woodward’s last conversation with Trump, which was on July 21, the day the manuscript for Rage was due, and date of the book’s publication, which was on September 15, only 59 days.
Much happened in that two-month gap, most importantly another 60,000 Americans died of Covid, so here’s another question that must be asked about Rage: Is the book relevant? Yes, I say, and that makes it worth reading.
First, let’s admit that no one reads a Woodward book – and I’ve read a half-dozen – for the writing. The text accompanying a statin prescription is more compelling. Woodward’s literary style is reminiscent of the joke about the bad restaurant with hefty servings – hey, the food is bad, but there is a lot of it. In Woodward’s defense, at least he keeps his portions small.
What gives Rage value is Woodward’s dedication to persistence (he did 17 lengthy interviews with Trump) and belief in one of journalism’s core practices, a tool often overlooked in these times of tweet reporting – the power of accumulation: adding one fact to the next, following the thread of evidence from interview to interview, and stacking truths next to falsehoods. The result is a powerful condemnation of Trump as president, Trump as a man, and Trump as the enabler of others of his ilk, such as his lamprey-like son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
It is Kushner, somewhat surprisingly because of his just-woken-from-the-tomb appearance, who provides the liveliest quotes in the book. Among them:
He borrows from the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland to explain Trump’s behavior: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.”
“Controversy elevates message.” Writes Woodward: “This was core understanding of communication strategy in the age of the internet and Trump. A controversy over the economy, Kushner argued – how good it is – only helps Trump because it reminds voters that the economy is good.”
Kushner on Trump and the media: “He’s just able to play the media like a fiddle, and the Democrats too. They run like dogs after a fire truck, chasing whatever he throws out there. … It’s like a buffet where they’ll always eat the worst thing you give them.”
“What I’ve learned in the world of Trump is news cycles don’t last very long.”
Rage opens with a tour of Trump’s earliest days in the White House, guiding the reader through the unease he created among his senior staff by his ignorance of the world and his unconventional, to say the least, manner of decision-making. The misgivings and the fretting of those like James Mattis, Rex Tillerson and Dan Coats (ex-Secretary of Defense, ex-Secretary of State and ex-Director of National Intelligence) have been well-reported, but even though Woodward is late to the tale he tells their stories in such simple, declarative sentences that what is no longer surprising still has the power to shock.
For me, the final third of the book is more compelling. It focuses on the rise of parallel contemporary traumas – the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. and the elevation to the national consciousness of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the homicide of George Floyd.
Of these two, Trump’s antipathy to wage all-out war against the virus by mandating mask-wearing and other socially beneficial measures is the most reported (especially his early awareness of the danger of the disease and his reluctance to take action for fear of economic ruin). What Woodward adds is perspective on the tension within the White House between the need of the administration to oversee the public health battle and the desire to focus on the upcoming election. Kushner, as kin, holds the upper hand. “The goal” with Trump, Kushner said, “is to get his head from governing to campaigning.
Woodward describes himself as being “incredulous” upon hearing these words: “In the midst of the largest public health crisis in a century, Kushner thought it was time to return to campaigning.”
As craven as Kushner is about the coronavirus, Trump is even more obtuse toward the significance of the police killings of black men and women, and the resulting waves of protests by people of all shades. Woodward asks Trump multiple times in several interviews if he understands the outrage and feels any sense of white privilege, given the circumstances in which he was raised.
“No,” said Trump. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you,” he said, his voice mocking and incredulous. “Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
Trump adds, repeating a common assertion of his, “I’ve don’t more for the Black community than any president in history with the possible exception of Lincoln.”
Woodward pursues the question several times, asking Trump if he understands what the protestors want and how he sees his role in responding to their demands, their fear and their pain. Trump answers in talking points and self-serving platitudes. As I said, not a single thing Trump says is surprising, but the cumulative impact of Woodward’s reporting is overwhelming. Normally, we see Trump in short-takes, yelling at reporters in soundbites or blurting out tweets. Rage is a full-length feature and like during the first (and maybe the last) Trump-Biden debate we see a long exposure of all of Trump’s ugliness – his hubris and insensitivity, his inability of see beyond himself, and, most of all, his profound ignorance.
Many times throughout the book, Trump tells Woodward he hopes the book will be positive, and just as many times says he doubts it will be. “I hope you treat me better than Bush,” he says at one point, “because you made him look like a stupid moron, which he was.”
Trump did not get his wish. Rage is a vivisection, a dismembering of Trump while he still breaths his foul breath on our nation. The book opens with an anecdote, told about the onset of the pandemic, that for the president there could be dynamite behind any door. Anything could explode. As he finishes the book, Woodward writes about Trump:
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the ‘dynamite behind the door’ was in plain sight. It was Trump himself. The oversized personality. The failure to organize. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in others he had picked, in experts. The undermining or the attempted undermining of so many American institutions. The failure to be a calming, healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do his homework. To extend the olive branch. To listen carefully to others. To craft a plan.”
Woodward, the one-man journalistic judge and jury of American presidents since the days when he and Carl Bernstein drove another petty, criminally-mind man from the Oval Office, interviewed the witnesses, examined the evidence, cross-examined the accused and reached a verdict about Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of our republic: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty on all counts.
During the early years of the digital revolution, I wrote a blog that focused on the challenges journalism and newspapers faced in an increasingly digitized society, and the entrenched cultural traditions that inhibited the ability of individual journalists as well as entire institutions to adapt to a changing world that was eroding their relevance and siphoning off their audiences.
I called the blog First Draft, a nod to the description of journalism as “the first rough draft of history.” The blog coincided with a three-year project I did on newsroom culture and learning for a journalism foundation (which resulted in this slim volume of advice) and served as my exit ramp from the professional world of daily newspapers where I’d lived for a quarter-century.
I left voluntarily and more or less at the top of my game – unlike the many thousands of my former fellow wretches who were riffed or bought out of their careers by collapsing newspaper companies. I was seeking something to fill holes the newspaper couldn’t, especially in those days, when news was defined rigidly, when hidebound hierarchies shaped what was covered and how and by whom, and when middle-age managers like myself saw a future in which deep shadows of uncertainty dulled any glow of promise.
A decade has passed. In that time, I’ve been freelancing wherever I can – and celebrating the hustle and the paltry paychecks as rewards for my liberation from management – and immersing myself more and more in photography, the pursuit that drew me into journalism in the first place.
For the last few years, I’ve been photography poor single mothers, repatriated families, children’s shelters and more in Oaxaca, Mexico. It is documentary work and is both intense and, at times, terribly saddening because of its intimacy. It is also immensely satisfying. I feel privileged to be allowed into the lives of these families and angry at the injustice, indifference and corruption that touches them every day. I regularly return home inflamed with the same passion to tell their stories that I felt decades ago in San Francisco during my first years in journalism as an enthusiastic, but unaccomplished photographer.
Therein lies the irony: I am working in what I love the most, photography and journalism, but it is not good work.
Good work? Yes, good work – “work of expert quality that benefits the broader society.” In other words, “good work” is at once personally satisfying and socially beneficial. The concept was the focus of a book (Good Work, When Excellence and Ethics Meet) by three Stanford psychologists that explored the challenges and rewards of doing “good work” in various fields, including journalism. The authors found a direct connection between the ability to do good work and self-fulfillment.
“Doing good work feels good,” they write. “Few things in life are as enjoyable as when we concentrate on a difficult task, using all our skills, knowing what has to be done.” … Good work is “something that allows the full expression of what is best in us.”
I’m not going to go further into the book, but it is well worth reading by anyone who has more than a passing interest in the current collision of values in what is now lumped under the term “the news media” and also between journalists who wish to adhere to the profession’s traditions of truth, fairness and, hopefully, justice, and the politicians and government institutions on which they report. In other words, in a world of lies and liars, how much currency does the truth retain?
For now, though, I am focusing on “good work” in a more selfish way: What I need to do to upgrade my documentary photography in Mexico from work to “good work.”
What I lack the most, I believe, is the opportunity to publish. An image that hides in a computer file is not “good work.” Stories that languish untold are not “good work.” A reporter who doesn’t empty her notebook or a photographer who does little more than fill his archives is not doing “good work.”
That’s what organized journalism provides, not only the opportunity to publish but the obligation to. Journalism does not happen in a vacuum. It is not just the academic, but also the journalist who must publish less the work perish. If good work, as Damon wrote, “allows the full expression” of the best inside each of us, then I am falling short because I have always expressed myself publicly.
In this context, I miss the newsroom. I have yet to accomplish alone what I did with other journalists, imperfect as it was. I miss the sense of purpose journalism provides. I miss the camaraderie. I miss the demands of deadlines. I miss waking each day with the belief, however misplaced or self-delusional it might be at times, that the day’s work ahead will matter to someone and perhaps make the world a more informed, more just or perhaps simply more functional place.
That desire is a universal characteristic among good journalists. In June 2004, after interviewing dozens of journalists for a project, I wrote that they possessed a common goodness: “ … the deep, abiding desire … to do good journalistic work. They believed to a person that the purpose of journalism is to provide, at the least, information and, at its best, knowledge to their fellow citizens with the purpose of bettering society.”
When these journalists could overcome “the oppressive troika of tradition, convention and production that combine to prevent most newspaper journalists from realizing these good intentions on a frequent basis” they achieved that purpose.
One reason I left the newsroom was that felt I could not otherwise escape that tyranny. What I have since discovered is just as there can be too much tyranny for some people there can be too much liberty for others, of which I am one.
I work better with structure. I work better on deadline. I work better under pressure. I need these things to do “good work.”
All that I had when I was younger even though I was less skilled, less accomplished and more full of myself. However, and I can say this now with the clarified vision of hindsight, I didn’t truly appreciate the work, the people and the basic purpose of journalism until I had it no more.
I want it back. Or as much of it as I can get back at my age. But how? I am too old to be hired somewhere, too experienced to be naïve and to hope to begin anew, and I carry far too much baggage filled with failures and (fewer) successes to share company with those who view reporting and photography as “content” designed to drive clicks.
You might think, given my age, that what I miss is not journalism, but my youth. That’s a reasonable assumption, but I can assure you that my longing for good work is not the waning pang of an aging heart. I would not wish my younger days on anyone (although I admit that certain less salubrious traits of those years served me well in newspapers, which at the time celebrated the aberrant as long as you could hit a deadline.)
No, what I want reflects a desire that only comes with age – the opportunity to do work that encompasses what I’ve learned over the years, that utilizes the skills I’ve acquired and forces me to challenge myself and confront the truths of the world around me. Good work.
It is unsettling to me, someone who has spent the better part of his doing one form of journalism or another, that the brazen embrace of The Big Lie by politicians has become so prevalent that those of us who prefer facts over fiction find ourselves making a case for the importance of truth.
Certainly, the rise of Donald Trump from Manhattan con man to Tweeter-in-Chief and the both intentional and unwitting acceptance by his stooges and other supporters of his fact-free self-serving version of reality has not only fueled the outrage more than half of America feels about their incoming president’s manipulative use of the lie, but has also confronted journalists with a challenge they are increasingly lesser-equipped to face in this age of declining revenue: How to shine the light of truth onto the dark web of lies woven by Trump and his ilk.
I found one answer to this question in the unflinching photography and reporting by photographer Daniel Berehulakin today’s New York Times about the brutal ant-drug campaign by Philippine Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte has unleashed his nation’s police and armed forces on the citizenry. More than 2,000 Filipinos have been killed by authorities since June 30, when he took office, and another 3,500 slain in other unsolved murders. The slaughter – the word used in the headline of Berehulak’s piece – continues with impunity with each murder wrapped in an official lie. The dead, as described in police reports, are often accused of “nanlaban,” which Berehulak describes as “what the police call a case when a suspect resists arrest and ends up dead. It means ‘he fought it out.’ ”
Berehulak’s report, and his savagely honest images, expose Duterte’s lie. Will the truth deter Duterte and save lives? Probably not. But it informs us, we Americans who must now live in nation led by a man whose first instinct is self-preservation and whose first tool is the lie.
Trump and Duterte talked by phone a week ago. Trump applauded Duterte’s brutality and invited him to the U.S. Liars are attracted to one another (see Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin). They need – and use – one another as partners and foils against the truth.
Trump is mendacious (to say the least) and not murderous (for now), but his looming occupancy of the presidency highlights like never before in recent American history the need for truth and its importance to civil society and our democracy.
What can each of us do? One thing is to demand hard truths from journalism and support journalists and news organizations that deliver it. Many Americans are already doing this, as evidenced by the 70,000 new subscribers the New York Times has enrolled since Trump’s election. Truth comes with a price. If we want the truth that we need, then we must pay for it.
Before we went to see the movie “Spotlight,” the film based on the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into widespread pedophilia by Catholic priests and the church’s systemic cover-up of the abuse, my wife, a former newspaper hack like myself, said, “This is going to make us sad.”
And it did.
I never won a Pulitzer Prize, although at various points in my career I have worked with peoplewho have. I presume no claim to their honor, but mention this as a way of saying I understand the work ethic, focus and passion that propelsordinary people who are good journalists into extraordinary people who are great ones.
“Spotlight” highlighted the scarcity of those things those people in my life.
Ever since I left the newsroom in San Francisco in 2000 to join a start-up, a short-lived, but lucrative adventure, I’ve wondered how to get back – not to a newspaper, necessarily, but to journalism and to the sense of purpose that imbues all the best moments of its practice.
But, I am poorly self-directed, too easily distracted and (still) foolishly insecure, a terrible recipe for someone hoping to resurrect an idea he abandoned and left molder in the closet of past decisions. Suffice to say, I didn’t find my way back (the unsuccessful itinerary is another story.) “Spotlight” made me wish I had.
This is not a regret (those I possess, but they have to do with people), but a realization made in the unforgiving light of age. I am not one to look back too often, but it’s fair to say that when I do I linger. I see the choices not made. I see the roads rejected. I see the work undone. I see the people left behind.
It would be easy, and natural, I think, to conflate the nostalgia of those newspaper days with hormonal headiness of youth. I was young then, and headstrong and arrogant and just smart enough to learn things quickly, like so many others I worked with. We were inflated with purpose, self-worth and the potency of the (then) power of the press.
Is that what “Spotlight” made me miss – my youth? Or, was it the journalism and, in the realm of the old San Francisco Examiner, the assemblage of great talents and even greater egos who produced it at its peak?
All of my adult professional life I have been a journalist of some sort or another and with varying degrees of quality.
Through most of these now 40 years I adhered to the canon of the trade – objectivity over bias, fairness over partisanship and fact over belief. In the last decade, however, my views changed, especially during the several years in which I wrote a blog (First Draft) about the constraints these core principles imposed on a profession whose defining practices were under assault by a digitally empowered audience and other disruptive technological and economic forces.
I came to see how the he-said-she-said definition of objectivity favored stenography over narrative and defined a “story” as something that always had two sides, regardless of how ludicrous, shallow or blatantly false one of those sides might be.
I stuck with the concept of fairness longer, but eventually it, too, was eroded when I began to consider the impact a simple phrase such as “in all fairness.” In a story, for example, about immigrants forced into indentured servitude in a sweatshop, must a journalist “in all fairness” give voice as well to the person who has economically enslaved these women? When Donald Trump bleats about Muslims or Mexican rapists, must a reporter “in all fairness” allow his spokesperson to rationalize such racist remarks? I once thought so, but I no longer do.
Of those canonical components of traditional journalism, what for me persists is the principle that facts matter more than belief (or opinion, if you will). Underlying this principle is a foundational layer of logic that things are either true or they are not and that the evidence of these truths can be found in facts.
I realize, of course, that the retail value of fact in the realm of politics and much of the rest of public discourse in the U.S. has fallen to nearly zero, but following the advice of my wise mother I am not going to jump off the bridge just because the other kids are doing so. I cling, comfortably, to the notion that facts enable those of us who care about such things to define what is true and what is not.
Here is where my problem lies.
I have come across, quite by accident, perhaps the best story of my journalistic life and I don’t know how to tell it because the facts of the story are not only elusive, but I think they will never be known (at least not to me).
I believe a terrible injustice is being done, but I can’t prove it.
I believe a powerful, politically connected person or persons have pulled enough levers to imprison a woman who less than two years ago was honored by the Dalai Lama for her compassionate work with poor children, but I can’t prove it.
I don’t believe the grave charges that have been compiled against this person and her family, but I can’t prove that what they are accused of doing never happened.
I believe I know the truth in this case, but I can’t prove it.
What is more important: what I believe to be true or what can be defined by the few, verifiable facts that exist, which is very little? Is it more ethical to write about what I believe to be a terrible injustice and risk being proven wrong when someday perhaps more contradictory facts emerge or to stay silent and let others who are more partisan champion her case?
I feel somewhat embarrassed to be even asking these questions because what moral center I’ve managed to keep intact over these years is shouting at me to write what I believe. Countering that cry, though, is the cautious reasoning of my remaining journalistic mind, which argues that anything is possible, that even good people do bad things and that is why stories must be told from the facts rather than from beliefs.
Truthfully, I am not looking to anyone else for an answer. It will come – it has to come – from me. Voicing this dilemma, though, enables me to better parse its components. Stay tuned.
43 estudiantes. 43 jóvenes secuestrados en la noche. 43 hijas t hijos asesinados por las manos de la corrupción. 43 cuerpos descartados y quemados como la basura de la casa. 43 oportunidades perdidas por un futuro mejor. 43 más razones para llevar luto por México.
Los 43 alumnos universitarios asesinados murieron debido a que el 26 de septiembre apropiaron unos urbanos y bloquearon una carretera, una forma común de protesta política en México, y al hacerlo se metieron en las planes de la esposa del alcalde de Iguala, una de las más corruptas y violentas ciudades en Guerrero, uno de los más corruptos y violentos estados en México. Ella estaba en rumbo a dar un discurso, encontró la calle bloqueada, hizo una llamada a tu esposo. El Alcalde, José Luis Abarca ordenó a la policía local atacarlos. La policía entregó los alumnos a una pandilla criminal asociada con los narcos que controlan la región. Y los jóvenes desaparecieron.
Todo esto sucedió con la misma impunidad por la parte del alcalde, la policía y los narcos que infecta todo México y literalmente ha permitido asesinos de todos tipos para irse sin miedo de ser castigados por décadas.
Desde el comienzo de lo que ha venido a llamarse la guerra contra el narcotráfico en México, que se emprendió en el 2006 por el entonces presidente Felipe Calderón contra la red de los carteles que generan hasta $500 millones de la venta de drogas ilegales anualmente y controlan 90 por ciento de la cocaína que entra a Estados Unidos, la cifra oficial de la violencia entre los carteles, entre el gobierno y los carteles y entre los carteles y los ciudadanos inocentes de México – como los 43 estudiantes de Ayotzinapa — ha alcanzado 60,000 muertos. Eso es el numero oficial. Extraoficialmente, observadores de los derechos humanos calculan que el numero es 120,000.
Para poner esa cifra en perspectiva, hay que considerar que 58,220 Americanos murieron en la guerra entre Estados Unidos y Vietnam, un conflicto que incitó a la generación mía a llenar las calles de la capital estadounidense en protesta y eventualmente causó cambios vastos en la sociedad Americana.
Por supuesto, Vietnam era una guerra Americana y existía un reclutamiento que fomentaba más resistencia contra el conflicto, pero todavía se puede imaginarse que una guerra de letalidad similar que esta ocurriendo en un país visitado por 6 millones de Americanos cada año achisparía un poco de rabia aquí.
No es asi.
Hasta ahora, la posición oficial de Estados Unidos ha sido poco más de una tracción de hombros. La administración del Presidente Obama ha descrito el destino de los 43 alumnos y la respuesta insípida del gobierno del Presidente Enrique Peña Nieto como “preocupante.”
Eso puede cambiar. Las manifestaciones callejeras que comenzaron en Iguala después de la desaparición de los estudiantes se han extendido a lo largo del país y se han vuelto violentas en el D.F. Peña Nieto, que ignoró los secuestros por muchos días antes de mencionarlos públicamente y luego salio del país para una conferencia de comercio en China, ha regresado a escuchar a un número cada vez mayor de gritos pidiendo su renuncia (avivados en parte por la revelación que él y su esposa, una estrella de telenovelas, tiene una casa secreta con un valor de $7 millones en un enclave adinerado de la capital.)
Los medios de comunicación estadounidenses están reportando cada vez más el escándalo y las comunidades mexicana-americanas en Estados Unidos están organizándose y marchando con la esperanza de incitar más atención publica. Una de esas marchas ocurrió el sábado pasado en San Francisco, cuando 500 personas se encontraron en la esquina de los calles 24 y Mission, el corazón de la comunidad Hispana en San Francisco, para caminar al centro. Más manifestaciones están planeadas, una en coordinación con una huelga general establecida a ocurrir en México el 20 de noviembre, el aniversario de la revolución Mexicana, y otra en diciembre en 43 ciudades estadounidenses.
¿Que puedes hacer? Muchas cosas. Ya sea poco o mucho.
Escribe o tuitea a tu congresista. Dile que estas enojado, que estas harto, que quieres que el gobierno estadounidense reclame que su segundo mayor socio comercial limpie su casa. (El comercio entre México y Estados Unidos que suma en total a $6,000 millones en 2013.)
Si fumas marihuana o usas cocaína (¿y porque lo haces?), para. Casi toda la cocaína y mucha de la marihuana que los Americanos consumen viene a través de México. Tu diversión apoya los carteles, que a su vez corrompen el gobierno más, que engendra un estado de la impunidad, que permite crímenes de todos tipos – desde la evasión de los impuestos a la matanza en más – para continuar sin ser castigados.
Marcha. Camina en las calles con los Mexicanos que han venido a nuestro país, legalmente e ilegalmente, para escapar la misma corrupción que ha causado la muerte de los 43 estudiantes. Con más de 33 millones de persones que tienen origen Mexicano viviendo en Estados Unidos, esta guerra es tan nuestra come es de México.
On Sunday, Venezuela held a presidential election, choosing between Nicolás Maduro, the hand-picked heir to Hugo Chávez, the U.S.-taunting strongman who died of cancer in March after 14 years of rule, and Henrique Capriles, a state governor who, under the flag of an united opposition, ran against and lost to Chavez in October.
Maduro won, but not before hundreds of Venezuelans converged on the country’s consulate on Mission Street in San Francisco to vote and to loudly proclaim their allegiance to one side or the other.
Capriles supporters, most clad in some form of red, yellow and blue, the colors of the Venezuelan flag, far outnumbered the chávistas, who used bullhorns to compensate for their lack of mass. The chávistas, wearing red, included an assortment of other left-leaning demonstrators, whose banners proclaimed support for socialism in Mexico, the Bolivarian revolution in general and, of course, Che Guevara.
Until recently I would have not devoted part of a sunny, spring Sunday to standing on a San Francisco sidewalk amidst a crowd of vociferous Venezuelan expats, but the small Spanish school in Marin where I engage in my own revolution against the demands of the subjunctive is run by a couple from Caracas and the current state of their native country is a frequent topic of conversation.
Part of protest in Mexico City against the killing of three photojournalists.
Mexico is becoming an increasingly dangerous place to be a journalist. Three photojournalists were found dead and dismembered Tuesday in the Gulf state of Veracruz, bringing to 44 the number of journalists killed in Mexico in the last six years, according to Article 19, a press freedom group.
While that number pales next to the more than 50,000 Mexicans killed in the same period during the government’s war against the narco cartels (and cross-cartel fighting), it elevates Mexico to No. 8 on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2012 Impunity Index, “which spotlights countries where journalists are slain and their killers go free.” Sadly, the year is still young.
Here’s what CPJ says about Veracruz:
… a battleground for the Zetas and Sinaloa cartels, is one of Mexico’s most dangerous states for the press, according to CPJ research. Four journalists were murdered there in 2011, and on Saturday, the body of journalist Regina Martínez Pérez was found strangled in her home in Xalapa.”
I have a long history with Mexico, including being the owner of a house I built there, but with many Mexicans clamoring for an end to the violence, the repressive PRI party on the verge of regaining the control of the presidency that it held for more than 70 years; the cartels becoming increasingly entrenched in local and national politics, and a the country’s always ethically tenuous journalistic institutions fighting — quite literally — for their lives, I fear the worst for the country in the near term.
You think I’m being overly dramatic? Read this story about the threats against Jorge Medellín, a reporter for the national newspaper Milenio. An excerpt:
Mexican journalists take the smallest hint of a threat seriously because they know that killing a reporter is so easy to get away with. The word for this is impunity–killing with no consequences. None for the killer, at least. But the consequences for the Mexican people are that journalists are afraid to report the news.
Will Instapaper save me or ruin me further? I ask because I’m a hoarder. Not one a big enough one to merit a reality show, not one of those disheveled types (does hoarding and dressing poorly always go together?) with dozens of feral cats and other critters living amid trash-packed rooms. No, I’m different. I’m an information hoarder.
I pile. My desk and my “office” are collections of stacks – things to do, things to read, things to use, things to organize all the other things. Partly, I blame dear old Mom, she who has never tossed a rubber band for fear that it might be useful for something some day, but mostly it’s my fault. I tell myself that all this information, all these good ideas, will come in handy when the day comes that I do something useful with my life. (Snide comments go here.)
The clutter continues inside my computer(s). The files and folders related to my professional pursuits are pretty buttoned up (money is always a good motivator), but the rest of my digital world operates on chaos theory. And nothing is messier than the hundreds of bookmarks that run downward and downward on the left side of my browser. Each is something I find interesting, compelling or entertaining, and something that some day I will read, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time, and cogitate upon.
You bookmarkers out there know that compiling these links is laborious (two clicks at least) and organizing them even more so. Who uses the Organize Bookmarks page anyhow? The result is an endless list of links, which as it grows and grows becomes a better source of guilt about ideas unfulfilled than of knowledge gleaned.
So, I’ve switched. Good-bye bookmarks, hello Instapaper. So long Command D, welcome Read Later. Now I’ve got a graphically pleasant, easy-to-read page of articles from the Times, Wired, the New Yorker and Salon. True, I subscribe to some of these publications, but they sit in a pile somewhere and it can be so tiresome to actually have to open them in order to find the content amid all that advertising. The nicely ordered list that Instapaper makes just seems so much … smarter.
And that’s why I want to read this stuff in the first place, which I will – some day.
A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy story about the ominous criminal, political and social conditions in Mexico that have combined to degrade civil society in many parts of the country to the brink of public disorder.
Fueling this collapse are two evils — the ravenous appetite of the narco cartels for control of the border, of law enforcement and of the proverbial hearts and minds of Mexico’s impoverished citizens; and the endemic, ubiquitous and persistent corruption of government on all levels.
The Journal piece focused on the implications for the United States should the rule of law fail in Mexico. It quoted a high-ranking official in the country’s current ruling party, the PAN:
“The Mexican state is in danger. We are not yet a failed state, but if we don’t take action soon, we will become one very soon.”
For me, it’s more personal. I have good friends — Mexicans and Americans — who live there. I have a house in Oaxaca, Mexico’s most beautiful state and also its poorest. I have seen the country’s working people, through resilient desire and endless effort, carve out good lives for themselves amid a system that favors the wealthy, the connected and the corrupt. And, sadly, I have witnessed well-off people I considered friends express disdain for the poor and for the creation of a society of laws. They are, after all, the beneficiaries of the current system.
I don’t cry easily. The scar tissue laid on during 20 years of daily journalism usually keeps the tears in check. But these days Mexico makes me cry.
In the fall of 2006 I stood in the zócalo, the main square, of Oaxaca – a place I love, where I got married, where I built a house on the far end of a dirt road – and watched a battered TV play a video of the day state police rousted striking public school teachers from the square. I watched the rise and fall of batons on makeshift shelters. I saw the march of heavy boots through darkened streets. Fires burned. Rocks flew. The camera shook. Above all, I heard the sound of helicopters, which police used to fling canisters of tear gas into the crowds below.
I cried right there as the video played. A woman next to me, dressed in the traditional apron of a southern Mexican housewife, saw me, an aging gringo journalist laden with camera gear, and said, “Que triste. Que triste.” How sad. How sad.
A few days later, local thugs — some say off-duty cops — opened fire on a protest march, killing freelance American journalist Brad Will. (Here’s a picture — not mine — of the shooting.)
The resulting international outrage — far beyond any that accompanied the earlier deaths of dozens of Oaxacans — prompted the federal government to send troops into the city restore order.
More than two years later, nothing has changed for the better in Oaxaca. The economy, highly dependent on tourism, has yet to recover. The governor who attacked the striking teachers remains in power. The leaders of the strike are jailed. The killers of Brad Will are free. (The photo at the top of the post is from an anniversary march in Oaxaca’s main square two years after the 2006 attacks.)
Multiply this one incident — a strike, a shooting, a disregard by the authorities for even the facade of justice — throughout the country and amplify it along the drug-trafficking lanes in the border cities and you begin to get grasp of the severity of the challenges Mexico faces. Here’s one fact: 6,000 people were killed in Mexico last year in drug-related violence. The U.S. dead in Iraq for six years of war is 4,200.
Perhaps you wonder why you should care about what happens in Mexico. After all, aren’t the beaches in Baja still beautiful and the pina coladas in Cancun just as tasty? De veras, they are. But Mexico is much more than an American playground.
First, it is also, as the Journal points out, the largest U.S. trading partner and with our economy already on life support we don’t need to lose our best customer.
Second, if you think having more than 4 million undocumented Mexican immigrants living in the United States is troublesome, then imagine the immigration pressure on the border should the Mexican government collapse. Says the Journal:
“It has 100 million people on the southern doorstep of the U.S., meaning any serious instability would flood the U.S. with refugees.”
Finally, there is morality. What is happening in Mexico is simply wrong. It is wrong to oppress the poor so the wealthy can prosper. It is wrong to deny people jobs because they belong to an opposing political party. It is wrong to glorify crime and drug use. And, it is wrong to kill journalists. (Read this report, or this one, or this one from the Committee to Protect Journalists.)
Poor Mexico. I cry for you. I wish I could do more.
* Newsies in the Pipeline: Newspapers are on life support, but J-school applicants are up in the U.K. and and in N.Y., reports Jarvis. Discuss.
* Readers Come, Money Doesn’t: Newspaper web readership is up 12% year over year (although web revenue is down). Nieman Journalism Lab lists its Top 15 newspaper sites. My hometown Chron (SFGate) averages 4.1 million uniques a month, up 10%. Somehow, there’s got to be a business in there.
* Ready the Tombstones: Former S.F. Examiner colleague and Salon pioneer Gary Kamiya concludes: “If newspapers die, so does reporting.” And, in light of the web revenue report, he adds: “Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable.” (Mutter mines the same vein.)
* Cancel the Funeral: Steve Yelvington says he just has “to call bullshit on the “Newspapers Are Dead” meme. Some numbers:
“In spite of the worst economy since Roosevelt, many U.S. newspapers are still turning profits in the 15-20 percent range, and the U.S. newspaper industry is still turning around 50 billion dollars of gross revenue every year.”
* Cue the Elegy:Joe Mathews mourns for the L.A. Times of old in the New Republic, lamenting, among many things, the loss of local stories that “show deep digging.” (Andrew Cline calls BS on him, saying: “Nostalgia is dead. It’s time to discover or create the next venue for journalism.”
Last year was a tough year for journalism (and many other professions). Newspapers, a dying industry, but still the primary source of original journalism in the world, cut more than 15,000 jobs. Some big ones decided to stop delivering the daily paper. Some smaller ones gave up paper altogether in favor of the Web. And a worse-than-dismal economy guarantees more of the same in 2009.
The decline of print journalism is inevitable for numerous economic, social and technical reasons. But, we have yet to see the sustained emergence of a replacement business model that can underwrite the journalism once paid for by the Daily Fish Wrap.
The proliferation of personal media tools — digital cameras, video recorders and phones — has transferred some of the lost capacity of professional journalism into the hands of everyone. That is a good thing. It means more eyes, more ears, more minds on the watch for news. When I was in the newspaper cattle-prodding business a few years back, I extolled the instant reporting of the London tube bombings by the victims of the attacks. Jeff Jarvis just did the same regarding the recent horrors in Mumbai.
Let us not forget, though, that as beneficial as it is for people anywhere and everywhere to report what they see, they are separated by at least one core principal of professional journalism — obligation.
Good journalists feel an obligation to witness the news and report what they see to their communities — even if that means running toward things that common sense and self-preservation would compel one to flee from as quickly as possible.
The picture on this page is an example of that obligation. Taken by Sebastian D’souza, the photography editor of the The Mumbai Mirror, it shows one of the Mumbai terrorists walking calmly through a railroad station. The New York Times reports that the photo is one only a few showing an attacker clearly. The Times describes the important of D’souzas photos and those of another newspaper photographer, Vasant Prabhu:
“Their photos, some of them unpublished, provide detail and precision that is lacking from other witness accounts. They show brave attempts by police officers to stop the attackers. They also highlight the woeful inadequacy of the officers’ weapons and thus help to explain how just 10 terrorists managed to hold a city hostage for three days.”
Read the whole story. And then ask yourself: Which direction would I have gone — toward the news or away from it?
(Note: This is a note to my friend Michele McLellan responding to her Facebook post about newspapers outsourcing copyediting tasks.)
Michele …
As you know, I’ve pretty much stayed out of the “whither journalism” lately, but I’ll add a thought or two to your well-reasoned argument based on my personal experiences of the last two years.
First, I’ve been doing a lot of work for a glossy, local lifestyle magazine here in the Bay Area. I do a lot of photography, I also write and edit. Most of the magazine comes together from people who don’t work in the same place — the editor has an office, freelancers write, I edit them, a copy editor in another place edits me, a designer in the office sends me Adobe InDesign files or PDFs for proofing. Works well. Every two weeks we meet for story planning and idea exchange.
Also, last year I wrote and photographed a book (touted all over my FB page). My partner — a chef — wrote her parts from her office, I wrote my sections from mine, the designer emailed around concepts and pages. We all rarely met. Book came out, is doing well. Of course, you and I did the same thing the year before.
Finally, to underwrite such rewarding, but hardly remunerative pursuits as magazine photography and cookbook writing, I keep a hand in editing research for financial institutions. I work with a team of a half-dozen analysts in Denver and New York whose work I edit weekly. I’ve done this for three years. Although we meet only once a year for a feedback and review session, I know their work as well as that of any of the reporters who say across the aisle from me in newsrooms for years.
Newsrooms traditionalists might argue that proximity contributes to quality. They are wrong. The prodigious amount of so-so writing and editing seen in many newspapers is testament to that. Commitment to excellence, responsibility and, most importantly these days, personal growth lead to quality – and those values are highly portable.
First the doors came off newspapers, then the walls blew out. In the next couple of years, we’ll see the floors drop away. Knowledge work – which is what journalism consists of, i.e., literary and creative skill applied to principles of public information, access and transparency – doesn’t need an address. It just needs a platform.
About a year ago, I photographed competing immigration rallies in San Rafael. On one side of the street were advocates for the local Latino community; on the other were members and supporters of the Minutemen, a conservative anti-immigrant organization. Both groups were a rarity in Marin County, an affluent, mostly white, heavily liberal enclave just north of San Francisco.
A few weeks earlier, federal immigration agents had raided homes and businesses in the city’s Canal neighborhood, a tightly packed area of run-down apartment buildings and small homes that is home to 12,000 people, 86 percent of them immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The agents arrested 65 people, 23 of whom were eventually deported.
The raids were part of the broader immigration debate in the country, a divide that had spawned huge marches across the country. I wanted to put something together for Marin magazine about how the issue played out in suburbs, but was hesitant for a couple of reasons. First, I was jammed with doing the book. Second, after 20 years of traditioal journalism I didn’t want to write an on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other type story where the emotion got buried under a slag heap of official statements from either side.
After I finished the book this spring, I began talking with Tom Wilson, head of the Canal Alliance, the Canal neighborhood’s primary social service group, about different story ideas. He pointed me to an after-school program that tutors neighborhood children, teaches them other academic skills and exposes them to a world of possibilities outside the Canal. The program guarantees that if a child sticks with it, he or she will graduate from high school and enter a community college.
I told Tom I’d like to photograph the kids in the middle-school program and ask them a few questions about their dreams. Then I pitched the idea to the magazine, adding that I’d write an introductory essay — not a story — about the immigration issue. To my surprise, they loved the idea.
I made the photographs over three afternoons in a classroom. I wanted the pictures to be simple portraits, so I posed the children in the middle of the room and lit them with one umbrella and a big reflector, using the far wall for a backdrop. I spoke with each for about five minutes first, talking about their dreams, their families and their countries of origin. Most of the interviews were in English, a few were in Spanish.
Some of the children dreamed big — to be doctors or lawyers. Others wished for little more than a visit home to their family in Mexico. Some rushed forward to be photographed. Others I had to persuade through cajoling.
If you look at the photographs, you will see the faces of children, but also, in many of them, the eyes of adults who have seen more of the world, a rough world, than any 12- or 13-year-old should.
If you read the essay (below), you will learn how I feel about this children, which is that regardless of how any of us feels about immigration the children of immigrants should not pay the price. Who are we to deny them better lives — especially in the United States, a country founded on that very principle?
Even though the bulk of the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes announced today were won by large news organizations — the Washington Post took six — one of the awards demonstrates that capacity of great work exists even within the smallest of news organizations.
Photographer Preston Gannaway of the 20,000 circulation Concord (N.H.) Monitor on the Pulitzer for Feature Photography with her intimate essay of a family coping with death. Looking at her pictures is difficult emotionally, but rewarding in their honest portrayal of something that is real in all of our lives. (Slidshow here.)
In my previous blog about newspaper journalism, I once wrote about the power of one, the capacity of any journalist, writer or photographer, to strive for excellence. Gannaway proves the point.
* Also: The Pulitzer for Spot News was won by Adrees Latif of Reuters this picture of a wounded Japanese photographer being held at gunpoint during the riots last year in Burma. The photographer later died.
A great privilege of doing journalism is the temporary passkey it gives me into the lives of others.
At times, this entrance is burdened with sadness or results in a stinging anger from the injustice in our society that holds so many at the bottom despite all their efforts to the rise up.
More often than not, though, I am rewarded with the pleasure of meeting someone who is charming or beautiful or enticingly smart. They allow me their company, permit me to question them in precise detail or engage me emotionally as I photograph them.
I treasure these moments, hold them in memory as long as possible and savor them for their simplicity of purpose. For me they are the essence of journalism — written and photographic — the inquiry, the interaction, the engagement.
Meeting Holly Seeler and her family — Tess, Jack and Victor — the other day in Sausalito was one of those moments. Seeler has multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that is attacking her ability to walk. Her response to the illness is energetic and forceful, and she has left a career as a creative director to focus on spreading the message of personal change through positive outlook and action.
I spent less than an hour with her. We made pictures. Her husband, a photographer as well, showed me his work. I met the dog, Roxie. Then I left — reluctantly. This was a good house, a good family. They gave me hour out of their lives. I added it to my collection.
It is unsettling to me, someone who has spent the better part of his doing one form of journalism or another, that the brazen embrace of The Big Lie by politicians has become so prevalent that those of us who prefer facts over fiction find ourselves making a case for the importance of truth.
Last year was a tough year for journalism (and many other professions). Newspapers, a 
