JOURNALISM
Yes, It’s About the Facts
Two crusading journalists win Nobel Peace Prize — and they make the world safer for all of us
The headline — in bold, 72-point type — caught my eye and made me stop.
I picked up a copy of The Washington Post in the main office and walked slowly down the hall to Room 215. Leaning against the railing leading down to the first floor, I opened the broadsheet and scanned the one-inch bold Bodoni headline and the story underneath it on the paper’s front page.
I don’t recall the exact title anchoring the story, which was placed “above the fold” — in newspaper parlance, the space toward the top of the front page, prime journalism real estate. But I still remember the way I felt.
Scared, angry — a little weepy, as well.
Daniel Pearl, a not-quite 40-year-old reporter based in Mumbai, India, had been beheaded by terrorists.
Pearl was the South Asia Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. He was digging into al-Qaeda links to the infamous British “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid.
No, I didn’t know Pearl. But his death in Pakistan, and those over the years of journalists like James Foley in Syria, Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya, and Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, horrify me.
In fact, almost 1,500 journalists were murdered worldwide between when Pearl lost his life in February 2002 and December 2020.
I taught high school journalists that freedom of the press was the right of all Americans.
I spent 23 years hammering them with Supreme Court cases. Cajoling them with stories of reporters who had come before them and made our country a better place. Assuring these kids — who wanted to tell the truth to their school community — that their work was protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I worked as a professional journalist for an additional 10 years. And if you count my 10 or so years in and around politics in D.C., I’ve been immersed in the craft — and the people’s right to know — for more than half my life.
That’s why I stand a little taller this week, after two journalists — Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Russian scribe Dmitry Muratov — won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
Both Ressa and Muratov are familiar with danger. Ressa runs the online site Rappler, and has had treacherous run-ins with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and other thugs of his ilk. Muratov is the founder of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Six members of his staff, including Politkovskaya, have been murdered since he started publishing in 1993.
The Nobel Committee’s choice to select two journalists for its prestigious Peace Prize comes as standard-bearers of a free press have been under pressure around the world to relax their vigilance; basically, to stand down from telling the truth.
The prize also comes in the wake of former so-called U.S. “President” Cheeto Bandito and his relentless campaign against “fake news” in this country. Eleven American journalists perished here between 1992–2015; eight due to murder. Five of those homicides occurred on the former guy’s watch in 2018, and while the jury in the Annapolis Capital murder trial did not reach this conclusion, anti-press rhetoric across the United States has made it so much more difficult for reporters and editors of print, broadcast and online outlets to do their jobs.
The Nobel Laureates recognize the burden they bear is not a light one.
“A world without facts means a world without truth and without trust,” Ressa said after receiving the news of her win.
“When facts have become debatable,” she said, “and when “the world’s largest distributor of news prioritizes the spread of lies laced with anger and hate — then journalism becomes activism … It’s about the facts, right?”
Muratov concurred, with a short statement that indicated he was ready to return right now to the fight for freedom.
“We will continue to represent Russian journalism,” he said, “which is now being suppressed. That’s all.”
He recognized that the prize “is for Novaya Gazeta, and also for those who died defending the right of people to freedom of speech.
“Now that they are no longer with us, [the Nobel Committee] probably decided I should tell it to everyone.”
I knew I had to say something to my students about Danny Pearl — that’s what his friends called him — that day back in 2002.
But I had to compose myself before I faced a classroom full of kids who were in it to win the fight.
I placed my copy of The Washington Post, containing the story of Pearl’s murder, on the table at the front of the room. I told my kids that while I wasn’t allowed to pray in school, I’d be thinking quite a bit that day about the contributions Mr. Pearl made — not only to journalism, but toward making life better for all of us.
I turned on my projector, and screened a slide on my whiteboard, featuring Pearl and the words to the First Amendment — highlighting the ones that applied to us.
“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
That was it. And it was enough.
