I wonder if Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and Stephen Glass, the best known of American journalism’s recently discovered practitioners of fraud, know about Manik Saha, Sajid Tanoli and Ruel Endrinal. While the U.S. trio wrote stories composed of lies, the other three journalists were among the many journalists in other countries who paid the ultimate price for revealing the truth.
Manik Saha, a veteran journalist in Bangladesh for the daily New Age and BBC’s Bengali-language service, died January 15 when a bomb was hurled at his rickshaw and decapitated him. He was well known in his home country for bold reporting on criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and Maoist insurgents.
Sajid Tanoli, a reporter with the Urdu-language daily Shumal in Pakistan, was shot and killed in Pakistan January 29 by a local government official who was enraged about an article Tanoli had written a few days earlier about an allegedly illegal liquor business run by the official.
…most journalists who were killed were hunted down and murdered, often in direct reprisal for their reporting.
Ruel Endrinal was killed February 11 by two unidentified gunmen. They shot him in the foot and then continued shooting him in the head and body until he fell dead. His death is believed by investigators to be the price he paid for speaking out against local politicians and criminal gangs on a political commentary program he hosted on a broadcast outlet in Legazpi City in the eastern Philippines.
It is a striking aspect of the changing international journalism landscape that American journalism, however fine much of it is, currently is best known for the fraud some journalists have committed as journalists, sinking their own careers and damaging the reputation of the profession by reporting stories that were lies in full or in part. Blair, Kelley, and Glass have become household names, symbols of a corruption and malaise that many in and out of journalism fear may be far more widespread than we now know. In recent weeks I’ve heard several very worried editors, most of them people who have judged major journalism competitions, wonder how many more are hiding in their newsrooms.
The slashes to journalism’s reputation have occurred with painful frequency since 1998. They have ranged from a lack of editorial involvement at CNN, Time Magazine, the San Jose Mercury and the Cincinnati Enquirer that led to publication and broadcast of major accusations the truth of which is still unknown. In some cases, journalists were condemned because of accusations of criminal activity in the gathering of information (the Enquirer) and in other instances because of insufficient evidence for powerful claims. Since dozens of journalists have been forced out of the profession for fabricating and distorting.
Meanwhile, Saha, Tamoli, and Endrinal and many others were killed. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an international organization that defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal, their plight represents a tragic trend: the literal killing of the messenger by people who don’t want truth revealed. Every week there are new reports on the CPJ website of deaths of journalists or threats to journalists and news organizations for trying to reveal the truth. Some current ones:
· April 11: Four Armenian journalists were seriously beaten in Yerevan simply for covering an opposition rally.
· April 13: Early morning arson destroyed the building that housed the printing presses of the biweekly The Independent in Banjul in Gambia. Six armed men stormed the building, fired guns, then doused printing equipment with gasoline and set it on fire. When journalists arrived at the scene, the armed arsonists tried to lock them inside the burning building.
· April 12: Three Czech journalists and a Japanese journalist were abducted in Iraq. Their captors threatened to burn the Japanese journalist alive, along with two Japanese aid workers, if Japan did not recall its troops from Iraq.
· April 9: Cheng Yizhong, editor-in-chief of Nanfang Dushi Bao, a weekly newspaper in the Guangdoing Province in China, was arrested on suspicion of corruption. His home was searched and publications about Chinese politics were confiscated. As people in the region have come to depend on the newspaper for investigative reporting about issues important to them, such as the beating death of a student last year while in police custody, the government took steps against the editors.
These and other recent actions against journalists in other countries contrast sharply with the breaking in the U.S. of the de facto promise journalists have with the public to provide truthful accounts of events.
There is a strong impression among many that journalists are killed primarily in the crossfire of wars and street violence. Research by CPJ found instead most journalists who were killed were hunted down and killed, often in direct reprisal for their reporting. Of the 346 journalists killed in the last 10 years for carrying out their work, only 55 journalists, 17 percent of the total killed, died in crossfire, while 263, 76 percent, were killed in reprisal for their reporting. The others were killed in other violent situations, such as violent street demonstrations.
In its investigations of slayings of journalists in the last decade, CPJ, a New York-based organization that tracks attacks against journalists and defends press freedoms, found only 25 cases in which the person or persons who ordered or carried out a journalist’s killing have been arrested and prosecuted. That means that in more than 90 percent of the cases, those who killed journalists did so with impunity. The motive usually was to prevent journalists from reporting on corruption or human rights abuses, or to punish them after they have done so. Of the 263 who were murdered, 53 were threatened before they were killed. In 20 cases, journalists were kidnapped and subsequently killed. While the kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 is well known, there have been several cases, most notably in Algeria and Turkey, where journalists have disappeared and never been seen again after being taken into custody either by government or opposition forces.
More than 30 journalists were killed during the last decade in Russia, 19 of them targeted, often by the mafia, in retaliation for their stories, according to CPJ. In Chechnya, 11 were killed in crossfire or by mines, but at least four were killed there for their reporting on the war, usually for investigating human rights abuses by the Russian military. In Rwanda 16 journalists were killed in the last decade, 14 of them massacred by Rwandan Armed Forces and Hutu militias in April 1994.
…in more than 90 percent of the cases, those who killed journalists did so with impunity.Like their fallen and imprisoned colleagues abroad, most American journalists produce honest work that they hope will help citizens be informed and active participants in democracy. They realize that the use of false information destroys trust, the most essential ingredient in the bond between journalists and the public, and they are rigorous in their efforts to be accurate.
In addition to being tainted by the actions of journalists who have lied, American journalists have been criticized in the past year for being timid in their coverage before the war against Iraq. Some critics say journalists should have displayed more skepticism and independence in their coverage of the Bush Administration’s case for going to war, including the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Given what we now know could have been known before the war started, that criticism carries serious implications for the potential power of missing information in a democracy.
Some foreign journalists are startled when they look at the malfeasance that has been occurring here since 1998.
Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who has endured severe persecution for his reporting, wrote eloquently in 1998 of the influence of American journalists in inspiring some of the most important investigative reporting in Latin America in the last two decades. There, in national cultures in which journalists often had a reputation for corruption, the ones who boldly revealed official corruption gained the confidence and respect of the public. In numerous instances, governments have been forced to change, indeed, have forced out, because of stories that revealed corruption.
“…..The influence of American journalism was decisive,” wrote Gorriti. “Its principles of thoroughness, fact-checking, editing, the effective separation between editors and publishers – all this influenced us profoundly.
“Given these standards, we can scarcely fathom the recent journalistic wreckage in the United States. How did competence and integrity dissipate in so many American newsrooms?”
We need to search for the answers to his question. We also need to ask how the trust can be rebuilt – among journalists and between journalists and the public. Since public relations has come to dominate many public and private institutions, people have felt that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to separate fact from spin in news stories. In the present season of malfeasance, many readers feel they are being asked to separate fact from fiction. What a mockery of the trust essential between journalists and the public, and what a mockery of the courage displayed daily by journalists everywhere who risk their lives in order to deliver truthful information to the public.
There probably are numerous personal and institutional factors that have contributed to the individual acts of dishonesty that are now being revealed. Surely one of them is me-ism, an overwhelming preoccupation with the promotion and success of the self. For that reason, I think it is unlikely that Blair, Kelley and Glass could understand the idealism that shaped the courage of Saha, Tanoli and Endrinal.
Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post reporter, was the founder of the Center for the Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University. She currently is a writer and journalism education consultant based in New York. (vivajournalism@rcn.com)
