Mutual self-debasement (though it’s not even necessary)
Last night’s annual celebrity bash presided over by a baton-waving George W. Bush (see the Washington Post’s appropriately chatty listing of who was seen in the audience) was another reminder that all is not quite right in the land of the free press. Somehow this tradition (which started under Calvin Coolidge, who escaped from the White House just before the Crash of 1929) has evolved (degenerated?) into a yearly chance to live it up and show that “sure, most of us think this guy is the worst president since the office was invented, but we have to ingratiate ourselves with him for another few months, so that he remembers our names at press conferences.” The President (all fourteen since Coolidge, that is) gets to show his humorous, human side, and agrees to gentle roasting (stress on gentle, ever since Stephen Colbert hit the quick in 2006).
At least the New York Times had the decency to pull the plug on its attendance: "These events can create a false perception that reporters and their sources are pals, and that perception could cloud our credibility," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty wrote, quoted in Editor & Publisher. "It's not worth it."
Other views on the state of American journalism abound, and they are mostly of the concerned family member variety. American organizations like the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the Newspaper Association of America, among others, have sprung into action to help counter a prevailing view of the Mainstream Media (MSM) as clueless, if not compliant, faced with the onslaught of the Bush Administration. The concerns are shared abroad, with Reporters Without Borders (RSF in the original French acronym) putting the US way down on its list of country reports on press freedom.
One especially lucid view of America from a concerned friend of the United States is that of Jean-Paul Marthoz, a veteran Belgian journalist, academic, and human rights campaigner. Marthoz has just published his latest book (Editions GRIP and Enjeux Internationaux) “La Liberté Sinon Rien: Mes Amériques de Bastogne à Bagdad.” I don’t think there is an English translation yet, but with his long history of connections with the US, Marthoz probably had Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” phrase in mind for his title. The Bastogne of the subtitle is a reference to Marthoz' Ardennes childhood, when memories were still vivid of the defiant American defense of the town in the Battle of the Bulge against superior German forces.
But the America of Bastogne is far from the Baghdad of the Bush administration. Marthoz, who places himself squarely in the “liberal” (in the American, somewhat left of center sense, not in the European free market libertarian definition) camp, has no time for either neocons or for extreme leftists. He knows both North and South America well (“Mes Amériques”), and his book chronicles his years as a correspondent and Human Rights Watch official covering the Western Hemisphere.
The heyday of American journalism, and of democracy
The United States that Marthoz most admires is that of Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, when the White House and Congress pressured Latin American dictatorships and - as survivors of human rights abuses told Marthoz - “saved lives.” He recalls the kind of investigative journalism that inspired him as a young man, the kind that uncovered the true extent of Watergate, and that disseminated the facts from the Pentagon Papers. A former Fulbright scholar in the US, he did his masters thesis on press freedom. He likes to quote Senator J. William Fulbright’s dictum, which guides his life’s work:
To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism -- a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.Marthoz told a group of Democrats Abroad Belgium members last week that all was not lost despite the current atmosphere in the States, and the RSF rating of the United States might actually improve for a change, thanks to a Congressional “shield law” to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources. He notes that the Pulitzer Prizes in 2008 rewarded civic commitment and investigative journalism, both in great need of revival in these times of the “unitary presidency.”
This impressive Belgian journalist – whose goal is “to restore complexity to the world,” the antithesis of the sound-bite oversimplification of “with-us-or-against-us” – deserves a wider audience in the country that welcomed him as a young Fulbrighter. Perhaps some day a bright Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy will see that Jean-Paul Marthoz would be an excellent bridge builder between Europe and the United States. One who believes in a “renewed transatlantic relationship, built on a new foundation,” after the disastrous Bush era. Maybe under the next president?