Last night, ProPublica founder and
executive chairman Paul Steiger received the Burton Benjamin Memorial award from
the Committee to Protect Journalists. Here are his remarks.
In recent
days I thought a lot about the 16 previous recipients of the Burton Benjamin
award, and re-read the words from this platform of some of them.
Their words
are inspiring. Their deeds are awesome. I am humbled and deeply honored to be
among them.
The first
honoree, in 1997, was Ted Koppel of ABC, who for a significant time brought
serious reporting to late-night TV with sustained high quality. The most recent,
last year, was Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian, who has the vision to be a
leader in reinventing journalism for the digital age and the courage to
challenge both his government and ours on the extent to which they spy on us.
Together, and with those in between, they inhabit an arc of profound change
that I want to reflect on briefly tonight.
The arc
actually goes back to 1981, when Michael Massing and other young writers with
overseas experience founded CPJ.
American
journalists were still basking in the reflected glow of All the President’s
Men, the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman movie that five years earlier had won
three Academy Awards and anointed Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and by
implication all reporters as rock stars with typewriters. Yes, typewriters.
Woodward’s
and Bernstein’s reporting in the Washington Post, based partly on tips from
anonymous sources, helped drive President Nixon from office. This came only a
few years after the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Supreme Court denied
Nixon’s motion to bar the New York Times and the Post from publishing leaks of
the papers, which detailed abuses during the Vietnam War.
U.S.
journalists, in other words, were riding high.
What Michael
and his young colleagues saw was that journalists in America had it far better
than those abroad, particularly in repressive states. Americans had the
protection of the First Amendment and the backing of wealthy, committed, and
lawyer-stocked news organizations. In vast parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, reporters, editors, and broadcasters could be bankrupted, beaten,
thrown into jail, or killed, by powerful people offended by what they wrote or aired.
As the
experience of our incredibly courageous honorees tonight demonstrates, in many
places around the world the life of a journalist who is determined to find and
report the truth is no better today than it was 32 years ago. Reporters,
editors, photographers, and publishers are still threatened, beaten, and murdered,
often with impunity. The core mission of CPJ is just as critical as it ever
was, in many respects more so.
What has
changed is the position of us, American journalists. We are still far better
off than our beleaguered cousins in danger zones abroad, of course.
But
financially, I don’t need to tell this group of the hammering our industry has
taken in the last decade. Publications shrinking or even closing, journalists
bought out or laid off, beats shrunk or eliminated.
And now,
more recently, we are facing new barriers to our ability to do our jobs –
denial of access and silencing of sources.
For the
starkest comparison, I urge any of you who haven’t already done so to read last month’s report, commissioned by CPJ and written by
Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post. It lays out in chilling
detail how an administration that took office promising to be the most
transparent in history instead has carried out the most intrusive surveillance
of reporters ever attempted.
It also has
made the most concerted effort at least since the plumbers and the enemies lists of the Nixon Administration to
intimidate officials in Washington from ever talking to a reporter.
Consider
this: As we now know from the
Snowden documents, investigators seeking to trace the source of a leak can go
back and discover anyone in government who has talked by phone or email with
the reporter who broke the story. Match that against the list of all who had
access to the leaked info and voila!
In my days
editing the Wall Street Journal, I used to joke that no one in the Washington
Bureau ever had an on-the-record conversation. Now I would have to wonder
whether anyone was having any kind of conversation at all that wasn’t a White
House-sanctioned briefing.
It isn’t
just words. The White House has been barring news photographers from all sorts of opportunities to
ply their craft. Routine meetings and activities of the president, of which
they used to be able to shoot still and video images under certain constraints,
now are often – not always, but often — off limits, according to the
American Society of News Editors, which is protesting the action, along with
other groups.
The
administration has invited news organizations to pick up images handed out by
the press office or from the White House website. Sort of like saying, “just
print the press release,” as some corporate PR people used to say to me years
ago when I asked for an interview with the CEO.
I don’t mean
to suggest that this administration is always and everywhere implacably hostile
to journalists. After its snooping into communications of the Associated Press
and of a Fox News reporter was revealed, the administration agreed to certain
restraints.
It
ostensibly agreed not to prosecute anyone for engaging in journalism. News organizations will generally be
given advance notice when the Justice Department wants access to their records,
so that they can resist in court, and warrants for access to a reporter’s
records won’t be sought unless the reporter is a target of a criminal
investigation. Still, the government can waive these constraints if national
security is involved.
CPJ chairman Sandra Mims
Rowe noted in announcing the Downie Report last month that the founders of CPJ
“did not anticipate the need to fight for the rights of U.S. journalists who
work with the protection of the First Amendment.” Limited resources, she said,
had to be directed at countries with the greatest need. Even with declining
revenues at U.S. news
organizations, the principal need is still abroad.
But, she
added, the time has come for CPJ to speak out against excessive government
secrecy here at home. As just one supporter of CPJ, I agree. If we are going to
be credible admonishing abusers of journalists abroad, we can’t stand silent
when it is going on at home.
One last
thing. I don’t want to leave the
impression that I’m in despair. I’m definitely not.
A couple of
billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar, have put up several hundred
millions of dollars in funding to, respectively, rebuild one great old platform
– the Washington Post – and erect an entirely new one.
From New
York to Texas to California, and in scattered places in between, non-profit
reporting teams, ProPublica happily among them, are enjoying increasing success
with both their journalism and their fundraising.
And new
forms of web-based reporting like Buzzfeed are both attracting young audiences
and sliding towards profitability. I was at first cranky the other day when
Buzzfeed stole one of our brilliant senior
editors. But then I
realized his new job is to recruit half a dozen reporters and start an
investigations team. For society and for journalism, that is progress.
We can’t
rest. We need to stand up in stout opposition whenever the First Amendment is
challenged at home. We need to speak out, even more vigorously than before,
when journalists are abused around the world. We need to keep finding and
funding more inventive ways to carry out serious reporting.
