Let’s Be Thankful For A Free Press
Sometimes you receive a call, a note, or letter that launches you back into your past.
I received one of those calls not long ago when a young writer named Benji de la Piedra contacted me to ask me about a legendary editor I had worked for at The Washington Post. Herbert Denton Jr. was a first-class reporter, editor and foreign correspondent who died far too soon of illness in 1989, at the age of 45. Benji is writing a book about Herb and his era at The Post.
Something Benji said impressed me profoundly. He referred to reporters like Herb as “folk heroes.”
It’s been too long since I’ve heard reporters referred to as “heroes.” The insidious term “fake news” gets thrown around with abandon. On social media platforms, there are far too many posts from people who still say COVID 19, which has killed 169,000 Americans, is a hoax pushed by the media.
Facts are sometimes difficult to bear. Truth is sometimes ugly, or reveals something our elected officials would rather we not know. Today’s reporters have been heroic in trying to protect the public from lies, half-truths, and downright delusional theories being pushed by people who care more about a political agenda than the public good.
Journalism was my first profession and is still a profession I love and respect. I had the privilege of working with Herb Denton in my twenties as a reporter on The Post’s Metro staff. As city editor, Herb helped form a generation of fearless, hard-charging reporters who saw themselves as the eyes and ears of the citizenry, as guardians of the public’s well-being.
Slight in build, soft-spoken, yet passionate, Herb was a model of what he preached. A son of the segregated South, he graduated from Harvard, fought in the Vietnam War, and never forgot his roots in Little Rock, Arkansas.
As a correspondent covering the civil war in Lebanon in the early 1980s, Herb dodged bomb blasts to provide accurate, first-hand reporting to those of us sitting comfortably in our homes in the U.S.
He wrote a moving piece about how the Lebanese still managed to bring some semblance of normalcy and grace to their shattered lives:
“They take a certain perverse pride in being able to cope — indeed often to thrive — under the kind of adversity that would have decimated most of the world’s other, far-frailer societies. They bear up against trouble with a certain dignity that is often surreal under the circumstances. They dismiss disaster with a wave of the hand and a one-word utterance — ‘malesh’ — “never mind.” I always thought of that as the Lebanese national motto.”
I can’t help but think of the American press, which has shown similar remarkable resilience in deciphering the truth in this surreal era of “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and QAnon tales.
From the first days of his career, Herb proved a worthy public advocate. Reporting on the Maryland suburb of Prince George’s County in the 1970s, he heard that children were getting sick after swimming in public pools. He delved into county records and found that the chlorine content in pools had not been inspected for years.
As a result of his reporting, the pools were closed until found to be safe.
While remembering Rep. John Lewis last month, many news outlets showed file footage of the beatings, dogs and the hoses unleashed on Lewis and other activists during civil rights marches. The television reportage that took place at that time stirred the national conscience and helped us move to a more just society.
What if the cameras had not been there?
It took courage a few years later for The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers revealing our failures in Vietnam at a time when the Johnson administration was still telling the public that the U.S. was winning the war.
It took courage for The Post to allow two young reporters on its Metro staff to pursue evidence of political corruption reaching into the Nixon White House.
More recently, reporting brought to light the findings of a fearless medical doctor that showed lead in Flint, Michigan’s water supply was poisoning its most vulnerable citizens, the children. It was dogged reporting that eventually brought down Harvey Weinstein and sparked the #MeToo Movement.
Just this past week, a PBS NewHour-Pulitzer Center camera crew exposed the deadly conditions in a remote, dangerous, disease-ridden stretch of land between Columbia and Panama that has become a crossing point for Africans seeking to eventually apply for asylum in the U.S.
At personal peril, reporters have waded into COVID-19 hot spots, detention camps at the border, and dangerous street protests — so that you and I can make informed decisions about our country.
Is it any wonder the first freedom to be abolished in totalitarian societies is usually freedom of the press?
On so many occasion in history, our free press has kept us from engaging our worst instincts. Is the press perfect? No, of course not. Reporters are human and have foibles like the rest of us, but like the rest of us, they try.
Financial concerns and public criticism have also taken a toll. I left my final journalism position because I saw evidence that my supervisors were more interested in cozying up to elected officials, the local police chiefs and sheriff than in fighting for the public good. Those journalists were the exception, not the rule.
As we enter the final weeks before our democratic elections, can we give thanks that we live in a society with a free press? Can we dial back the glaring generalities and outright exaggerations critical of the press, and express support for the reporters who work every day for our well-being?
Can we pray for those who risk their safety to bring us the truth? They are the legacy of honorable journalists like Herb Denton.
