On Protest and Reporting

Today, Poynter ran a piece titled "Should journalists protest in Trump's America?" This is a question I've been wrestling with as a freelancer. It was mostly focused on newsroom journalists. I posted to Facebook and tweeted, wondering how it applies to freelancers like myself. The piece's author, Katie Hawkins-Gaar, asked me to elaborate. At first I responded in tweets, but then realized I had more to say. Here's what I ended up writing.

Why is it important that I be on top of current affairs? Partially, so as I reach out to editors I can be prepared to jump into my reporting and do it well. I need to have a clear idea of what current issues are to make an effective contribution. On a more selfish level, I need to have a clearer idea of what kind of stories will more easily get an editor’s attention, not to mention that of the public.

In the meantime, I also need to report potential stories, pitch them, and wait on editors understandably harried by current circumstances to reply. How do I survive doing so with such uncertainty? How do I make a living doing that? And how do I do that if the world is changing very rapidly. If a crisis emerges, how does my more evergreen work matter?

That’s reporting. What about protest and politics? Do I let the world go by when people I care about are affected, concerned, scared, etc.? What about when I am affected? Am I affected? Probably not as much, because I’m white, straight, cis-male, college- and graduate school- educated and born in the United States. I am Jewish, but not practicing, and that’s still not (yet) as much a target. My best strength is my dedication to the craft, my skepticism, and my courage to tell stories even if people don’t want to hear them. But, again, I have to be able to survive telling them. It, sadly, often comes to economics, which are often made shakier by political uncertainty. So do I then work on more anodyne material while watching the world go by? Isn’t that just shutting my ears? Wouldn’t that just be isolationism in a different form?

After all, my first book is all about reporters who risked their lives and livelihoods in a troubled time to bring stories to the public that were being inadequately covered. My central subject — Melville Jacoby — was writing about devastating, daily air raids in China that were killing thousands. He was writing about brutal conditions in Shanghai and about the march toward war in what was then French Indochina. His master’s thesis was all about how the U.S. public wasn’t paying attention the war between China and Japan and what that portended for them. He knew what happened there mattered here, and vice versa, so he was driven to tell such stories. Then he reported on the totally under-resourced defense of the Philippines, and sent home the first photos the U.S. saw of the absolutely savage conditions U.S. and Filipino troops endured in Bataan.

I mention all this not because I want to raise heads about my book. I mention it because journalists are still doing this kind of work, still not being listened to, and still often dying because of their work. Seventy-five years later, journalists are telling us about civilians dying in military strikes, about coming conflicts and uncertainty, about corruption, about tone-deaf foreign policy. As a journalist, my form of protest, if I have one, is, in part, amplifying these reporters, and in part, joining them. Not letting the line go quiet.

And I do wonder, in this time, how do I do justice to the subject I spent so much time with? Mel, Annalee, and their friends and colleagues were people who had marks on their heads for their reporting, who fled besieged islands in the dead of night to get the story out. Me? I’m at home reading Twitter, trying to figure out where and how to jump in and contribute when my portfolio is, well, not stale, but, about such specific subjects it seems disconnected from what’s happening. What editor wants to take the risk on that at a time when they need to be very careful about the professionalism of their contributors, to know that they can trust the credibility of their reporting? 

I guess this doesn’t answer the question of what and how I protest as a freelancer, but the thing is, I can’t afford to not think them. I don’t know any other way to operate. How do I contribute now? Lately I’ve thought the ideal is joining a news organization, becoming a stringer for a few publications, or becoming a regular contributor to a few outlets, but with freelancing, even in a time of protest, it still comes back to how do I survive while doing so? I always think I can best help society by reporting well, but where do I turn to be able to do that? Normally, I’d say my community, but if some of my community — those who aren’t reporters — are out in the streets protesting or at home making calls to representatives, and the rest — those who are reporters — are pushed to the max doing their own reporting, what’s left as a backstop or a network for me?

That Which We Attack

When you read of who was killed in Paris on Friday, take note that it was not simply white French who died, nor simply Christians. They were Americans, Chileans, Tunisians, Moroccans, Portuguese, Belgians, Englishmen, Spaniards, Romanians, Italians and, perhaps, more to be named. Some were likely Christian, others Muslim, perhaps some were Jewish, or atheist. Perhaps I shouldn't presume what these people believed. Perhaps some never identified with any religion. 

Don't think this was an attack on Christians, nor on Europeans, nor the West, nor non-Muslims, and don't think that by bearing sympathy for the victims' families we are ignoring the rest of the world, that we are ignorant, that we are racist or that we are biased. It was the world and humanity that was attacked, just as it is the world that is attacked when gunships tear up operating rooms where doctors from around the world perform surgeries, as it is the world that is attacked when gunmen shoot up universities and shopping malls, and as it is when robotic aircraft operated from subdivisions in Nevada assault weddings in Yemen.

It is the world that is attacked when airliners above the Ukraine and Egypt are shot down, and it is the world that is attacked when jets drop bombs on rebels in one country in the name of attacking terrorists in a different one. It is the world that is attacked when fanatics fire rockets into neighborhoods or blow themselves up on buses, just as it is the world that is attacked when militaries bulldoze homes and massacre refugee camps. It is the world that is attacked when men are forced to march starving through jungles and women are raped just before they're lined up and shot, just as it is the world that is attacked when atoms are split over a city. It is the world that is attacked when families are sent to gas champers for the crime of occupying what someone else has declared their living space, and it is the world that is attacked when we ignite entire cities as we seek vengeance.

It is the world that is attacked when a husband shoots his wife and it is the world that is attacked when the state assumes it can stop killing by strapping that man to a gurney and injecting him with lethal chemicals. It is the world that is attacked when white supremacists fire upon parishioners in a church and when police shoot men for the color of their skin and slam young girls onto classroom floors, just as it is the world that is attacked when a criminal shoots the men and women sent to protect their neighbors and families.

We can only understand this world in which we live through our human eyes, and when it is attacked, it is humanity that is attacked. Borders are imaginary lines we draw to determine who is worthy of our protection and camaraderie and who is, ultimately, less-than. Religions are products of our minds constructed to make sense of all this chaos and to justify this killing. When one of us crosses these imaginary lines and leans on these systems, we simply ignore the fact that it is us that we are attacking.

We are the victims and the perpetrators.

On Nukes and Circuses

On a day when we learned 42 U.S. Senators have now committed to an international deal that will help prevent proliferation of the most destructive weaponry ever known, I prefer to think about how we have taken a step back from another expensive, deadly conflict and toward transnational understanding, instead of sharing -- as many are doing in my social media feeds, however critically or derisively -- some video of a medieval-minded woman who flouts the very system she has sworn an oath to protect. This system and all its vaunted liberty was built on the very separation of governance from theocracy that we champion abroad, that we insist distinguishes us from the foreign lands we have cast as enemies.

We are better than this. Let's focus on the world we want and not anchor ourselves watching the spectacle of the retrograde circuses around us.

When We Recognize Yesterday In Today

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"Chaos has made wanderers out of 15,000,000 people. These people, not only Jews, torn from their homes will soon command the world's attention. For unless an intelligent situation is found, the dire effects of mass migrations will be felt over and over again during the coming centuries. It is hardly up to the refugees themselves. They are so completely befuddled that only happenstance guides their course."

From "Jews in Exile" by Melville Jacoby, writing as Mel Jack, for the Los Angeles Times on January 14, 1940. As 1939 began, about 70 Jewish people lived in Shanghai, China. As war broke out across Europe, Jews forced to flee the conflict and the Holocaust were turned around by nations all over the world, including the United States. Because of its unique status as an international city, Shanghai was one of the few places to allow refugees to enter, and the city's Jewish population swelled to around 17,000 by the time Mel was there, though, as Mel wrote, the city and its leaders would soon clamp down on this population.

Sound familiar?