Richard Drake
History
UM-Missoula
Address Oct. 20, 2001, to the Montana Associated Press Broadcasters Association. Printed here with permission.
Although I have been introduced as an academic historian, I do not feel entirely out of place in this group because for two years in the mid-1970s I worked as a reporter for a business publication in Los Angeles. Had it not been for my irresistible love of history, I might be in the audience today instead of behind the speaker's lectern. Journalism was the road not taken for me. I have no real regrets about the choice that I made, but whenever things are not quite right in the history business, which is a lot of the time, I remember my editor back in Los Angeles who thought that with some remedial work I might make a go of it as a reporter.
Because of my experience in working for The Town Hall Journal, I think that I have paid more respectful attention to journalism as a craft than most academic historians do. Academic historians tend to disparage journalism. For example, in scholarly reviews the characterization of a book as a "journalistic" account is not a form of praise. It signifies that a book is superficial, impressionistic, and lacking in the kind of intellectual rigor on which historians pride themselves.
Journalists give as good as they get. I vividly recall the cutting disdain with which my editor pronounced the words "too academic" and "professory" whenever he thought that I had written something lacking usefulness or practicality. Perhaps every line of work has its points of pride, which often take the form of prejudices.
The academic prejudice against journalism found its most vehement spokesman in Fernand Braudel. In a 1958 essay entitled "History and Social Sciences: The Long Term," this great French historian claimed that all current events are the product of three distinct but related forces. He called them short-term, middle-term, and long-term forces. The short-term refers to the immediate moment, the middle-term to the contemporary era including approximately the preceding fifty years of history, and the long-term to the rest of history. Braudel criticized journalists for concentrating almost exclusively on the short-term forces.
Although Braudel's criticisms contain much truth, he and academic historians like him go wrong in their ultimate assessment of journalism. He dismisses journalism as a whole and calls it "the most distorting and unpredictable lens through which to view reality." As a historian myself, I want to put in a good word for the middle and long-term dimensions of current events. Nevertheless, as a one-time reporter, I know how challenging and important it is to get the basic "short-term" facts of a story straight.
The late Murray Kempton pointed out that individuals who from a standing start can go into the field and sort out the constituent elements of a complex, on-going story are invaluable. He was right about this. Misha Glenny on the Balkans and Alma Guillermoprieto on Latin America would be good examples of the kind of individuals Kempton had in mind.
Kempton insisted on using the word reporting rather than journalism to describe the work that he admired. Journalism, he thought, had come to be associated with the not entirely respectable activities of our mass media. Depressed by the fluff and yammering that more and more passed for journalism, he ended by being nearly as critical of the trade as Braudel was. Kempton, however, did make an exception for reporting, which he thought honorable when done with the highest canons of the profession in mind--accuracy, honesty, and objectivity being the chief among them.
Kempton's comments about reporting deserve our attention especially today. More than ever before, the professional reporting of current events matters. In the aftermath of 11 September, we find ourselves at war with terrorism worldwide. A fundamental problem with this war is that a juridical definition of terrorism is not to be had. It is a term that warrants careful investigation on a case-by-case basis.
In all the crisis periods of modern history, contending political parties have used the term terrorism to characterize the violence of their adversaries. Terrorism is defined as the illegitimate political violence of the State, against either its own citizens or a foreign population, and of armed groups against the State. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, however, is often self-serving.
For example, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the driving force behind the 1944 plot on Hitler's life, is viewed today as a hero and martyr, but he was put to death by the Nazis as a terrorist. Also, Stalin routinely included the charge of terrorist activity against the hapless and innocent victims of the Purges of the 1930s. Not everyone in history who has been called a terrorist is actually guilty of that charge.
Today, the term "terrorism" is a ping-pong ball batted back and forth between disputants in hotspots all over the world. Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat have accused each other of being terrorists. We bombed Afghanistan for harboring the terrorist Osama bin Laden, but then the Taliban regime called President Bush a state terrorist in a reenactment of the exchanges between the Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan, each of whom thought the other was the epitome of terrorism. Some deeds, such as the 11 September attacks, will be seen by most people as illegitimate or immoral political violence, i.e., as acts of "terrorism." Yet in the history of terrorism, not every case is as clear as 11 September. The charge of terrorism can be used by a cynically manipulative government as a smokescreen behind which it imposes inhuman conditions on an oppressed population.
The fearless newspaperman, Jacobo Timerman, exposed just such a situation in Argentina with his classic book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (1981). The death squads in that country claimed to be waging war on terrorists, many of whom just happened to be housewives and students. He made clear who the real terrorists in this situation were: the ones with funding from the CIA and training from the School of the Americas.
Timerman subsequently performed the same kind of service with his reportage from the Middle East. In The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon (1982), he contradicted some longstanding American assumptions about terrorism in that part of the world. Though appalled by Palestinian terrorism and implacably censorious of it, Timerman questioned the double-standards in America that prevented us from understanding how the thousands of lost lives in Lebanon might be the result of state terrorist activity by a reactionary Likud government in Israel.
Precisely because of the semantic confusion generated by the term "terrorism," it is imperative for us to have good reporters capable of peering behind the verbal draperies to tell us what actually is happening. We need to know not only about Osama bin Laden. We also must have accurate and objective information about the vast array of terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism with which we are now at war, to sort out obdurate fact from partisan rhetoric.
Our leaders are promising us a multigenerational war against terrorism. The model being held up before us is the "good" war, World War II, not the "bad" war of recent memory, Vietnam. The plain implication of the good model is to have a completely united front against the enemy. This united front includes patriotic journalists.
Yet it would be a mistake to reduce patriotism to unquestioning support of a given government policy. Patriotism might entail, as it has so often in the past, questioning government policy. Questions particularly would be in order if honest reporting in the field reveals that the military strategy in the war on terrorism is failing to address the deeper causes of what had given rise to the sympathy and support that organizations like Al-Qaeda enjoy in the Islamic world.
We might kill Osama bin Laden, root out every last cell of his organization, and still be left in the position of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. In many ways, the spectacular terrorist assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 had the same kind of earthquake effect on the Russian government that 11 September has had on ours. Alexander III employed maximum force to smash the Narodnaya Volya organization that had killed his father, and he succeeded. The terrorists were run to the ground, their organization destroyed. Within a generation, however, the forces of revolution overwhelmed the tsarist government.
One lesson to be drawn from the Narodnaya Volya episode is that the military defeat of a terrorist organization does not necessarily end the problem of terrorism, which always battens on the misery of oppressed people. A good newspaperman, of the kind called for by Murray Kempton, might have been able to open the eyes of the Russian government to what it actually was facing. The Narodnaya Volya turned out merely to be one of the bright red worms of revolution endlessly generated by a giant compost heap of poverty, backwardness, and alienation. Beheading the worms only added to the moldering materials.