Pubdate: Thu, 23 May 2002
Source: Sun Herald (MS)
Copyright: 2002, The Sun Herald
Contact:  http://www.sunherald.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/432
Author: Bill Minor

A JOURNALIST'S ROLE IS PERILOUS, IN ANY LANGUAGE

Fellow journalist and columnist Joe Atkins, whose day job is teaching 
journalism at Ole Miss, has edited an important new volume of 20 
essays from journalists around the globe dramatically illustrating 
how a free press which many Americans take for granted is an 
endangered concept worldwide.

In "The Mission/Journalism, Ethics and The World," contributors share 
experiences which prove the theme that reporters worldwide have a 
common bond: To get the story and tell it, often against great odds 
and putting their lives at risk.

Atkins, whose Mississippi connection goes back to his reporting days 
on the old Jackson Daily News in the 1970s and later in the 
Washington bureau of Gannett newspapers before entering academia, 
ties together the overriding "mission" message of the book with 
several of his own contributions.

The project is part of an international communication series 
published by Iowa State University Press.

Perhaps no other place in the world, and certainly nowhere else in 
our own western world, is life more dangerous for journalists than in 
Colombia, South America, from where Stephen Jackson, editor of the 
country's largest English-language newspaper, weighs in with his 
harrowing account.

Jackson worked for me in the late 1970s, trying to keep alive a 
hard-hitting, investigative, alternative weekly in this capital city.

Our little weekly, The Capital Reporter, located in Jackson's 
warehouse district, four times had its plate-glass window smashed, 
and was shot into by night-riders after we riled the Klan, along with 
some belligerent elements of the establishment.

However, our experiences were a cakewalk compared to what Colombian 
journalists have long endured at the hands of the murderous, powerful 
drug lords in that supposedly democratic nation.

In a wave of terrorism orchestrated by the drug mob during the latter 
1980s, Jackson writes, a leading candidate for president of Colombia 
was gunned down; news reporters and even an editor of El Espectador, 
a major Bogota newspaper noted for its relentless anti-drug campaign, 
were assassinated.

When Jose Gonzalo Gacha, known as the billionaire "enforcer" of the 
cocaine cartel, was killed in a gun battle in 1989, great relief 
swept through the country and the Colombian press.

Journalists who hoped life would improve after Gacha's departure, 
Jackson writes, were sorely disappointed. The nation remains wracked 
with violence, not only from the drug mob but the left-wing 
guerrillas who control 40 percent of the country.

Forty-three journalists lost their lives during the 1990s, he says, 
and in May 2000 the country's most noted investigative reporter, 
Judith Lima, was kidnapped, raped and beaten. Yet, Jackson reports, 
the press in Colombia "continues to speak out."

Bernard Nezmah, former editor of Slovenia's Mladina magazine, relates 
the dangers he and other journalists faced during, and even after, 
the communist era in that small Balkan country.

To challenge a Balkan boss and "to make a journalistic contribution 
to the democratization of the Slovenian society," Nezmah writes, he 
skirted the edges of professional ethics, using sarcasm as his 
principal weapon in forcing Stane Dolanc, a quasi-god of Yugoslav 
politics and former communist, to step down.

Nezmah used such risky techniques as juxtaposing a photo of Al Capone 
next to one of Dolanc, who bore a striking resemblance to the onetime 
American racket boss.

Surprisingly, Nezmah didn't encounter legal trouble from Dolanc, but 
his biting sarcasm of a Slovenian mayor landed him in legal hot 
water, and he was given a one-month jail sentence. The judge 
suspended his jail time on the condition that Nezmah stop writing 
critically for a year.

Protests against the ruling were heard all across Europe, contending 
it forbade sarcasm as a literary device. Finally, in the Supreme 
Court, the judgment was nullified. It made legal history in Slovenia 
and became a major breakthrough for press freedom.

Jerry Mitchell, The Clarion-Ledger's star (and only) investigative 
reporter, who has won praise nationally for his relentless push to 
reopen civil rights crimes for which perpetrators have long gone 
unpunished, describes the role of a "muckraker," a long-honored tool 
of the trade that is sorely missing from modern American journalism.

Many people misunderstand the term, he says, "They think it is the 
press peeping through the windows of celebrities." Such keyhole 
tactics, Mitchell says, are not muckraking. The role of the bona fide 
muckraker long ago was summed up as the reporter's role to "comfort 
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

He recounts the experience of spending seven hours interviewing 
(mostly listening to the rantings of) Byron De La Beckwith, the 
long-suspected assassin of civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers, a crime 
for which the old racist was finally convicted after 30 years of 
freedom. Mitchell's key to unraveling the truth in his investigative 
pieces is not to prejudge a source, but to hear him out. "Just 
because someone is nuts, just because he has a personality so 
offensive that you feel need of a shower later, doesn't mean that 
person can't be a valuable source."

"Mission" contains warnings that many American journalists wrongly 
believe the U.S. model of a free press should be adopted by the 
global press in this era of emerging democracy.

John C. Merrill, professor emeritus of the University of Missouri, 
sees the world leaning to a new journalism paradigm that stresses 
"order and social harmony," not old-style U.S. press libertarianism. 
Merrill (who has a Mississippi background) sees the drift toward 
authority-centered press, largely because others perceive too much 
chaos in the American press.
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