BILL MOYERS:
JOURNALISTIC COURAGE
JOURNALISTIC COURAGE
NOTE: INTERESTED PARTIES SHOULD
FEEL FREE TO QUOTE THE FOLLOWING
TEXTS IN PART OR IN FULL. ANY SUCH
USE MUST INCLUDE ATTRIBUTION TO THE
RIDENHOUR PRIZES, AND TO THEIR
SPONSORS "THE NATION INSTITUTE" AND
THE "FERTEL FOUNDATION."
BILL MOYERS: Thank you very much, Sissy
Farenthold, for those very generous words,
spoken like one Texan to another -
extravagantly. Thank you for the spirit of
kinship. I could swear that I sensed our
good Molly Ivins standing there beside you.
I am as surprised to be here as I am
grateful. I never thought of myself as
courageous, and still don't. Ron Ridenhour
was courageous. To get the story out, he
had to defy the whole might and power of
the United States government, including its
war machine. I was then publisher of
Newsday, having left the White House
some two years earlier. Our editor Bill
McIlwain played the My Lai story big, as he
should, much to the chagrin of the owner
who couldn't believe Americans were
capable of such atrocities. Our readers
couldn't believe it either. Some of them
picketed outside my office for days, their
signs accusing the paper of being
anti-American for publishing repugnant
news about our troops. Some things never
change.
A few years later, I gave the
commencement at a nearby university, and
when I finished the speech, a woman who
had just been graduated came up to me and
said, "Mr. Moyers, you've been in both
government and journalism; that makes
everything you say twice as hard to
believe." She was on to something.
After my government experience, it took
me a while to get my footing back in
journalism. I had to learn all over again that
what is important for the journalist is not
how close you are to power, but how close
you are to reality. Over the last 40 years, I
would find that reality in assignment after
assignment, from covering famine in Africa
and war in Central America to inner-city
families trapped in urban ghettos and
middle-class families struggling to survive
in an era of downsizing across the
heartland. I also had to learn one of
journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying
to tell the truth about people whose job it is
to hide the truth is almost as complicated
and difficult as trying to hide it in the first
place. We journalists are of course obliged
to cover the news, but our deeper mission
is to uncover the news that powerful people
would prefer to keep hidden.
Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight
the same battles until you go blue in the
face, drive the people you work with nuts
going over every last detail to make certain
you've got it right, and then take all of the
slings and arrows directed at you by the
powers that be - corporate and political and
sometimes journalistic - there is no use
even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F.
Stone once said, after years of catching the
government's lies and contradictions, "I
have so much fun, I ought to be arrested."
Journalism 101.
So it wasn't courage I counted on; it was
exhilaration and good luck. When the road
forked, I somehow stumbled into the right
path, thanks to mentors like Eric Sevareid,
Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of
producers, researchers and editors who
lifted me to see further than one can see
unless one is standing on the shoulders of
others.
The quintessential lesson of my life came
from another Texan named John Henry
Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the
University of Texas. He served in the
Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross
and the U.S. Army during World War II, and
came home to become a celebrated
raconteur and popular national radio host
whose career was shattered when
right-wingers inspired by Joseph McCarthy
smeared him as a communist. He lost his
sponsors and was fired. But he fought back
with a lawsuit that lasted five years and
cost him every penny he owned. Financial
help from Edward R. Murrow and a few
others helped him to hang on. In the end,
John Henry Faulk won, and his courage
helped to end the Hollywood era of
blacklisting. You should read his book, Fear
on Trial, and see the movie starring George
C. Scott. John Henry's courage was
contagious.
Before his death I produced a documentary
about him, and during our interview he told
me the story of how he and his friend,
Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken
house there in central Texas when they
were about 12 years old. They spotted a
chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so
close it looked like a boa constrictor. As
John Henry told it, "All of our frontier
courage drained out of our heels. Actually,
it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots
and I made a new door through the hen
house." His momma came out to see what
all of the fuss was about, and she said to
Boots and John Henry, "Don't you know
chicken snakes are harmless? They can't
hurt you." Rubbing his forehead and his
behind at the same time, Boots said, "Yes,
Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you
so bad you'll hurt yourself."
John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson.
I'm always ashamed when I do. Temptation
to co-option is the original sin of journalism,
and we're always finding fig leaves to cover
it: economics, ideology, awe of authority,
secrecy, the claims of empire. In the
buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were
reminded of what the late great reporter
A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press
is "the weak slat under the bed of
democracy." The slat broke after the
invasion and some strange bedfellows fell
to the floor: establishment journalists,
neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits,
right-wing warmongers flying the skull and
bones of the "balanced and fair brigade,"
administration flacks whose classified leaks
were manufactured lies - all romping on the
same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.
Five years, thousands of casualties, and
hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the
media co-conspirators caught in flagrante
delicto are still prominent, still celebrated,
and still holding forth with no more
contrition than a weathercaster who made a
wrong prediction as to the next day's
temperature. The biblical injunction, "Go
and sin no more," is the one we most
frequently forget in the press. Collectively,
we don't seem to learn that all it takes to
transform an ordinary politician and a
braying ass into the modern incarnation of
Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on
the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the
invocation of national security.
There are, fortunately, always exceptions to
whatever our latest dismal collective
performance yields. America produces
some world-class journalism, including
coverage of the Iraq War by men and
women as brave as Ernie Pyle. But I still
wish we had a professional Hippocratic
Oath of our own that might stir us in the
night when we stray from our mission. And
yes, I believe journalism has a mission.
Walter Lippman was prescient on this long
before most of you were born. Lippman,
who became the ultimate Washington
insider - someone to whom I regularly
leaked - acknowledged that while the press
may be a weak reed to lean on, it is the
indispensable support for freedom. He
wrote, "The present crisis of Western
democracy is a crisis of journalism.
Everywhere men and women are conscious
that somehow they must deal with
questions more intricate than any that
church or school had prepared them to
understand. Increasingly, they know that
they cannot understand them if the facts
are not quickly and steadily available. All
the sharpest critics of democracy have
alleged is true if there is no steady supply
of trustworthy and relevant news.
Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption
and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster
must come to any people denied an
assured access to the facts."
So for all the blunders for which we are
culpable; for all the disillusionment that has
set in among journalists with every fresh
report of job cuts and disappearing news
space; for all the barons and buccaneers
turning the press into a karaoke of power;
for all the desecration visited on broadcast
journalism by the corporate networks; for
all the nonsense to which so many aspiring
young journalists are consigned; and for all
the fears about the eroding quality of the
craft, I still answer emphatically when
young people ask me, "Should I go into
journalism today?" Sometimes it is difficult
to urge them on, especially when serious
questions are being asked about how loyal
our society is to the reality as well as to the
idea of an independent and free press. But I
almost always answer, "Yes, if you have a
fire in your belly, you can still make a
difference."
I remind them of how often investigative
reporting has played a crucial role in
making the crooked straight. I remind them
how news bureaus abroad are a form of
national security that can tell us what our
government won't. I remind them that as
America grows more diverse, it's essential
to have reporters, editors, producers and
writers who reflect these new rising voices
and concerns. And I remind them that facts
can still drive the argument and tug us in
the direction of greater equality and a more
democratic society. Journalism still matters.
But I also tell them there is something more
important than journalism, and that is the
truth. They aren't necessarily one and the
same because the truth is often obscured in
the news. In his new novel The Appeal,
John Grisham tells us more about
corporate, political and legal jihads than
most newspapers or network news ever
will; more about Wall Street shenanigans
than all the cable business channels
combined; more about Manchurian
candidates than you will ever hear on the
Sunday morning talk shows.
For that matter, you will learn more about
who wins and who loses in the real
business of politics, which is governance,
from the public interest truth-tellers of
Washington than you will from an
established press tethered to official
sources. The Government Accountability
Project, POGO, the Sunlight Foundation,
Citizens Against Government Waste,
Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center
for Responsible Politics, the National
Security Archive, CREW, the Center for
Public Integrity, just to name a few - and
from whistleblowers of all sorts who never
went to journalism school, never flashed a
press pass, and never attended a gridiron
dinner.
Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he
came upon the truth of My Lai. He was in
the Army. He later became a pioneering
investigative reporter and - this is the irony
- had trouble making a living in a calling
where truth-telling can be a liability to the
bottom line. Matthew Diaz and James
Scurlock, whom you honored today, are
truth-tellers without a license, reminding us
that the most important credential of all is a
conscience that cannot be purchased or
silenced.
So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young
people: "Journalism still makes a
difference, but the truth matters more. And
if you can't get to the truth through
journalism, there are other ways to go."
To The Nation Institute and the Fertel
Foundation, to the Ridenhour judges and to
all of you, thank you again for this moment
and, above all, for the courage of your own
convictions.
The 5th Annual Ridenhour Prizes, sponsored
by The Nation Institute and the Fertel
Foundation, were awarded at a luncheon
ceremony on April 3, 2008 at the Press Club
in Washington, D.C. The 2008 Ridenhour
Prizes were given to veteran journalist Bill
Moyers (Courage Prize), author James D.
Scurlock (Book Prize) and former Navy JAG
officer Matthew Diaz (Prize for Truth-Telling).
Named for the Vietnam era whistleblower
Ron Ridenhour who exposed the truth of the
My Lai massacre, the Ridenhour Prizes
recognize those who have spoken out on
behalf of the public interest, promoted social
justice or illuminated a more just vision of
society. For more complete information
about The Ridenhour Prizes, as well as past
and current winners, please visit
www.ridenhour.org.
FEEL FREE TO QUOTE THE FOLLOWING
TEXTS IN PART OR IN FULL. ANY SUCH
USE MUST INCLUDE ATTRIBUTION TO THE
RIDENHOUR PRIZES, AND TO THEIR
SPONSORS "THE NATION INSTITUTE" AND
THE "FERTEL FOUNDATION."
BILL MOYERS: Thank you very much, Sissy
Farenthold, for those very generous words,
spoken like one Texan to another -
extravagantly. Thank you for the spirit of
kinship. I could swear that I sensed our
good Molly Ivins standing there beside you.
I am as surprised to be here as I am
grateful. I never thought of myself as
courageous, and still don't. Ron Ridenhour
was courageous. To get the story out, he
had to defy the whole might and power of
the United States government, including its
war machine. I was then publisher of
Newsday, having left the White House
some two years earlier. Our editor Bill
McIlwain played the My Lai story big, as he
should, much to the chagrin of the owner
who couldn't believe Americans were
capable of such atrocities. Our readers
couldn't believe it either. Some of them
picketed outside my office for days, their
signs accusing the paper of being
anti-American for publishing repugnant
news about our troops. Some things never
change.
A few years later, I gave the
commencement at a nearby university, and
when I finished the speech, a woman who
had just been graduated came up to me and
said, "Mr. Moyers, you've been in both
government and journalism; that makes
everything you say twice as hard to
believe." She was on to something.
After my government experience, it took
me a while to get my footing back in
journalism. I had to learn all over again that
what is important for the journalist is not
how close you are to power, but how close
you are to reality. Over the last 40 years, I
would find that reality in assignment after
assignment, from covering famine in Africa
and war in Central America to inner-city
families trapped in urban ghettos and
middle-class families struggling to survive
in an era of downsizing across the
heartland. I also had to learn one of
journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying
to tell the truth about people whose job it is
to hide the truth is almost as complicated
and difficult as trying to hide it in the first
place. We journalists are of course obliged
to cover the news, but our deeper mission
is to uncover the news that powerful people
would prefer to keep hidden.
Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight
the same battles until you go blue in the
face, drive the people you work with nuts
going over every last detail to make certain
you've got it right, and then take all of the
slings and arrows directed at you by the
powers that be - corporate and political and
sometimes journalistic - there is no use
even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F.
Stone once said, after years of catching the
government's lies and contradictions, "I
have so much fun, I ought to be arrested."
Journalism 101.
So it wasn't courage I counted on; it was
exhilaration and good luck. When the road
forked, I somehow stumbled into the right
path, thanks to mentors like Eric Sevareid,
Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and scores of
producers, researchers and editors who
lifted me to see further than one can see
unless one is standing on the shoulders of
others.
The quintessential lesson of my life came
from another Texan named John Henry
Faulk. He was a graduate, as am I, of the
University of Texas. He served in the
Merchant Marines, the American Red Cross
and the U.S. Army during World War II, and
came home to become a celebrated
raconteur and popular national radio host
whose career was shattered when
right-wingers inspired by Joseph McCarthy
smeared him as a communist. He lost his
sponsors and was fired. But he fought back
with a lawsuit that lasted five years and
cost him every penny he owned. Financial
help from Edward R. Murrow and a few
others helped him to hang on. In the end,
John Henry Faulk won, and his courage
helped to end the Hollywood era of
blacklisting. You should read his book, Fear
on Trial, and see the movie starring George
C. Scott. John Henry's courage was
contagious.
Before his death I produced a documentary
about him, and during our interview he told
me the story of how he and his friend,
Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken
house there in central Texas when they
were about 12 years old. They spotted a
chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so
close it looked like a boa constrictor. As
John Henry told it, "All of our frontier
courage drained out of our heels. Actually,
it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots
and I made a new door through the hen
house." His momma came out to see what
all of the fuss was about, and she said to
Boots and John Henry, "Don't you know
chicken snakes are harmless? They can't
hurt you." Rubbing his forehead and his
behind at the same time, Boots said, "Yes,
Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you
so bad you'll hurt yourself."
John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson.
I'm always ashamed when I do. Temptation
to co-option is the original sin of journalism,
and we're always finding fig leaves to cover
it: economics, ideology, awe of authority,
secrecy, the claims of empire. In the
buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were
reminded of what the late great reporter
A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press
is "the weak slat under the bed of
democracy." The slat broke after the
invasion and some strange bedfellows fell
to the floor: establishment journalists,
neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits,
right-wing warmongers flying the skull and
bones of the "balanced and fair brigade,"
administration flacks whose classified leaks
were manufactured lies - all romping on the
same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.
Five years, thousands of casualties, and
hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the
media co-conspirators caught in flagrante
delicto are still prominent, still celebrated,
and still holding forth with no more
contrition than a weathercaster who made a
wrong prediction as to the next day's
temperature. The biblical injunction, "Go
and sin no more," is the one we most
frequently forget in the press. Collectively,
we don't seem to learn that all it takes to
transform an ordinary politician and a
braying ass into the modern incarnation of
Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on
the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the
invocation of national security.
There are, fortunately, always exceptions to
whatever our latest dismal collective
performance yields. America produces
some world-class journalism, including
coverage of the Iraq War by men and
women as brave as Ernie Pyle. But I still
wish we had a professional Hippocratic
Oath of our own that might stir us in the
night when we stray from our mission. And
yes, I believe journalism has a mission.
Walter Lippman was prescient on this long
before most of you were born. Lippman,
who became the ultimate Washington
insider - someone to whom I regularly
leaked - acknowledged that while the press
may be a weak reed to lean on, it is the
indispensable support for freedom. He
wrote, "The present crisis of Western
democracy is a crisis of journalism.
Everywhere men and women are conscious
that somehow they must deal with
questions more intricate than any that
church or school had prepared them to
understand. Increasingly, they know that
they cannot understand them if the facts
are not quickly and steadily available. All
the sharpest critics of democracy have
alleged is true if there is no steady supply
of trustworthy and relevant news.
Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption
and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster
must come to any people denied an
assured access to the facts."
So for all the blunders for which we are
culpable; for all the disillusionment that has
set in among journalists with every fresh
report of job cuts and disappearing news
space; for all the barons and buccaneers
turning the press into a karaoke of power;
for all the desecration visited on broadcast
journalism by the corporate networks; for
all the nonsense to which so many aspiring
young journalists are consigned; and for all
the fears about the eroding quality of the
craft, I still answer emphatically when
young people ask me, "Should I go into
journalism today?" Sometimes it is difficult
to urge them on, especially when serious
questions are being asked about how loyal
our society is to the reality as well as to the
idea of an independent and free press. But I
almost always answer, "Yes, if you have a
fire in your belly, you can still make a
difference."
I remind them of how often investigative
reporting has played a crucial role in
making the crooked straight. I remind them
how news bureaus abroad are a form of
national security that can tell us what our
government won't. I remind them that as
America grows more diverse, it's essential
to have reporters, editors, producers and
writers who reflect these new rising voices
and concerns. And I remind them that facts
can still drive the argument and tug us in
the direction of greater equality and a more
democratic society. Journalism still matters.
But I also tell them there is something more
important than journalism, and that is the
truth. They aren't necessarily one and the
same because the truth is often obscured in
the news. In his new novel The Appeal,
John Grisham tells us more about
corporate, political and legal jihads than
most newspapers or network news ever
will; more about Wall Street shenanigans
than all the cable business channels
combined; more about Manchurian
candidates than you will ever hear on the
Sunday morning talk shows.
For that matter, you will learn more about
who wins and who loses in the real
business of politics, which is governance,
from the public interest truth-tellers of
Washington than you will from an
established press tethered to official
sources. The Government Accountability
Project, POGO, the Sunlight Foundation,
Citizens Against Government Waste,
Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center
for Responsible Politics, the National
Security Archive, CREW, the Center for
Public Integrity, just to name a few - and
from whistleblowers of all sorts who never
went to journalism school, never flashed a
press pass, and never attended a gridiron
dinner.
Ron Ridenhour was not a journalist when he
came upon the truth of My Lai. He was in
the Army. He later became a pioneering
investigative reporter and - this is the irony
- had trouble making a living in a calling
where truth-telling can be a liability to the
bottom line. Matthew Diaz and James
Scurlock, whom you honored today, are
truth-tellers without a license, reminding us
that the most important credential of all is a
conscience that cannot be purchased or
silenced.
So I tell inquisitive and inquiring young
people: "Journalism still makes a
difference, but the truth matters more. And
if you can't get to the truth through
journalism, there are other ways to go."
To The Nation Institute and the Fertel
Foundation, to the Ridenhour judges and to
all of you, thank you again for this moment
and, above all, for the courage of your own
convictions.
The 5th Annual Ridenhour Prizes, sponsored
by The Nation Institute and the Fertel
Foundation, were awarded at a luncheon
ceremony on April 3, 2008 at the Press Club
in Washington, D.C. The 2008 Ridenhour
Prizes were given to veteran journalist Bill
Moyers (Courage Prize), author James D.
Scurlock (Book Prize) and former Navy JAG
officer Matthew Diaz (Prize for Truth-Telling).
Named for the Vietnam era whistleblower
Ron Ridenhour who exposed the truth of the
My Lai massacre, the Ridenhour Prizes
recognize those who have spoken out on
behalf of the public interest, promoted social
justice or illuminated a more just vision of
society. For more complete information
about The Ridenhour Prizes, as well as past
and current winners, please visit
www.ridenhour.org.
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