By Sebastian Junger
Thursday, January 25, 2024
It’s hard to know what to make of the
international press corps. Overwhelmingly white and college-educated, most have
presumably ignored professional opportunities that pay orders of magnitude more
money than journalism — and generally don’t get them killed. If you’re smart
enough to tease the truth out of the confusion, nuance, and outright propaganda
of most war zones — and most countries — you’re probably smart enough to do
pretty well on Wall Street. Or in the restaurant business. Or flipping houses
in Florida. And yet, every year, idealistic and ambitious young people troop
off to make almost no money reporting on the world’s tragedies and failures. I
hardly have a friend in the business who hasn’t been shot, kidnapped, blown up,
detained, or threatened with execution. And yet they persist. I’ve lost one
close friend and numerous acquaintances to war.
If you ask my fellow journalists why they do it, many
will resort to the tired piety that someone must bear witness to the world’s
horrors, but let’s have some honesty here. Journalism is one of the most
important jobs in a democracy, and my involvement in the profession is a source
of profound pride, but we don’t need to pretend selflessness to have merit. No
other profession — lawyer, logger, preschool teacher — bothers to, so why
should we? Journalists are some of the most ego-driven people I know, as well
as some of the most principled, and they’re willing to risk their lives on both
counts. Their supposed addiction to adrenaline can be thought of more
accurately as an addiction to having a life of great meaning and consequence.
What’s addictive is feeling different from everyone else, cut from a different
cloth. Which indeed many of them are.
I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue out
of the way. Many people will tell you — or scream at you — that objectivity is
a myth and journalists are just partisan hacks trying to advance their own
agenda. Fair enough — some are. But such people aren’t actually journalists; they’re
something else. News hosts who put on enormous amounts of make-up to make
enormous amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by lying about
reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of this article. Now that that’s out
of the way we can state that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy
his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report
the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a
person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.
Truth-tellers are everywhere in our society because we
rely on them to survive. Trial judges, weather forecasters, safety inspectors,
structural engineers, and radiologists all provide unvarnished opinions so that
we can lead safer, better lives, and the press is no different. The liberal
press was scathing about President Biden’s pullout from Kabul even though he
was “their” president and dangerously wounded by their work. Likewise, Megyn
Kelly and Chris Wallace, then of Fox News, asked uncomfortable questions and
delivered unwelcomed facts despite the anger they risked inciting in their
conservative audience. When Fox News Decision Desk director Arnon Mishkin
shocked viewers and mortified Fox executives by calling Arizona for Joe Biden
during the 2020 election, he was acting as any oncologist would while looking
at a patient’s X-ray: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you have cancer. Telling you
otherwise would be a disservice to both you and my profession.”
One can tell the relative objectivity of a news
organization (“integrity” may be a better word) by its willingness to report
stories that are unflattering — or even devastating — to its preferred
candidate. Even a cursory examination of cable-news websites reveals who ranks
where in this regard. Why a society would need such radical truth-telling
should be obvious, but the following anecdote from Afghanistan makes the point
nicely. I first went to Afghanistan in the summer of 1996, when I saw part of
the Taliban’s final conquest of the country. After America’s entry into the war
in 2001, I rushed back to document the liberation of Kabul and the fall of the
Taliban regime. I was a “believer,” in a sense: I believed that after 9/11,
America had a legal and moral right to go after al-Qaeda, and that we could do
a lot of good for this poor, beautiful country that I had fallen in love with.
My belief in the mission, however, did not prevent me from calling out American
missteps and failures. I was a journalist, after all — not a Pentagon press
spokesman.
And then we invaded Iraq. Although I was drawn to the
sheer magnitude and drama of the war, I didn’t cover it because I was
personally so against our decision to invade that I didn’t think I could be
objective. I still had high hopes for Afghanistan, but my optimism didn’t
survive long. I spent a year embedded with a platoon from the 173rd Airborne in
the infamous Korengal Valley, and our outpost was attacked almost daily. After
one particularly fierce firefight, a special operator shook his head and said, “We’re
never going to win this war until we admit we’re losing it.”
What he said shocked me: It was 2007, and questioning the
war was still considered unpatriotic heresy. If you didn’t believe America was
right and honorable in all things and would win any war it fought, you were
basically siding with the terrorists. And yet here was a highly experienced
soldier questioning exactly that. And that is the proper role
of the press: to provide the kind of honest and brutal assessment that
generals, politicians, contractors, and second lieutenants can’t because
they’ll lose their jobs. The simple truth is that if you’re against the working
press, you’re against protecting American soldiers from faulty weapons and bad
decisions. No military or government will publicly examine itself for failures.
Only the press — and internal whistleblowers — can do that.
Journalism is important because reality is important, and
reality is something that many generals and politicians have a complicated
relationship with. The powerful do not willingly embarrass themselves, so the
press must do it for them. In 2004, as the Iraq War started to deviate from the
quick and easy success foreseen by President George W. Bush, journalist Ron
Suskind interviewed a senior administration official (rumored to be Karl Rove)
for the New York Times. Suskind wanted to know why the Bush
administration was refusing to acknowledge the setbacks in Iraq, but the
official just dismissed journalists as being stuck in the “reality-based
community.” “We’re an empire now,” he supposedly said, “and when we act, we
create our own reality.”
Watching reality refuse to conform to someone’s ideology
would be more gratifying if it didn’t involve over 7,000 dead American soldiers
and an estimated 350,000 dead Iraqis. (Most Iraqi civilians were killed by
insurgents, but the invasion unleashed a level of violence that U.S. forces
could not counter.) It fell to the press to inform the American public about
all this because the Bush administration could not be trusted to do so, and the
American public deserved to know every detail. It was their tax dollars paying
for it, after all; their sons and daughters dying for it.
Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to
covering up failures; just listen to Biden officials on the disastrous Afghan
withdrawal. Journalists investigate such things not because they are for or
against a specific policy — though they might be — but because they are
generally against dishonesty and abuse of the public trust. That is the very
point of their existence, the entire rationale for what they do. When
journalists cite biology to refute the idea that gender difference is merely a
social construct, they are not standing up for cisgendered Americans but rather
for the idea that objective truth matters and will come after us one day if we
ignore it for too long. The same can be said about the Mexican-border crisis,
the national debt, climate change, election denial, and anything else that
threatens this great nation. Some are conservative issues, some are liberal
ones, but all deserve a fair and unbiased accounting.
For better or ill, the press is the only place to get
such a thing. Being human, journalists have lied, plagiarized, distorted, and
made mistakes, just like the people they investigate, but their sins are
generally investigated by the press itself. If there were a more reliable
alternative to the press, I would tell you to throw your arms around it and
never let go, but there isn’t. Small-town newspapers are particularly important
for public accountability, but they are dying out at an alarming rate, and as
they go, a certain ground truth about the American experience goes with it. In
fact, a Boston-based nonprofit called the GroundTruth Project is dedicated to
preserving our nation’s local press and seeding “news deserts” with reporters
and photographers.
“The crisis in local reporting has become a crisis for
our democracy,” says founder Charles M. Sennott. “In news deserts, three things
occur: Voter participation plummets, polarization surges, and bond ratings drop
as banks do not want to invest in communities where no one is watching the
store. And into the barren terrain, toxic misinformation seeps into the soil
and further divides an increasingly uninformed population.”
Much of the blame can be laid on the internet, which
radically changed the economics of news reporting by using algorithms to simply
confirm peoples’ views and biases rather than challenge them. This shift
amounts to a kind of intellectual death spiral in which true believers on both
sides insist on self-serving opinions that have no basis in fact and allow for
no legitimacy on the opposing side.
***
Journalists are easy to vilify in such a
hyper-partisan environment because they keep uncovering problematic facts, but
an America without any press at all is hard to imagine. Or rather, it’s easy to
imagine, but terrifying. Think how much worse this tragedy would have turned out
without a functioning press: By 1967, American soldiers in Vietnam had been
struggling for years with M16 rifles that jammed constantly and were utterly
unreliable in combat. The M16 was a new design, based on the civilian AR15, and
both the rifle and the new, smaller-caliber ammunition it used were ill suited
to jungle combat. Soviet-made AK-47s, on the other hand, worked in almost any
conditions and gave Vietcong fighters a significant firepower advantage over
American soldiers. Over and over, American soldiers were found dead next to
jammed rifles, often with the cleaning rod shoved down the barrel in a
desperate attempt to clear a shell casing from the chamber. In some units, 30
or 40 percent of rifles jammed within a few minutes.
According to C. J. Chivers, author of The Gun,
American soldiers eventually took to carrying AK-47s taken off dead Vietcong as
backup guns. One Marine preferred to go into combat with just a grenade
launcher and a .38 caliber revolver that he bought off a man who was at the end
of his tour. A Marine commander told his men to fix bayonets before firefights
so that at least they could stab the enemy. Before getting overrun and wiped
out, one unit had time to radio, “Out of grenades, all weapons jammed.” The
men’s bodies were found the next day, the stocks of their guns smashed from
having been used as clubs.
Both the U.S. military and the manufacturer, Colt, knew
about the gun’s problems but refused to fix them or even acknowledge the issue.
“MACV told all information officers . . . that the M16 was not a
topic for discussion,” an information officer from the 25th Infantry Division
later testified. (“MACV” stands for “Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.”)
“Newsmen were not to question soldiers about the weapon. No stories about the
rifle jamming or malfunctioning were to be written. . . . At the
same time the Army launched an all-out propaganda campaign to make GIs in
Vietnam more confident in the weapon they basically mistrusted.”
Finally, a young Marine lieutenant named Mike Chervenak
borrowed a chaplain’s typewriter and, along with his company commander, wrote a
polite but firm letter detailing the M16’s flaws. He sent one copy of the
letter to the Barnesboro Star in his hometown of Barnesboro,
Pa., and another to the Washington Post. A third copy went to
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a final letter went to Richard Ichord of the
House Armed Services Committee. Representative Ichord quickly convened a
subcommittee to investigate the problem, but the military stonewalled him so
shamelessly that it was able to avoid any accountability whatsoever.
And then the Washington Post published
Chervenak’s letter. The Marine Corps was furious, launching an immediate
investigation into Chervenak himself, but the ensuing uproar eventually forced
Colt to fix the problems. By then, though, scores of American soldiers were
dead because of weapon malfunctions. The Washington Post and
one very brave lieutenant had accomplished what the U.S. Congress could not:
accountability at the highest levels of the U.S. military.
I have no idea whether my own work has had such a stark
and immediate impact on my country — I doubt it. Information moves in strange
ways, though, and the truth has a quiet ability to bear fruit many years later.
When I was 22, I drove around the country with my best friend, John, in an old
Subaru station wagon. I wanted to be a journalist but had no idea how to go
about that, so I just wrote down anything that seemed significant. Driving
south from Miami one night, we stopped in Big Pine Key to get coffee at a
Circle K, and I went to use the men’s room in back. The walls were covered with
exceedingly ugly anti-immigrant graffiti — mostly directed against Cubans — but
a single anonymous response caught my eye. I asked the cashier for a pen and
piece of paper and went back to write it down. “Thank God the rest of the
people in this country are warm and caring and welcomed me in ’62,” the man had
written. “I fought in Vietnam for you to say that. I love you like a brother.”
The very worst things about America were on that
men’s-room wall, and the very best. The proper work of journalism is to remind
us of both. That Cuban man may still be out there somewhere, a decade older
than I am and maybe not even remembering that he stopped at a Circle K in Big
Pine Key, Fla., in the mid 1980s and wrote what he did on that bathroom wall.
But a young man who wanted to be a journalist thought it was important enough
to copy onto a piece of paper that he kept track of for the next 40 years.
Maybe their work is not done yet, those 34 words; maybe they have only just now
begun showing this country how truly great we can be.
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