THE poet and journalist Myke Obenieta recently tagged me in his post of the trailer of the coming Steven Spielberg movie, “The Post” that stars the power duo of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. The film is about Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of the Washington Post, together with the paper’s editor Ben Bradlee and their dilemma on whether to expose or not United States government secrets about the Vietnam war.
It’s an interesting movie for us in mainstream media, but more so for everyone else who have been trying to pull mainstream media people down. Here is a bit of journalism’s long history that details the challenges we faced through the decades, notably in upholding truth: “A cover-up that spanned four US presidents pushed the country’s first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between journalist and government.”
In a way, this can be tied up to a recent article, “Amanpour: No Free Press, No Democracy” written by CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour and posted on the CNN website edition.cnn.com on Nov. 14, 2017. The article was part of CNN’s Opinion Series specifically dealing with the “challenges facing the media, under attack from critics, government and changing technology.” Amanpour wrote in defense of “journalists who have never left the front lines of the battle for the truth.”
What is happening in the country now is what is happening everywhere. The “weaponizing of social media” has brought in its wake the “demonizing” of traditional media and its practitioners. What has made the situation worse is that governments--those of the Philippines and the US can be an example—are abetting the effort to demonize and defend their rule. Reporters and photographers who are in the front lines, sort of, are being harassed, bashed and threatened. More than that, truth and facts are being assaulted by “fake news” and “alternative facts.”
Yet there is no denying journalist’s refusal to buckle down in the face of great odds. In 1971 in the US, the battle for truth took the form of Graham and Bradlee deciding to defy a court order not to publish a secret document, known as the Pentagon Papers, revealing the US government’s duplicity in the Vietnam War. Among the information revealed in the documents was the help given by the John F. Kennedy administration to overthrow then South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and assassinate him in 1963 and the extensive bombing by the US of North Vietnam.
Amanpour herself has been tested a number of times since she was hired by CNN in 1983. She risked her life covering the Iran-Iraq war, the democratic revolutions that swept Eastern Europe, the war in the Persian Gulf and many more. In her recent article, she wrote about a reporter in Malta who was blown up in an improvised explosive device attack.
“At this time of year,” she concluded, “we would do well to remember that we are in fact the people’s best friends. Remember that anywhere in the world, only the truth we fight for guarantees freedom...We journalists will continue to wage this battle. The free press must not be demonized.”