Recently Bill Moyers received a journalism award, the Ridenhour Prize. Moyers received the Courage Prize. In his acceptance speech, Moyers noted that “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.'”
Moyer said, “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. Excerpts from Moyer’s speech:
- 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. …
- 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 … 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.”
- 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 that facts can still drive the argument and tug us in the direction of greater equality and a more democratic society. Journalism still matters.
- 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.
- 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.”
Published in The Nation, “Journalists As Truth-Tellers,” by Bill Moyers
