JACKSON-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.
The book's short title is "The Mission," with a subtitle "Journalism, Ethics and The World."
In "The Mission," 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 latter 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, which took Atkins three years to complete, is part of an international communication series published by Iowa State University Press. For anyone, certainly in the classroom, this book is a valuable resource to learn from qualified observers more about the ethics and hazards of global journalism.
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 had once worked for me in the late 1970s trying to keep alive a hard-hitting watchdog, investigative alternative weekly in this capital city. At the time, Jackson, who is white, was also teaching at predominantly black Tougaloo College.
Our little weekly, The Capital Reporter, located in a one-story glass front office 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 business and governmental establishment.
However, our experiences were just a cakewalk compared to the horrendous story of what Colombian journalists have long endured at the hands of the murderous, powerful drug lords who target the press as their major threat in that supposedly democratic nation.
Remember, this is a country where the U.S. has spent billions of dollars over the last 20 years in a "war" to interdict or slow the huge drug traffic that flows out of Colombia primarily to a ready U.S. market.
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 with Colombian soldiers in December, 1989, great relief swept through the country and especially the newsrooms of the Colombian press.
Journalists who hoped life would improve after Gacha's departure, Jackson writes, were sorely disappointed as the nation remained wracked with violence, not only from the drug mob but the left-wing guerrillas who now control 40 percent of the country.
Forty-three journalists lost their lives during the 1990s, he says, and as late as May 2000 the country's most noted investigative reporter, Judith Lima, was kidnapped, raped and beaten. Yet, Jackson reports, the press in Colombia, which is read religiously by the nation's 40 million population, "continues to speak out."
Bernard Nezmah, former editor of Slovenia's Mladina magazine and now a philosophy professor, relates the dangers which 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 on the edges of professional ethics, using sarcasm as his principle weapon in forcing Stane Dolanc, a quasi-god of Yugoslav politics and onetime Communist to step down.
In a series of stories on Dolanc, Nezmah used such risky techniques as juxtaposing a photo of Al Capone next to one of Dolanc, who bore a striking resemblance to the one-time American racket boss. Surprisingly, Nezmah didn't encounter legal trouble from Dolanc, once noted for using iron-fisted tactics on the press.
But his biting sarcasm of a Slovenian mayor was less appreciated and landed Nezmah in deep legal hot water, from which he was given a one-month sentence in jail. The judge suspended his jail time only on the condition that for a year Nezmah stop writing critically.
Protests against the ruling were heard all across Europe, contending it forbade sarcasm as a literary device. However, a higher court denied his appeal. Finally in the Supreme Court the judgment was nullified.
Jerry Mitchell, The Clarion-Ledger's star (and only) investigative reporter who has won praise nationally for his relentless pursuit to reopen some of the South's worst 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.
From the outset, Mitchell makes clear, "I am a muckraker. I know. I know. It is not fashionable to be a muckraker anymore."
Many people misunderstand what the term means, he adds: "They think it is the press peeping through the windows of celebrities." Such keyhole tactics, Mitchell says, are not what muckraking really is, "and I detest them as much as anyone."
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 some of his major 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."
