On Monday I was writing about fancy toilets.
Today we’ve learned about Mr T’s habit of tearing up documents and giving them a water burial. Did I ever in a million years think a president would flush paper down a toilet like a toddler? The answer is NO. Is it fair to jump on a certain NewYork Times author for withholding that little nugget until her book is about to be published? Maybe.
When I first started writing for a newspaper back in the Berkshires, I was happy just to have a job other than pioneering-new-mom-on-the-side-of-a-mountain. Bob was off working crazy hours and I was left tending to the wood stove while making my own baby food with a tiny Mouli grinder. I loved researching and writing about “black ice,” and anything else my editor had to offer.
And by researching, I mean calling people up on an actual phone and asking them probing questions. Writing while the Bride napped, then bundling her up and getting in my all-wheel-drive to plow through snow to hand in my essay at the office, only to take my red-penned papers back up the mountain for rewriting. Yes, I know I’m starting to sound like an old codger.
The work of a newspaper reporter, no matter where they happen to live, is essential to a happy and healthy democracy. I watched the Washington Post reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, cover the Watergate story and take down a president IRT. They chased after the money and helped to uncover most of the secret tapes Nixon had hidden, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. Bob and I were just dating at the time, and I was writing for my own enjoyment.
Connie Schultz, a Twitter pen pal, received a Pulitzer Prize when she was writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2005. She had the audacity to ask some coat check girls where the money in their tip jars went after everybody left. She spoke to the management of the company, and wrote a most brilliant and truthful expository essay. The Pulitzer Board awarded her the Commentary Prize “…for her pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged.”
“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
https://robs1024.medium.com/journalism-is-not-activism-acedf41858c6
At the Berkshire Eagle, I knew I was in the midst of something sacred.
I asked my editor once if I should take a writing class, but I guess the nuns taught me well with all that sentence diagramming. He didn’t want me to “change my voice,” and over the years I never have. I’ve tried to connect the lines between what’s happening in our public life with my own private thoughts. Bob says I think in metaphor, and once told someone, “She writes about anything and everything.”
Which sounds bad until you remember I just wrote about toilets.
Last night we had dinner on the porch with cousin Peg who also happens to be a journalist. Turns out our little Bug is working on her school newspaper, so they had a lot to talk about under the outdoor heater! My granddaughter gets to interview teachers and ask them anything she wants!
I’ll have to tell the Bug about Woodward following the money, and Schultz asking young women about their tip jars. Journalism, at its best, is an honorable profession that can be dangerous at times. Now we’ve learned that Mr. T brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago when he left office; kinda pales when you compare this to Hillary’s emails about lunch plans.
Sometimes Bob would read a piece I was working on and ask me if I was ready to be, ‘fill in the blank’ – arrested, stalked, fired, or worse. I’d just laugh and say my phone number is unlisted. We didn’t have Twitter on our dumb phones back in the day.
In 2021, UNESCO reported 55 journalists around the world were killed. It’s not an especially high number on average, but the kicker is “Eighty-seven percent of all killings of journalists since 2006 remain unresolved… The organization noted too that women journalists also face a “shocking prevalence” of harassment online.”
And that’s what bothered me about the criticism of a certain NYTimes writer in the Twitterverse today. When does a journalist have a duty to inform?
MountainMornings 