National Catholic Reporter Announces It Will Restrict Its Commenting Services, Due to "Dramatic Increase in Trolls and Disruptive Comments"

Last week, I pointed you to some valuable (and worrisome) commentary about how trolls are trashing open discussion spaces online and causing some news sites to shut down their commentary threads. 

David Carr on the Importance of the Little People to Journalists Seeking Truth

New York Times journalist David Carr, who died yesterday, talks about his first big break as a young journalist investigating police brutality against African-American residents of Minneapolis: Carr notes, 

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "High Time for Catholic Publications" to Include Women in Leadership Structures

(One of the good droppings): Heidi Schlumpf, commenting at National Catholic Reporter on the lack of women's representation in the leadership structures of leading U.S. Catholic publications:

And Another Quote: "The Whole Point of the Professional Journalistic Creed Is to Form a Closed Circle of Gatekeepers"

Scott Tucker

And yet another quote: Scott Tucker at Truthdig on (mainstream) journalism as a form of priestcraft for states whose spectacles demand devoted servants--not to mention golden calves, incense, and human sacrifices burnt on sacrificial pyres:

New York Times Staff Openly Critique (Their Own) Biased Journalism

It would be interesting to know whether the Occupy movement--particularly in New York City--has helped raise the awareness of New York Times employees who recently wrote an open letter to their boss calling for more honest and thorough news reporting by their publication.*  And for less bought-and-paid-for coverage of the news, with wealthy corporations calling the shots as the paper does its reporting.

Glenn Greenwald on Cronkite's Legacy: Character and Integrity

As a follow-up to my tribute to Walter Cronkite yesterday, I’d like to note Glenn Greenwald’s very fine article “Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did.” Greenwald contrasts the craven fawning of contemporary journalists, faced with the lies and unethical behavior of the rich and mighty, with the willing of Walter Cronkite to speak the truth even when it was inconvenient for him to do so—and to search for that truth beneath the mountain of rhetorical garbage that power often heaps atop inconvenient truths in order to make those truths in accessible.

Greenwald notes,

In fact, within Cronkite's most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today's modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.

As he points out, asked in 1996 if he had any regrets following his retirement, he answered,

What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation.

Cronkite was referring here to the journalistic standards that journalists of integrity like himself developed, as they learned to spot and to name the lies hidden in much official government discourse about the Vietnam War—an integrity that vanished from American journalism in the final decades of the 20th century.

And then Greenwald adds,

It's impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite's death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.

Amen. And our country (and world) are much the poorer for the legacy those pompous baritone talking heads are leaving us, when they could have followed in the footsteps of Cronkite instead. Mr. Bush and his criminal cronies could not have come to power and remained in power without the active complicity—and immoral abdication of journalistic integrity—of mainstream American journalists in the final decades of the 20th century, who have traded in the heritage of Walter Cronkite and Molly Ivins for, well, the mess we have now, all glitter and no substance, all spin and little grit.

The true heirs of Walter Cronkite are few and far between in the American media today: Paul Krugman, Leonard Pitts, Bill Moyers, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Bob Herbert, etc. The rest are dross, whose willingness to toe the party line, lazy refusal to delve beneath the surface, cozy self-serving connections to the rich and famous, and blowsy pontifications constitute the antithesis of real journalism.

Walter Cronkite: In Memoriam

We weren’t, God knows, a conventional family. For one thing, we were Southern, and that put us well outside the social mainstream. For another, we might or might not, on any given day, gather for supper without my father mysteriously absent from the table. He was frequently away, off on one of his periodic, unannounced jaunts, holed up drunk in a hotel room somewhere, with or without his woman du jour.

During those times, we ate in total silence, never sharing what any of us felt about the situation, the embarrassment of the calls from the court, saying he had missed a hearing, or calls from his law partner, asking if any of us knew how to contact him. Or, in my case, the relief—relief not to have him in the house, with his glowering, accusing presence that communicated to me without fail what a disappointment I was to him, the sissy son who couldn’t play football or baseball if his life depended on it, but who, strangely (and this was somehow shameful to my father), excelled at fishing and hunting, who could find his way around the woods even at night, when other boys remained lost and helpless on scouting trips designed to teach us self-sufficiency in the wild.

No, we weren’t conventional, so we didn’t always have all the rules that governed the table and television behavior of other families around us. Like one down the street where each person at table was required to say something, anything, in a daily ritual of “sharing” and “conversation-making” that sent me into a panic anytime I was invited to eat with these folks. Just as their habit of giving each person a bowl of popcorn for his- or herself, with a spoon to eat it, sent me into a spin when I spent the night there . . . . Needless to say, in that tightly controlled Calvinist family, with its hypochondriac, exercise-addicted father, television during meals was strictly forbidden.

We didn’t have any specific rule about television during supper, though my father might, depending on the severity of his hangover on a particular evening, jump up and turn off the t.v. set, announcing that civilized people don’t watch television while they eat. Our table rules—and they were legion—were more confined to niceties like posture, or how one held a fork, or whether one offered the last item on a platter to everyone else before taking it for oneself, or whether one chewed with a closed mouth and kept his extra arm in his lap, since strong and able people did not lean their elbows on the table.

In my memory, television began to insinuate itself into our suppers only gradually, during the Civil Rights and Vietnam era. With Walter Cronkite. Before that time, we didn’t watch t.v. as we ate—in part, because we didn’t even have a television set until I was well into grade school, and who would have wanted to try watching those queasy-making black and white splotches and lines when he ate, anyway?

With Walter Cronkite, news became imperative, even when it interrupted our mealtimes. Since the news hour coincided with our supper hour, we had no choice except to watch as we ate, and we did so voraciously—watch the news, that is, as we chewed the meatloaf or tuna casserole, enjoyed the pole beans with new potatoes and fresh-sliced tomatoes. We needed to know about the church bombings in Birmingham, the civil rights activists who had mysteriously disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. We needed to know because these stories were part of our own story.

As white Southerners, we were inextricably involved in the massive social shift underway in our country, with its explosive tension points in places like our neighboring states of Alabama and Mississippi—Alabama, the state in which my mother’s father had been born, Mississippi, the state in which he had grown up. We could not escape these stories, because they were our stories.

And because they were our stories, we needed to discuss them as we listened to Mr. Cronkite around our supper table. What to do? How to handle the demand to change—seemingly overnight—everything we had been taught to believe about race, about social rank and order, about God’s arrangement of the world? Was it possible to call Beulah Mrs. Jameson without sounding like a fool when the insincere words fell out of our mouth?

And, increasingly, as I began to think with an adult mind about what was happening around me and dared to challenge my father during these dinner-table confabs: why were the roads in our neighborhood paved, when those in the black community next to us were unpaved? Why did we insist on believing that God had consigned Ham’s descendants to perpetual servitude, rather than believing that we ought to do to others what we hoped to have done to ourselves? What did the bible mean, when it was full of so many contradictory passages? Which ones demanded attention, and which belonged to bygone cultural eras?

Through it all, the reassuring voice of Walter Cronkite droned on in the background, assuring us that, no matter how horrific the events we saw that night on the t.v. screen—the bombed-out church, the Vietnamese village on fire with napalm—the world turned upside down still had some meaning. Some sanity prevailed somewhere, perhaps someplace like his native Missouri, our neighboring state to the north, which managed to remain down-home and quasi-Southern without the violent baggage of places like Mississippi and Alabama, and, we feared, our own state of Arkansas.

This was a voice we could trust. It was a version of our own voice, with its laid-back cadences and its air of gentle, unassuming authority. It was the kind of voice my mother characterized as gentlemanly—a trait she knew when she saw it, though it was becoming rarer and rarer in the world in which we lived. Walter Cronkite had it, as did Adlai Stevenson. Lyndon Baines Johnson didn’t, though Lady Bird was a real lady. Bill Fulbright counted for a gentleman. Orval Faubus decidedly did not.

So Walter Cronkite did more than inform me, during those crucial formative years of adolescence in a sleepy Southern state far from the social mainstream, when the news was always from outside, always essential, if I wanted to find connections between my own small, closed world and the bigger world around me. He also molded me as a person, as a truth-seeker. As a gentleman. He functioned as an important role model, one to which I was told to aspire.

He was what a gentleman ought always to be. He refused to compromise, when it came to telling the truth. We admired that, even when we resisted the truth he wanted to bring to our dinner table on any given evening. And he was courteous to others, even to those with whom he obviously disagreed—qualities we ought to cultivate and practice in a world in which the rules seemed to be slipping, so that people seemed inclined to behave like animals towards each other, and not with humanity.

He never condescended. He put everyone at his ease. A gentleman can talk with equal composure to a president or a street sweeper. In the final analysis, a person’s social status doesn’t matter. What matters is the quality of that person’s character, something Rev. King kept stressing in every speech he gave, and how could we disagree, even when we knew he wanted to use that rubric to crack our social world wide open?

A man of integrity who was not afraid to go where his pursuit of the truth led him, even when that pursuit led him to speak out against his own friends, against those with whom he rubbed shoulders, those who sat with him at the tables of power. A journalist par excellence. And a human being par excellence.

That’s who Walter Cronkite was to me. That’s the man to whom my mother taught me to listen carefully as he delivered the nightly news in the 1960s, the man she encouraged me to become, no matter what vocation I chose in my adult life.

A man—a type of man—whose absence will leave a definite hole in the heart of our society. A man to remember, celebrate, and admire. And, insofar as possible, even in a postmodern world very different from the one in which he came of age, a man to emulate, who leaves behind a legacy to be carried on by other truth-tellers, since the challenge of seeking and telling the truth never goes away, no matter how seismic the shifts in the world around us.

The Journalist's Mission: To Discover Hidden Truth

I like Bill Moyers. Have always liked him. He strikes me as one of those rare voices of unalloyed integrity in American journalism, voices increasingly rare in an age of sound-bytes and commercial control of the media.

For that reason, I was delighted to learn early in April that Bill Moyers was awarded this year’s Ridenhour Courage prize to honor his commitment to costly truth-telling in journalism. Today’s Alternet website publishes Bill Moyers’ acceptance speech when he received the Ridenhour award on 3 April.

Some noteworthy comments from his speech:

We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

And yes, I believe journalism has a mission.

But I also tell them [i.e., youth considering a journalistic vocation] there is something more important than journalism, and that is the truth. They aren't necessarily one and the same because the truth is often obscured in the news.

Journalists have a mission. That mission is to seek and tell the truth at all cost, even when the powerful of the world try to silence your voice—as they will certainly seek to do.

As do the citizen journalists of Japan, about whom I blogged yesterday, Bill Moyers believes that “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 . . . and from whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.”

My view of what journalism is meant to be and can be at its best will forever be shaped by the memory of how one of my statewide daily newspapers, the Arkansas Gazette, met the challenge of the Central High integration crisis in 1957.

When Governor Faubus sought to close the school rather than allow it to be integrated, and President Eisenhower sent federal troops to assure that integration took place, any media outlet in Arkansas that defended integration paid a high price. The prevailing cultural climate of overwhelming racism assured that even the most moderate statement in favor of integration would be received as inflammatory—as beyond the pale.

It took courage to speak truth to power in that cultural climate. Though today business and church leaders of my state would like to take credit for having resisted ugly racism in the past, the truth is clear for anyone who cares to read our history: most white churches and almost all business leaders resisted integration, defended segregation, and justified our culture of racism.

It is easy to repent in retrospect, when we pay no price for doing so. It’s easy to cast ourselves in the role of the merciful when it costs us nothing to be merciful—nothing by way of taking sides in the battle of justice against injustice.

In that battle, the Arkansas Gazette did take sides: against the governor, against the business leaders of our state and most church leaders, against racism, hatred, and segregation. This statewide newspaper paid a price for choosing the path of costly grace. They lost subscribers. They were lambasted on all sides by powerful citizens of our state.

But they gave witness to the real craft and calling of journalism in an exemplary and unforgettable way. When newspapers in the South were poked, prodded, and pulled to tell stories that we all knew—stories of endemic oppression of people of color across our part of the United States—and when they had the courage to publish pictures of incidents we had all seen, we Southerners, of African Americans being turned away from lunch counters because of the color of their skin, the cultural tide began to shift in the whole nation.

It took courage to tell these stories, to print these pictures. It took courage to give a voice to an outside group—African Americans—who had previously been marginalized, objectified, denied a voice or any integrity at all by mainstream culture and the mainstream media. Those journalists who exhibited the rare courage demanded by the times will always be remembered as exemplars of their vocation. The others, the many, many apologists for the status quo—their names and faces have begun to fade into the history of the past century.

Why bring all of this up now, as Bill Moyers receives the Ridenhour prize? In the first place, I do so because what Moyers says in his acceptance speech echoes a point I have been stressing in this blog, in posting after posting.

This is that the truth is not just out there to be plucked like a ripe apple from a tree. It is not out there to be received in a handout of official soundbytes at a press-club luncheon.

The truth has to be sought, struggled for. In a climate in which the powerful always try to keep inconvenient truth hidden, in which the powerful can easily distort the truth and manipulate our consciousness such that we believe untruth, finding and telling the truth involves us in a battle. Those who seek and wish to tell truth are always engaged in an ongoing battle against lies, distortions, and manipulations designed to justify the cruelty and injustice of the status quo.

There are, of course, many aspects of the truth that we must battle today to discover—if we care about the truth at all; if we want to leave a better world for the next generation; if we want to build a healthier democracy in which more people have voice and access to power and privilege; if we wish to bind up wounds inflicted by the unjust. It is a battle to discover and publicize the American government’s use and approval of torture. It takes courage to pursue that shocking story, when so many powerful interest groups collude to keep the contours of the story hidden.

It is a battle to know what is happening in the war in Iraq, when we are not even allowed to see photographs of those who come home in coffins and body bags. It is an ongoing struggle to find out the truth about all those who are benefiting economically from this war. The channels through which money flows in our society are murky and hidden, particularly when the money is dirty. Anyone who tries to trace those channels will quickly find herself up against some powerful and ruthless interest groups who will use every dirty tactic in the book to keep the truth from coming out.

All these stories need to be told. On this blog, I keep maintaining that another story which also demands a hearing is the story of how our culture (and churches) treat gay and lesbian persons.

Because I grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights movement, I am always critically aware of the numerous, clear parallels between what was previously done to African Americans by my people, and what is done today to gay and lesbian persons. Just as African Americans and African-American stories could not obtain a hearing in the mainstream media, stories of the real, everyday lives of gay and lesbian persons are shut out of the media today. The mainstream media relegates “gay stories” to “the gay media,” thus assuring the continued marginalization of gay people and our stories, and assuring that our lives and stories remain hidden from people in the mainstream.

Just as anyone who challenged the prevailing cultural racism of the past, so today, anyone within mainstream culture who speaks out courageously on behalf of gay and lesbian human beings will pay a price. Church leaders who spoke out in the midst of the civil rights struggle lost donations; their church Sunday collections suffered. They received midnight visits and calls from rich members of their congregation who told them to cool it, to stop preaching a social gospel and concentrate instead on the “real” gospel of individual redemption.

Those midnight calls and visits continue today, when any mainstream church leader—especially in the American South—dares to raise her voice against oppression of gay and lesbian human beings. The threats to withhold donations go on today, just as they did in the past.

Grace is as costly today for churches that witness to Jesus’s redeeming mercy for all human beings by combating ugly injustice against some human beings, gay and lesbian ones, as it was in the past, if churches witnessed to Jesus’s redeeming mercy for all human beings by combating ugly injustice against people of color. It is just as difficult today to find, claim, and speak forth the truth about the real lives of gay human beings, in a church context, as it was for the churches of the past to find, claim, and speak forth the truth about the real lives of people of color.

The distortion of information, the machines that churn out a positive sewer of lies on a daily basis, is just as powerful today, regarding gay and lesbian human beings in our culture, as it was in the past, regarding African-American persons. Today, when I read what a Peter LaBarbera or an Elaine Donnelly or a Sally Kern says about me, about people I know, I can think only of the lurid flyers with which some kind Christian groups papered my high school in Arkansas in the late 1960s, when we finally integrated.

The flyers showed African-American men, lips accentuated, skin made as black as night, dancing with blond Southern girls. The text accompanying the pictures asked if this is what we really wanted Christian civilization, the civilization we had struggled so hard to build in the South, to come to.

Just as the LaBarberas, Donnellys, and Kerns of the world ask us today: is this what you really want Christian civilization to come to? Dirty, disease-ridden homosexuals showering with the flower of American manhood in military showers? Infectious, promiscuous homosexuals teaching your children, preying on them, converting them to their unhealthy lifestyle?

The tactics have not changed. The attempt to spread misinformation has not changed. The lies remain virtually the same, though the picture accompanying the lurid flyers telling us to fear forces that will cause the decay of Christian civilization shift, as it becomes convenient to target a different group: Jews, Muslims, people of color, women, gays.

And the price of seeking and speaking truth remains the same. Challenge the dissemination of misinformation, ask people to think, to talk respectfully with each other, to provide evidence for their “facts,” and you will meet fierce opposition.

You will be subject to slander, exclusion, misrepresentation. Your integrity will be questioned. You will be called a liar, even by those spreading ludicrous lies about you. You will be called a liar even when you value telling the truth far above precious jewels, and have a lifelong history of being a truth-teller.

This is the price any of us who are gay and lesbian, and who try to speak truth to power, pay. Sadly, we often pay that price right within the church context, right within Christian communities, within the churches where some of us continue to try to find a spiritual home and a welcoming Christian family.

If this is how those of us who are gay and lesbian are treated by many of our fellow Christians, if we ask for respectful dialogue based on truth and not on lies, is it any wonder that anyone who walks along with us pays a similar price? It takes courage to speak the truth, when many forces collude to keep the truth at bay.

For Christians who wish to be in solidarity today with gay and lesbian human beings, learning and speaking the truth about the real human lives of gay persons will continue to demand costly grace. My hat is off to you: thank you for your courage, your decency, your humanity.