James Risen makes a remarkably powerful speech upon receiving the 2014 Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism. Risen is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times who for the past six years has been resisting being forced to testify about his sources in the trial of government whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling despite threats of imprisonment by two different administrations now.
Here's a partial transcript:
I’m really proud to receive this award, not only because of the legendary figures in journalism who have received it before, but because of its namesake, Elijah Lovejoy. I think as both a journalist and someone who likes to study American history, I’ve long considered Lovejoy to be one of my heroes. And today, I think that his story is particularly instructive because it can provide so many parallels to the challenges that we face today, both as journalists and citizens in the post-9/11 world. In fact, I would argue that a study of the pressures that Lovejoy and other abolitionist writers and thinkers faced can help us step back and see more clearly what we are dealing with today in the post-9/11 world....
Elijah Lovejoy.... is really underappreciated in American history classes... I think that is because he was such an early pioneer. He was a disruptive force; that’s the language that we would use today. He became an abolitionist decades before abolitionism had any impact in the broader society, long before the Civil War overshadowed such early pioneers as Lovejoy.... As a minister he decided to publish a religious newspaper called the St. Louis Observer. He started out as a religious publisher but his hatred of slavery, which was all around him in St. Louis at the time, led him to begin to write about the need to abolish this institution in the 1830s. Just stand back and think about this. He was openly opposing slavery, publishing articles opposed to slavery three decades before the Civil War.
By doing so, he was committing the dangerous sin of challenging the conventional wisdom of his day....
When he was beginning to advocate for the freeing of the slaves, the abolitionist movement had not yet become a significant political force, certainly not what it became in subsequent decades. The handful of people in the country like Lovejoy who advocated for abolition were considered dangerous radicals, so far outside the mainstream of political and intellectual thought of their time that their mental stability was questioned.
By calling for an end to slavery, they were challenging a bedrock political assumption of the United States. The American economy, both north and south, including merchants in Boston as well as the planters in South Carolina, was dependent on slavery, either directly or indirectly, and so a basic prerequisite to being taken seriously in American politics at the time was to accept the continuation of state-supported slavery. To print attacks on slavery meant you were attacking the laws of the United States, and by publicly attacking the laws of the United States you were nothing more than a criminal....
Of course we now know that Elijah Lovejoy was on the right side of history....
But today, I think it is important to study Lovejoy and the other early abolitionist writers like William Lloyd Garrison and see what it’s really like to challenge the cement-like certainty of the conventional wisdom of the day, especially when it is constantly being reinforced by a mainstream press.
The conventional wisdom of our day is the belief that we have had to change the nature of our society to accommodate the global war on terror. Incrementally over the last thirteen years, Americans have easily accepted a transformation of their way of life because they have been told that it is necessary to keep them safe. Americans now slip off their shoes on command at airports, have accepted the secret targeted killings of other Americans without due process, have accepted the use of torture and the creation of secret offshore prisons, have accepted mass surveillance of their personal communications, and accepted the longest continual period of war in American history. Meanwhile, the government has eagerly prosecuted whistleblowers who try to bring any of the government’s actions to light.
Americans have accepted this new reality with hardly a murmur. Today, the basic prerequisite to being taken seriously in American politics is to accept the legitimacy of the new national security state that has been created since 9/11. The new basic American assumption is that there really is a need for a global war on terror. Anyone who doesn’t accept that basic assumption is considered dangerous and maybe even a traitor.
Today, the U.S. government treats whistleblowers as criminals, much like Elijah Lovejoy, because they want to reveal uncomfortable truths about the government’s actions. And the public and the mainstream press often accept and champion the government’s approach, viewing whistleblowers as dangerous fringe characters because they are not willing to follow orders and remain silent.
The crackdown on leaks by first the Bush administration and more aggressively by the Obama administration, targeting both whistleblowers and journalists, has been designed to suppress the truth about the war on terror. This government campaign of censorship has come with the veneer of the law....
It takes a long time to change the conventional wisdom in a culture, especially when there are powerful vested interests that do not want it to change.
Bringing about that change needs a vanguard of courageous pioneers who have a moral vision and are determined to spread it to others through their constitutional right to speak freely via the press.
And "the press" in "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" is surely not meant to mean its current narrow interpretation of only professional journalists, the employees of the corporately captured commercial media. Verbal speech and speaking in print and in all the various forms possible online are simply different forms of communication. "The press" is a rhetorical figure of speech, a synecdoche, for speech itself.
Risen's speech itself is only seventeen minutes, the rest is a question-and-answer section. I'd encourage everyone to watch the video of it and to share it as widely as possible.