The people, armed with the truth, are trully the powerful

By Tim King

Trump was at it again last week. At a rally he based the press and journalists. Attacks on the press have been a trademark of Trump and is allies from Washington D.C. to Long Prairie the cowards, bullies, and would be dictators have attacked truth telling. To do battle with them and to banish their distortions and lies we must arm ourselves with the truth.

I wrote the essay below last  summer as I reflected on the state of journalism in America. We all have a lot of work to doc to avoid falling into the abyss that Turkey, Mexico, and Russia find themselves in.

-- Tim, 3/31/18

Last May 15th Javier Valdez was driving his car in his home state of Sinaloa, Mexico. Nobody knows what happened exactly but somehow another driver forced him to come to a stop. Then somebody got out of that vehicle, pulled Mr. Valdez from his car, and shot him dead. There’s no question who the killer was. It was one or the other of the drug gangs that Mr. Valdez wrote about regularly in his weekly newspaper, Riodice. Mr. Valdez, who was a highly respected and award winning journalist, also wrote for a French wire service. In Europe and in Mexico, when people wanted to know the truth about the drug gangsters, they sought out the reporting of Javier Valdez.

Journalist Javier Valdez Cardenas was murdered in Sinaloa
Mexico on May 15, 2017 by narcothugs. Foto from Wikipedia

Reporters who have dared to discover and then report the truth have long been the targets of thugs, gangsters and politicians. Javier Valdez was the seventh reporter killed in five months in Mexico. There the thugs and gangsters oppose the truth with bloody impunity because there is little difference between them and the politicians.

“The murder of Javier Valdez tells us that in Mexico the life of a journalist is completely worthless to those in power,” Estaban Illades, a fellow journalist and friend of Mr. Valdez, said.

I would say it somewhat differently, although the result is the same. In Mexico, and around the world, journalists who tell the truth about the powerful to the people - their readers - are feared by the powerful. The people, armed with the truth, are trully the powerful. The others, as I said, are just gangsters, thugs, and politicians who serve their own interests and do not serve the people. To protect their illegitamate power they kill journalists. They arrest Journalists. They intimidate journalists.

Take Turkey, for example. At the end of last year the government had imprisoned eighty-one journalist and closed more than one hundred news outlets. These journalists are behind bars, the government says, because they have been involved in “anti-state activity”. Now I don’t know if you or I have been involved in any anti-state activity lately because I don’t know what that is. But the crime that these journalist have committed is reporting the truth to the Turkish people. Your Turkish thugs, gangsters, and politicians can’t abide by that sort of so-called anti-state activity.

So it goes around the world. Take the United States, for example. On January 20th (2017) six reporters were arrested by the Washington D.C. police at Donald Trump’s inaugaration ceremony. Their crime was, I suppose, anti-state activity. They were covering the inaugaral protests with pencils, cameras and tape recorders. For that the U.S. Attorney charged them with rioting. Charges against five of the six reporters were dropped by the end of January but Aaron Cantu, a freelance reporter who was at the inaugral on assignment for a Santa Fe, New Mexico weekly  newspaper, is scheduled to go on trial this month. He faces a maximum penalty of seventy years in prison for wielding a pencil. Cantu’s problem is, it seems, that he was following, and reporting on, a group dressed in black that was breaking windows. Cantu was dressed in black as well and was arrested for being dressed in black.

Protest in Mexico City against the murder of
Javier Valdez Calderon - Photo from Wikipedia

With reporters under threat of being arrested for reporting the truth to the American people, the American President and his representatives have kept up a steady drum beat of abusive comments regarding reporters and the information outlets they work for.

“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” Donald Trump told CIA employees on January 21st, the first full day of his Presidency.

And on it went ad nauseum.

Then in May someone shot out the windows of the Lexington, Kentucky  Herald Leader and a Republican Congressional candidate in Montana physically assaulted a reporter for asking questions.

What I’ve been wondering is how many steps is it from a President and his altar boys repeatedly saying negative things about reporters to reporters being dragged out of their cars and shot? In the U.S. we insult reporters. We arrest reporters. We assault reporters. We shoot their windows out. What is the next step into barbarity?