Sunday, September 21, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:07 AM]Ho! A journalist!
(Everyone and their siblings have already linked to this, so if you're reading this you've probably already seen it). John Burns on the press and its responsibilities:
Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing.As various people have already remarked, this makes an interesting bookend with Eason Jordan's piece about how CNN just couldn't help slanting its news for years to accommodate a dictator.
We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away.
