The Darkness at our Door

Saw this today in a restroom at the university where I teach. It makes me think of what we are without journalism--earless, eyeless, brainless. And we're getting too close to that point.

The Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Democracy is not dead in the U.S. yet, but I feel the fever is getting serious. Too much has happened recently that points to the rising darkness.

President Trump joked this week at a political rally in Montana about Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge for attacking a reporter for The Guardian during a previous election campaign. Trump has called journalists enemies, but making a joke of an assault in the same news cycles dominated by the murder of a Washington Post columnist is beyond being obnoxious or thoughtless, Trump’s usual base level of discourse.

It’s dangerous.

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Turkey, two weeks ago. President Trump has finally started to admit he is dead, although he has been full of inconsistent conspiracy theories to explain it away in some politically convenient fashion. As is so often the case, our addled president awaits enlightenment from the darkest corners of Fox News before he, standing at the levers of power of the American government, can make nonsense of events.

I was not familiar with Khashoggi’s work, but he was an American journalist. True, not a citizen, but a legal resident of the United States working for The Washington Post. And he was killed for it.

It’s not the only sign of journalism’s decline in what increasingly seems like a noisy Dark Age. This is fall break at the university where I teach, and my wife and I took a couple of days off to travel to central Missouri to ride on the Katy Trail. While there, I stopped in the town where I had been a newspaper editor 30 years ago, and purchased a copy of the paper.

A not-local paper. Sad.

I almost wish I had not. The “local” paper was hardly local at all.

The sorry state of local journalism is a tragedy in this country. We are slowly closing our minds to the role that a town conscious can fulfill. And we are becoming too frighteningly like those countries in other parts of the world where the press is dull, official, and irrelevant.

Jamal Khashoggi had his last column published by The Washington Post. In it, he wrote eloquently of the Arab world’s need for a free press:

“The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices. We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.”

Erase the word “Arab.” In this now great again country, we suffer from poverty of mind, mismanagement by our top leader and poor education in small towns where local events are no longer covered by local journalists.

Jamal thought he was writing about Saudi Arabia. His words come too close to describing America today.

President Trump makes jokes about assaulting journalists, who he terms as “enemies.” And his fans, betraying their ignorance, cheer.

The enemy is those who enjoy siloed lives, isolated form the world as it is. I hope darkness is not closing in too much, although I find myself more filled with dread as the mid-term election approaches and the Trump base is fired up for all the wrong reasons.

I hope voters decide to turn the lights on.