Imagine you’re a lawyer coming back from a business trip overseas.
The border agent at the airport takes your passport and asks your business.
“I’m an attorney,” you say.
“So you chase ambulances,” the agent replies, still staring at your passport.
“Excuse me?”
“So you chase ambulances,” the agent insists.
It sinks in. The agent despises your profession, and he’s making a passive-aggressive point, enjoying his power to detain you. “You say you’re a lawyer, and that means you chase ambulances, right?”
You have a meeting to get to, and frustrated at being held at the door of your own country, you decide to go ahead and demean yourself — a little. “Yes, I’m a lawyer, and some people would say that means I chase ambulances.”
But the agent is having none of it. “So you chase ambulances?”
“For the purposes of expediting this conversation, OK, I chase ambulances.”
If this hypothetical situation seems absurd, you’re getting the point.
But substitute “lawyer” with “journalist” and “chase ambulances” with “write propaganda,” and you have a script for what an American journalist says happened to him last week at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.
Ben Watson, a reporter with the national security news outlet Defense One returning from an assignment in Denmark, said a Customs & Border Patrol denied him entry until he heard what he wanted to hear. The CBP is investigating the incident, the latest reported by journalists claiming unfair detention and harassment by Trump administration border officers.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette projects editor Sonny Albarado, linking to a powerful protest by the Society of Professional Journalists, boiled it down in a tweet:
Harassing journalists at our borders must stop. Must. Stop. And CPB and TSA workers held accountable. https://t.co/5de2rQwP7y
— Sonny Albarado (@SAlbarado) October 7, 2019
“Harassing journalists at our borders must stop. Must. Stop. And CBP and TSA [Transportation Security Administration] workers must be held accountable.”
Another Sonny, Carlton M. “Sonny” Rhodes, a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, noted that Watson’s allegation hasn’t been independently confirmed. But if true, he said, it’s appalling. “Requiring a journalist to admit to being a propagandist is like making a politician admit to being a liar, or requiring a banker to confess to being a thief.”
Rhodes devoted a long career to reporting and editing the news, then teaching others how to do it well and honorably. When I met him he was going over notes in the old Arkansas Gazette newsroom in fall 1980, a 35-millimeter camera slung around his neck. Later he and I worked together at the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway and at the Democrat-Gazette.
“This [incident] comes close on the heels of a Buzzfeed News reporter’s being denied access to an immigration court in Texas and reports of other challenges to journalists who are just trying to do their jobs,” Rhodes told Arkansas Business. “While troubling, this disregard for constitutional rights is not surprising, given the president’s disdain for any information that doesn’t massage his ego.”
The president who made “fake news” a battle cry for his base has now turned to “corrupt news,” which lacks the same ring but echoes a theme. “His calling the media the ‘enemy of the American people’ was irresponsible, and we are increasingly seeing the effects of his irresponsible behavior,” Rhodes said.
SPJ, formerly Sigma Delta Chi, has a strong chapter in Arkansas, embracing both professionals and students. The group’s national president, Patricia Gallagher Newberry, said in a statement that vilifying journalists and discounting their work threatens American democracy. “This is a disturbing pattern … that prevents journalists from doing their jobs of informing the public about what’s happening. And it happens more than we know, in small towns and big cities across the country. When cries of ‘propaganda’ and ‘fake news’ are repeated enough, it chips away little by little at this pillar of democracy.”
She’s disturbed that “so many people” are willing to cast aside a free press, along with its mission of holding the powerful accountable. She also urged journalists facing legal battles in these kinds of cases to apply for help from the SPJ Legal Defense Fund.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but justice in the legal system sometimes requires the checkbook.
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