This is crucial history, David. Thanks for all the reminders of fraught times. This belongs in your memoir! The only quibble I have is about the idea that a journalist knows s/he is doing things right if there's fire "from both sides." I have gotten allergic to Both Side-ism. Sometimes criticism, even from someone you consider a wack job, means you got it wrong. In this case, you and Lowell, sympathetic to the BPP, started out to show how the FBI invited division but as you, Kate, and Paul got in more deeply you could see this other angle. It's not that, as journalists, we're less advocacy oriented. It's that our ethos -- our politics too -- is informed by fidelity to the journey of discovery. And to sharing every important thing with our readers, come what may. Even if it upends our own expectations. Does that sound right?
You have put it better than I could, Doug. The division into "sides" is truly toxic to the search for truth and justice. Once too many people become invested ideologically, there no longer is any sense of shared truth they can agree with. And that is how democracy -- and the honest journalism that sustains it -- dies.
This is crucial history, David. Thanks for all the reminders of fraught times. This belongs in your memoir! The only quibble I have is about the idea that a journalist knows s/he is doing things right if there's fire "from both sides." I have gotten allergic to Both Side-ism. Sometimes criticism, even from someone you consider a wack job, means you got it wrong. In this case, you and Lowell, sympathetic to the BPP, started out to show how the FBI invited division but as you, Kate, and Paul got in more deeply you could see this other angle. It's not that, as journalists, we're less advocacy oriented. It's that our ethos -- our politics too -- is informed by fidelity to the journey of discovery. And to sharing every important thing with our readers, come what may. Even if it upends our own expectations. Does that sound right?
You have put it better than I could, Doug. The division into "sides" is truly toxic to the search for truth and justice. Once too many people become invested ideologically, there no longer is any sense of shared truth they can agree with. And that is how democracy -- and the honest journalism that sustains it -- dies.