Melita M. Garza
Professional Freedom and Responsibility Chair
Texas Christian University
melita.garza@tcu.edu

For Capital Gazette staffer Chase Cook’s determined words, “we are putting out the damn paper tomorrow,” I offer this translation: the free press lives. On Thursday, June 28, 2018, Cook, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, was on a day-off when a murderer took a shotgun to the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, killing five of Cook’s colleagues. In a blink of an eye, Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, and Rebecca Smith, all dedicated to truth telling and community journalism, were gone.

The violence leveled against the Capital Gazette is still a relative rarity in the United States compared to many other countries, even in an era of increasingly strident anti-media rhetoric. Nonetheless, the issue of journalists’ safety was top of mind for me when these five Capital Gazette employees were slain. Just two days before the shooting, I was at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., attending an awards ceremony honoring freelance conflict journalist James W. Foley, a Medill and Marquette graduate who was murdered in 2014 by ISIS in the Raqqa region of Syria. The awards’ ceremony, put on annually since his death by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, is one way the organization honors the storytelling of intrepid reporters and highlights its own work to insure the safety of journalists, whether working at home or internationally.

Tellingly, the keynote speaker, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews, turned first to journalism history to provide some context to discuss the dangerous life that Foley and other journalists often face. Matthews mentioned “people like Ernest Hemingway on the way back from covering the Civil War in Spain; Ernie Pyle, who told the life of the average GI in World War II and was killed telling that story, (and) Neil Sheehan, who exposed the great shining lie of the Vietnam war.” There are of course, others he might have mentioned, including Dickey Chapelle, the brilliant war photographer who was killed in Vietnam in 1965, or Ruben Salazar, the Spanish-language KMEX TV reporter and former Los Angeles Times staff writer killed in 1970 by a law enforcement officer while covering a Chicano Vietnam war protest, or the five Vietnamese immigrant journalists assassinated in the United States between 1981 and 1990, whose murders remain unsolved. There are more recent examples, among them Marie Colvin, an American journalist working for the Times of London who was killed covering the Syrian Civil War in 2012, and Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach, who was killed in 2017 while documenting murders in her home state of Chihuahua.

And while Matthews might have added more in the way of historical background, he did note, however, the important distinction between conflict journalists and war correspondents. “Unlike the war correspondent” conflict journalists “are not only reporting behind enemy lines, there are no lines,” he said. In retrospect, as the events at the Capital Gazette have reminded us once again, there are no lines, even for domestic reporters. Truly there never were. In the United States, the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837 in Alton, Illinois, may have been the earliest such effort to violently silence the voice of journalism.

Beyond history, Matthews added much from a perspective rarely brought to the table in the journalism field. Matthews spoke about a central element he had in common with Foley: a Jesuit education. Both he and Foley grew up knowing the lives of the Saints, “especially the martyrs who endured the unimaginable at the ends of their lives,” Matthews said. “James knew the dangers of reporting war in Libya and Syria. Then he went back again and again knowing those dangers. When he met his end, squarely, in the face, he replaced the dashing face of the foreign correspondent with the stoic face of moral courage.”

To draw the face of moral courage, Matthews once again turned to Hemingway, this time taking a page from For Whom the Bell Tolls. He reflected on the heroic character of Robert Jordan, the American dynamiter fighting in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. “Robert Jordan said he could spot a traitor… He said he could always spot a traitor because they had a sadness that comes before the sellout—sadness in their face.” This emotion, Matthews said, was not visible in Foley.

“When I look at my wallet, at a picture of James Foley, I don’t see sadness,” Matthews continued. “I don’t see what Hemingway knew and was worried about. I see the opposite. In the many times I have looked at that picture— at that young man’s face…. I see a stoic resolution. It says to me:  I will not show fear. I will not show defeat. I can see that you are taping all this. That my captors are going to use all this. I know it will find its way home to my country, to my friends, to my mom and dad. I am going to be strong and resolute and loyal every second of this. Loyal to what brought me here, to this dangerous land, to these captors, to this dire fate. I’ll be true to what I was brought up to be. And true to what brought me here and I wanted to do—to find and show the truth.”

While most of us have not confronted, and will likely never face, such harrowing situations, there is still much that we can do. The issue of journalists under siege needs a more prominent spot on our research, teaching, and professional collaboration agenda. During the 2018 AEJMC Conference in Washington, D.C., the Commission on the Status of Women and the AEJMC Council of Affiliates sponsored the research panel: “Under Attack: Threats, Challenges, and Gender Bias Facing International Female Journalists.” At pre-conference—the time of this writing—the scheduled speakers were Carolyn M. Byerly of Howard University; Celeste González de Bustamante of the University of Arizona; Kimberly Adams, a senior reporter with Marketplace; Hannah Allam, a national reporter with Buzzfeed; and Suzanne Franks, a journalism professor at the City University London.

The topic had one other prominent place on the AEJMC program, courtesy of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which scheduled a breakfast for conference participants to learn about and offer feedback on the foundation’s Journalists’ Safety Guide.

Moral courage, though, has no standard guide. Therefore, we can and should emphasize that journalism is not only a craft, but also a calling and a spirit. Journalism is not entirely alone as a field offering more than a mere job. Matthews noted this at the close of his Newseum speech when he held Foley up as a role model. “I want my children to be this stoic, to possess this moral courage. Because years ago, in all those years of Catholic school, of studying the martyrs, I read of such heroic souls as his.”

Two days after Matthews said these words, the Capital Gazette’s Chase Cook, in the face of the horror that took the lives of five of his colleagues, exhibited his own form of journalistic stoicism when he tweeted with moral certainty that an assassin’s bullets wouldn’t stop the presses.

Left to right: Mike Boettcher, war correspondent, OU Gaylord visiting professor, Alexandra Stratton, OU Gaylord 2017 grad and Bloomberg reporter, Gloria Noble, OU student; Melita M. Garza, TCU professor; Hannah Allam, OU Gaylord 1999 grad and Buzzfeed national reporter; John Schmeltzer, OU Gaylord professor; Madeline Roper, senior, OU Gaylord