Thinking over here about the free press. What an ideal, what a human achievement.
You know the hallowed stories. The first investigative newspaper series is generally credited to W.T. Stead, whose “The Maiden Tribute of Babylon,” caused a sensation in 19th-century England. Stead was a rascally man and born crusader. In 1885, while editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he had become alarmed at what he’d seen and heard of widespread child prostitution in the streets and brothels of London. The story had been pretty much ignored; oddly enough, men in powerful positions hadn’t found it all that upsetting. But feminists and Christian reform groups did, and Stead, working quietly with them, launched a four-part exposé. As part of it he hired a 13-year-old prostitute to tell him her experience.
It blew the lid off Victorian London. Legislation was passed, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. Not much, maybe, but something. Stead paid a price: They threw him in jail for three months for procuring his teenage source. He emerged unrepentant, his prison uniform in his bag. Once a year he’d put it on and swan around town reminding everyone of what he’d done, and of the poor girls. Also to remind people to buy more newspapers. (To top off his story: He died on the Titanic, on his way to a peace conference; he was seen at the end helping women and children into the boats.)
Another story, also in England but for me closer to home. My late friend Harry Evans put his professional reputation on the line in the late 1960s and ’70s to investigate a drug that pregnant women were being prescribed to ease debilitating morning sickness. Over the years, evidence mounted: The drug was disfiguring children in the womb, they were born limbless and twisted up. Harry, then the editor of the Sunday Times, pushed the story, wouldn’t let go even in the face of financial repercussions and personal threats—“I will bury you,” a health minister told him.
When Harry found out damages had yet to be paid to the parents, he essentially took the whole story to the European Court of Human Rights, and won. Soon the parents were given 10 times the first and tardy offer. It didn’t end the pain, but it was something. Three decades later he was knighted by the queen for services to journalism; next month journalists from around the world will gather in London to honor Sir Harry’s legacy.
And there are the famous American stories. The Pentagon Papers revealed to the American people the conclusions the U.S. government had come to, in secret, about Vietnam. Which were utterly different from what it said in public. Talk about taking on the deep state. The Post and the Times went to the Supreme Court, which said, essentially, damn straight the American people have a right to know.
The best journalists are and always have been professionals who are simply trying to locate the truth, and tell it. They want to tell the people what they have a right to know about the world they live in. That is why you break the story, unearth the lie, ask the question, tell the yarn—“Hey Martha, listen to this!” You’re trying in your way to make the world more just.
I’ve been thinking recently about war reporters, who’d do anything to tell you what is really happening. Bob Capa, the photojournalist, was in the first wave on D-Day, and died when he stepped on a mine in Vietnam in 1954. Ernie Pyle, the GI’s journalist, won a Pulitzer for his World War II reporting in Europe and was killed in the battle of Okinawa, where the soldiers put up a memorial. “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle 18 April 1945.” Mike Kelly of the Atlantic was racing to the Baghdad airport, NBC’s David Bloom was with the Third Infantry Division as it bore down on Baghdad.
These, and many more, put themselves in danger because the people of countries at war deserve to know—must know, will base their views on knowing—what is happening on the ground.
So—to Evan Gershkovich, the Journal’s Moscow-based reporter who was arrested two weeks ago. He did his job in danger, as all reporters in Moscow do, operating under harsh press laws since the Ukraine war. There is every reason to be very worried about him. He has been charged with espionage, the first American reporter to be so charged since the Cold War. He is not in a regular prison but an FSB prison, meaning he’s subject to greater isolation.
I didn’t know him but know his work, which is enterprising and perceptive. Also varied: He covered everything from Siberian forest fires to Vladimir Putin’s relative isolation to the war’s economic toll.
Everyone knows he isn’t a spy. He is a journalist who is now a state hostage, held, it is generally assumed, for some future trade down the road. But maybe not: You never know with Mr. Putin.
An event in Evan’s support was held at Columbia University on Wednesday and got a good crowd, including reporters who’d been his friends and competitors in Moscow. Max Seddon of the Financial Times said not only are charges of espionage “absurd,” the Russians themselves “know they are false.” Valerie Hopkins of the New York Times, who worked with Evan for months as part of the bare-bones press corps, painted Moscow’s general air of suppression: A man had been arrested on the Metro recently when another passenger saw the wrong webpage on his phone, and reported him.
The Journal’s Elena Cherney spoke movingly of the self-questioning editors experience when a reporter is taken. David Rohde, of the New Yorker, who had been imprisoned for seven months by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008, said friends, family and colleagues will blame themselves and shouldn’t. “The only one responsible for the crime is Putin.”
It’s been pretty much established now that the order came from the top.
You, as a reader, can do a lot to help this good man. Here is a good place to start: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-you-can-use-social-media-to-support-evan-gershkovich-c7bb2167
But let me add something. It isn’t clear to whom—if anyone—Mr. Putin listens; it’s probably not those who immediately protested his action. But there is one group he might hear: those in Western journalism and politics who have, the past year, shown sympathy for Mr. Putin’s position, or who have made arguments he has agreed with, or who have expressed public skepticism about the Western response in Ukraine. They might have some pull here.
Commentators, political figures: If in the past year you have said things on U.S. airwaves that Mr. Putin agreed with or found helpful, the video clip of what you said was played over and over on Russian media. You are well known there, and well positioned to go on the world’s airwaves and, in speaking about Ukraine or Mr. Putin, weave in, in a way not easily edited out, that what is in effect Evan Gershkovich’s abduction, and his cruel and cynical imprisonment, is something you passionately protest and cannot accept. That whatever your foreign policy views they do not encompass sympathy for a hostage taking. And Mr. Putin is wrong.
J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, many others: You care about the free press, and have flourished within it. Protest what has happened here, sharply and repeatedly. Might it help? Who knows. Maybe not. But it’s something.