About a week ago, I got a cryptic message on Facebook’s Messenger app from Ed Symkus, a longtime arts journalist who had been a colleague in the 1980s when I worked at The Tab.
“I’ve recently been searching through stuff I’ve accumulated, giving it away, and making room for new stuff,” he wrote. “I just found something—very small—that absolutely has your name on it (figuratively). Please send along your mailing address if you’d like it to be part of your stuff.”
Who could resist, particularly because although I hadn’t spoken with Ed in years (maybe decades), I always learned from him and, more recently, had been enjoying his Facebook posts about Boston’s music scene in the late 1960s and 1970s.
“Dare I ask what it is,” I responded.
“You dare not,” he replied.
And so it came to pass that on Wednesday, a thin package appeared. Inside was plate block that turns out to be today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp, issued on April 10, 1947, it portrays Joseph Pulitzer, who was born on April 10, 1847. Pulitzer, of course, was a newspaper publisher first in St. Louis and then in New York, who, along with William Randolph Hearst, pioneered so called “yellow journalism,” which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. But Pulitzer also was a visionary, whose estate provided the funding for the journalism’s top honor, the Pulitzer Prize.
It’s striking in these hyper-partisan times to pause and reflect on what Pulitzer said about the role of journalism in a democracy.
“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together,” he once wrote. “An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.”
However, he warned, “a cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”
This last point, is so important, so let’s draw on of his quotes so he can restate it:
“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.”
The last several years, and the present all underscore both the dangers Pulitzer warned of and the possibilities he hoped for. In many respects, the news ecosystem (which extends far beyond what we used to call the media) is extraordinarily debased. On the other hand, the last few years have also seen the important role that high quality journalism can play against darker forces.
Though he thrived on sensationalism, Pulitzer was, as good journalist should be, a reformer at heart. “I will always fight for progress and reform,” he once wrote, “never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties…always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
It’s fitting then, the journalism’s highest prize is named after a man who embodied the best of what journalism can be but also did so in ways that never lost sight of the fact that journalism also is a business that relies on readers and advertisers as well as on dedicated people doing their jobs.
I stumbled across a wonderful illustration about this in a recent Cincinnati Enquirer article about Jim Borgman, who in 1991 won the Pulitzer Prize for his delightful editorial cartoons, which had appeared in the Enquirer. Borgman recalled that the paper’s publisher arranged for his family, his mother, and his sister to be on hand when the award was announced. “It was kind of like going to heaven and you see all the people you love all at once,” he told Kevin Necessary, author of the retrospective piece .
Let’s let Borgman and Necessary take it from here by quoting at length from the piece:
“‘But let me tell you a story,’ [Borgman] added. ‘Our house is beginning to fill up with flowers. People are sending balloons. And you get this kind of crazy feeling of being the center of attention and everyone is toasting you and it kind of plays with your head.
And about two days later I’m at home and the phone rings. And the voice on the other line says, ‘Is this Jim Borgman?’ I say, ‘Yes, it is.’
It was The New York Times calling. ‘How are you doing today?’ Jim said the voice on the other line asked. Jim replied, ‘I can’t even begin to explain. My house is full of balloons and flowers, and I’m seeing all kinds of people that I haven’t seen in years and hearing from everyone. And I’m just so grateful and I’m so thrilled. I couldn’t be happier.’
Jim said there was a pause on the other line. Finally, the woman from the Times said, ‘Well, that’s nice. I was just calling to see if you wanted to get home delivery of The New York Times.’
‘You just go right back to your place, you know?’ Jim said.
‘But what a great day,'”
In the end, of course, that’s what good journalists do. They go back to the places they need to be to do the work that needs to be done. As Pulitzer once observed, “a journalist is the lookout on the bridge of the ship of state. He notes the passing sail, the little things of interest that dot the horizon in fine weather. He reports the drifting castaway whom the ship can save. He peers through fog and storm to give warning of dangers ahead. He is not thinking of his wages or of the profits of his owners. He is there to watch over the safety and the welfare of the people who trust him.”
Thanks Ed, for the reminder of all this and more.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.