Risking to Write

It’s been the week of journalism awards. Last Tuesday, the Courage in Journalism event. Then, last night it was PEN USA’s turn to give awards to some brave people in our profession

PEN also gave out a bunch of well-deserved literary awards, and some other special honors. But the heart of the evening has always been the Freedom to Write Award and the First Amendment Award

It’s the wee hours and I’m a bit champagne-addled, so I’ll make this short. But I don’t want to shut down the computer without introducing you to the two people who received those central awards:

This year, the First Amendment prize went to Jerry Roberts, the guy who resigned as executive editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press after the paper was bought by billionaire Wendy P. McCaw, a woman who seemed to believe that, purchasing a newspaper was sort of like purchasing a summer home in the Hamptons. You got to invite all your friends over, then you and they could do whatever you wanted. In McCaw’s case this meant dictating the papers content, as if it was her own private country club newsletter.

The News-Press wasn’t exactly the New York Times but, for years, it had been a fine and feisty paper, and editor Jerry Roberts felt honor-bound to do whatever he could to temper McCaw’s actions.

As Roberts put it: “Newspapers have a duty to honor the extraordinary powers granted them by the First Amendment through the process of exercising those powers in the public interest…” Finding himself in a situation where McCaw continued to demand that the staff violate the most basic of journalistic ethics, Roberts resigned. Then—as she seems to do whenever anyone crosses her—McCaw retaliated by smearing Roberts, linking him to child pornography, and suing him for big bucks.

And then things really started to get ugly.

Yet whatever difficulties might plague American journalists, they pale in the light of the threats and terrors that Freedom to Write winner, Sahal Abdulle, had to face every day to report the news in Mogadishu, Somalia for Reuters.

Here’s Abdulle’s poetic and heartbreaking description of one of the worst of those dark days.

I am in a car full of journalists driving from the funeral of a colleague murdered hours earlier in Mogadishu for doing his job. We don’t get far.

An explosion throws our vehicle up and fills it with excruciating heat. Black smoke billows about us. I can feel the pressure rushing up inside my clothes, my neck splits open.

Climbing from the smoking wreck, blood spits through the fingers I clamp to my throat.

It was a remotely detonated bomb. Death is often random in Mogadishu, but in this case we were the target.

Journalist, friend, and founder of local media house HornAfrik, Ali Iman Sharmarke, lies dead beside the wreckage.

Amid the chaos and pain, I scan the crowd, looking for a doctor to help, or maybe the killer.

Somalia has become one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a journalist. I spent the last year there, staying in my family house, during some of the worst violence to hit Mogadishu in the last two decades.

I saw countless burned bodies in hollowed-out houses, the corpses of 90-year-olds and infants ripped to pieces. I watched colleagues die trying to get the Somali story out to a world already jaded by wars in Iraq, Darfur and Afghanistan.

Riven by conflict since the 1991 ouster of a military dictator left Somalia in anarchy, Mogadishu is wracked by an Islamist-led insurgency against the government and its Ethiopian military allies.

My colleagues and I in Somalia often talked about why we did the job. Some of us had left lives and families in the West. Mine was in Canada.

Ali and I asked each other that question many times. He too had a Canadian passport. Ali believed until the end that he was giving Somalis a voice and, like me, kept coming back.

We all had our own way of coping. A motley crew of reporters used to hide out at my Mogadishu home. They teased me about the hours I spent every day with my eyes closed, blocking everything out, listening to John Coltrane.

When the violence woke us before dawn, I tended to my garden. I planted 72 new species this year. The Australian at head office in Nairobi called me The Constant Gardener.

I once forced a reluctant taxi driver to help me save a tortoise. It was caught in the crossfire on a city street. I adopted him. You need to protect something amid such danger…..