A JOURNALIST'S ROLE IS PERILOUS, IN ANY LANGUAGE

Fellow journalist and columnist Joe Atkins, whose day job is teaching
journalism at Ole Miss, has edited an important new volume of 20
essays from journalists around the globe dramatically illustrating
how a free press which many Americans take for granted is an
endangered concept worldwide.

In "The Mission/Journalism, Ethics and The World," contributors share
experiences which prove the theme that reporters worldwide have a
common bond: To get the story and tell it, often against great odds
and putting their lives at risk.

Atkins, whose Mississippi connection goes back to his reporting days
on the old Jackson Daily News in the 1970s and later in the
Washington bureau of Gannett newspapers before entering academia,
ties together the overriding "mission" message of the book with
several of his own contributions.

The project is part of an international communication series
published by Iowa State University Press.

Perhaps no other place in the world, and certainly nowhere else in
our own western world, is life more dangerous for journalists than in
Colombia, South America, from where Stephen Jackson, editor of the
country's largest English-language newspaper, weighs in with his
harrowing account.

Jackson worked for me in the late 1970s, trying to keep alive a
hard-hitting, investigative, alternative weekly in this capital city.

Our little weekly, The Capital Reporter, located in Jackson's
warehouse district, four times had its plate-glass window smashed,
and was shot into by night-riders after we riled the Klan, along with
some belligerent elements of the establishment.

However, our experiences were a cakewalk compared to what Colombian
journalists have long endured at the hands of the murderous, powerful
drug lords in that supposedly democratic nation.

In a wave of terrorism orchestrated by the drug mob during the latter
1980s, Jackson writes, a leading candidate for president of Colombia
was gunned down; news reporters and even an editor of El Espectador,
a major Bogota newspaper noted for its relentless anti-drug campaign,
were assassinated.

When Jose Gonzalo Gacha, known as the billionaire "enforcer" of the
cocaine cartel, was killed in a gun battle in 1989, great relief
swept through the country and the Colombian press.

Journalists who hoped life would improve after Gacha's departure,
Jackson writes, were sorely disappointed. The nation remains wracked
with violence, not only from the drug mob but the left-wing
guerrillas who control 40 percent of the country.

Forty-three journalists lost their lives during the 1990s, he says,
and in May 2000 the country's most noted investigative reporter,
Judith Lima, was kidnapped, raped and beaten. Yet, Jackson reports,
the press in Colombia "continues to speak out."

Bernard Nezmah, former editor of Slovenia's Mladina magazine, relates
the dangers he and other journalists faced during, and even after,
the communist era in that small Balkan country.

To challenge a Balkan boss and "to make a journalistic contribution
to the democratization of the Slovenian society," Nezmah writes, he
skirted the edges of professional ethics, using sarcasm as his
principal weapon in forcing Stane Dolanc, a quasi-god of Yugoslav
politics and former communist, to step down.

Nezmah used such risky techniques as juxtaposing a photo of Al Capone
next to one of Dolanc, who bore a striking resemblance to the onetime
American racket boss.

Surprisingly, Nezmah didn't encounter legal trouble from Dolanc, but
his biting sarcasm of a Slovenian mayor landed him in legal hot
water, and he was given a one-month jail sentence. The judge
suspended his jail time on the condition that Nezmah stop writing
critically for a year.

Protests against the ruling were heard all across Europe, contending
it forbade sarcasm as a literary device. Finally, in the Supreme
Court, the judgment was nullified. It made legal history in Slovenia
and became a major breakthrough for press freedom.

Jerry Mitchell, The Clarion-Ledger's star (and only) investigative
reporter, who has won praise nationally for his relentless push to
reopen civil rights crimes for which perpetrators have long gone
unpunished, describes the role of a "muckraker," a long-honored tool
of the trade that is sorely missing from modern American journalism.

Many people misunderstand the term, he says, "They think it is the
press peeping through the windows of celebrities." Such keyhole
tactics, Mitchell says, are not muckraking. The role of the bona fide
muckraker long ago was summed up as the reporter's role to "comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

He recounts the experience of spending seven hours interviewing
(mostly listening to the rantings of) Byron De La Beckwith, the
long-suspected assassin of civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers, a crime
for which the old racist was finally convicted after 30 years of
freedom. Mitchell's key to unraveling the truth in his investigative
pieces is not to prejudge a source, but to hear him out. "Just
because someone is nuts, just because he has a personality so
offensive that you feel need of a shower later, doesn't mean that
person can't be a valuable source."

"Mission" contains warnings that many American journalists wrongly
believe the U.S. model of a free press should be adopted by the
global press in this era of emerging democracy.

John C. Merrill, professor emeritus of the University of Missouri,
sees the world leaning to a new journalism paradigm that stresses
"order and social harmony," not old-style U.S. press libertarianism.
Merrill (who has a Mississippi background) sees the drift toward
authority-centered press, largely because others perceive too much
chaos in the American press.