Re: [Marxism] Take London-based Poet Stephen Spender...

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony Lawless writes: "Joaquin: You, like most people, believe that there are
some things you ought to know and some things you have no reason to know.
You also believe that there are some things other people ought to know,
merely because YOU know them even though you deny that OTHER PEOPLE have the
right to think you ought to know some other things yourself merely because
THEOSE OTHER PEOPLE know them. For example, you think that Alexander
Cockburn ought to know about Larouche and even to share your dismissive
attitude toward him and his publication. But you stridently deny that you
need to know anything about the CIA scandal involving Stephen Spender merely
because TONY knows this and claims that you ought to too."

I thank Tony Lawless for so THOROUGHLY and COMPLETELY missing the point.

I neither insist nor expect Cockburn to know anything about anything IN
GENERAL.

But as a member of the world's second oldest profession, as a fellow
scribbler and perpetrator of "journalism," I DO HAVE very specific
expectations when he EXERCISES that profession and writes for the public.

In Spanish academia, we call people like Cockburn and myself "social
communicators" or "professionals in social communication." Leaving aside the
pompous pretentiousness of the terms, the word "social" in there carries
with a very important duty.

At the National Press Club building in Washington DC there is a plaque with
the Journalist's Creed, supposedly what we have instead of a Hippocratic
Oath. It states: 

"I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected
with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the
public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is
betrayal of this trust. 

"I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness
are fundamental to good journalism. 

"I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to
be true."

Cockburn's DUTY to have informed himself about LaRouche, his 21st Century
Science and Technology magazine, and Jaworowski's articles as a contributor
to that magazine from this idea that journalists have a SOCIAL
responsibility, or as is commonly said in English, that journalism is a
public trust, that we are trustees for the public with a DUTY to the public.

Quite simply, if Cockburn could not be bothered to become conversant with
these matters then he should not have written about them. Having undertaken
to place them before the public, he then ACQUIRED a duty to become himself
much more fully informed about them than the average member of the public.
That's presumably why we journalists get the big bucks -- to sift through a
lot of material, for hours --and sometimes days or weeks-- if necessary, to
provide members of the public who do not have the time to invest in every
event or controversy that interests them with a summary of what is --by our
lights-- most relevant and important.

There is no reason, it is true, that in his purely personal capacity,
Cockburn "had" to have investigated this. But having undertaken to write
about it, it was no longer a question of his personal interests, but of his
DUTY to INFORM rather than MISINFORM.

I have NOT undertaken to write about Spender or that Cold War scandal. In my
purely personal capacity, no reasonable demand can be placed on me, nor
expectation exist, that I should become more fully informed about it (though
I have, at least a little -- a tip of the hat to Louis for the material from
the archives). But should I undertake to write about it in a well-known
magazine, or produce a piece for television broadcast on it (for that's what
I really do nowadays -- TV) then I would be obligated to learn about it much
more fully, and know enough about it to justify each and every significant
editorial choice I made in putting the piece together.

More ambiguous are spaces like this one, or blogs. I do not think it
reasonable to require or expect that comrades investigate subjects they
write about in this much less formal sort of space with anything like the
thoroughness they OUGHT to bring to the task if they were writing, say, an
op-ed piece for the New York Times or a column for the Nation (as Cockburn
does). 

Blogs I believe do require more attention -- but taking into account the
character of the given blog. One that merely comments or points to items of
interest in the daily news flow are one thing; one that claims to, for
example, tell you whether someone like Jaworowski is to be trusted on the
science of CO2 measurement in ice cores dating back hundreds of thousands of
years has to be held to an entirely different standard.

But even here, on Marxmail, I think some minimal grounding of yourself in
the matter at hand is called for. Thus I vexed Hopson, or perhaps Sayan, I
can't remember exactly, for having failed to at least check Wikipedia on
Jaworowski before rushing to his defense. There they would have seen things
that SHOULD HAVE set off all kinds of alarm bells. 

And this goes with a vengeance for Cockburn. His DUTY to become reasonably
well-informed came not from his purely personal capacity, but from his
SOCIAL role as a journalist, his acting as a "trustee for the public." 

And he failed in the performance of his fiduciary duty.

Joaquín


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