This week started with our colleague and friend, Tom Fox, suddenly finding himself in the midst of a violent assault on the judiciary. Rather than flee, he took up his camera and shot the suspect with something other than bullets. As he has done tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, before he lifted his camera. And in its eye, Fox captured the suspect in the thrall of his attack.
This is first stunning _ who has the courage, the habit, the skill and the quickness of mind in such a moment other than a professional deeply dedicated to his craft? Second, the moment is also reflective of the larger public service that is reporting to a community what is happening and why _ or, in the case of an opinion section like ours, what might be done about it to shape our common trajectory.
Reporters and photographers across the globe do this every day. Journalists don't always get it right, and not every person purporting to be a journalist takes with them the approach of letting the facts shape the story. But there is an importance to having professionals out there, on the streets, in the rooms of power, telling the rest of us what is happening that is too often overlooked. Too often we forget that our public debate is what determines the success of our society, and too often we take for granted that even basic facts are widely known about what is happening.
Repressive regimes understand the power and importance of a free press, perhaps at times better than those in free societies. After all, there is a reason why journalists in Russia, Venezuela, and China (to pick just a handful of oppressive countries) are either on the run from state control or outright under the influence of the very powers that society needs to come under the scrutiny of honest, fair reporting.
Repressive regimes understand that to allow an unfettered media _ even a lone photographer who feels free to memorialize on film whatever is before him or her _ is to open the gates to self governance. A society that is well informed is a society that can determine its own destiny.
This is why journalists are often targeted for killing across the world, and why free speech itself is an essential ingredient to our society. We met recently with a group of journalists visiting from South America. We asked them a simple question: After visiting our newsroom, what is the biggest difference between journalists in the United States and the press in your home countries? The answer for more than a half dozen journalists was the same. Some of it came through in fragmented English and other comments were translated. But the message was the same, in the United States there is a level of freedom of the press that is impressive, important, and not as freely felt elsewhere in the world.
Journalists elsewhere might publish freely, but they often do so with a feeling that they need to look over their shoulders.
That doesn't mean there isn't danger. To paraphrase something Fox said after Monday's terrifying event: stay in this business long enough and at some point you will be in the line of fire. That's especially true for photographers and reporters whose work sends them to dangerous places, even in our own city.
We are grateful for Tom Fox. We are so grateful he and others were spared in Monday's violence.. We should all be grateful for the press freedoms he was exercising.
And we are thinking today of all those who take risks _ often risking everything _ just to capture an image or otherwise tell the world what is happening around us.
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