So to Beacon Light, Libertyville, where journalism is a people business. And sometimes, naturally, things become personal. Which is why journalists ought to try to answer many of the referendum’s most fundamental questions for themselves.
Why are the worst-hit countries of the south – Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal – still so keen on EU membership? Because they remember the days of the colonels, of fascist dictators; days without freedom, including press freedom. I remember the stories that came to me at the Guardian via friends in the Greek resistance, just as I remember joining other European editors as we stood beside El Pais’s Madrid presses in the wake of Colonel Tejero’s failed but simmering coup.
What are journalists in Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia – the four Balkan candidate countries – doing now? Among other things, collecting investigative journalism prizes for exposing corrupt judges, corrupt government contracts, corrupt and bloated projects. In short, in all four countries, for doing their job. And don’t overlook the prizes to Cumhuriyet in Turkey, their editors facing jail for “divulging state secrets”.
Who supports and helps fund these locally driven, brave investigations? The EU. The awards are part of the enlargement process. They make press freedom a vital part of any accession. Which is one compelling reason why Ankara won’t be joining any time soon as press freedom withers and President Erdoğan carries on locking up record numbers of journalists.
Do my many friends in Turkey want to join Europe? Of course. It would be a blow for freedom. But none of these hopes seem to count as Project Fear and Project Whopper go to war over cash and immigrant numbers that treat human beings as mere statistics.
• I was at the One World Media awards on Thursday night, celebrating the people who tell the stories of the poor, the deserted, the dispossessed: and the grief over Jo Cox’s death was palpable. This world of care had lost one of its own. And then I went home to read the tributes – including Phil Collins in the Times. “If we surrender to nihilism about our politics we do not encourage better politics, we license barbarism,” he wrote. A point beyond grief; and one, for a few moments at least, beyond the glib bubble.
