Digital future depends on lessons of the past

163 years after his murder, Elijah Parish Lovejoy serves as a model for journalists now struggling to find their way in a new business and technological climate

By Bill Kovach

(The following are excerpts from a speech by Bill Kovach, the 2000 Lovejoy Fellow, at The Lovejoy Convocation, Colby College, Nov. 9, 2000.)

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was born in Albion, Maine, on November 9, 1802, 198 years ago this day.

Five slugs from a double barrel shotgun ended his life in Alton, Illinois, in 1837. He was buried on what would have been his 35th birthday.

They killed Lovejoy because he believed in the promise of democracy, in human freedom and dignity. After he saw a slave burned at the stake, he said so, persistently and forcefully.

And here is one of the things Lovejoy said:

“The truth is, my fellow-citizens, if you give ground a single inch, there is no stopping place. I deem it, therefore, my duty to take my stand upon the Constitution. Here is firm ground...we have slaves, it is true, but I am not one. I am a citizen of these United States...free-born; and having never forfeited the inestimable privileges attached to such condition, I cannot consent to surrender them...I am ready, not to fight, but to suffer, and if need be, to die for them.” …

It is with a sense of inadequacy that I receive an award in Elijah Parish Lovejoy’s name. But if my career in any measure deserves this award, it is not mine alone. I am surrounded here tonight not only by the ghost of Elijah Parish Lovejoy but by ghosts of others who directed and shaped my career.

People like:

Two Albanian immigrants, my parents, who taught me the meaning of responsibility and the value of learning. ...

And Nat Caldwell, a reporter who drilled into me the journalist’s obligation to those betrayed by people in power and pointed me to some of them trapped in the black ghettos of my home state of Tennessee.

…For all that the means of journalism have changed since Lovejoy’s time its purpose has remained constant, if not always well served. For all that the speed, and the techniques and the character of news delivery have changed, there is a clear theory and philosophy of journalism which Lovejoy knew and which flows out of the function of news and it is this: the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self governing.

We are seeing for the first time the rise of a market-based journalism divorced from the idea of civic responsibility. Consider the words of Rupert Murdoch talking about his company winning television rights in Singapore.

“Singapore is not liberal, but it’s clean and free of drug addicts. Not so long ago it was an impoverished, exploited colony with famines, diseases and other problems. Now people find themselves in three-room apartments with jobs and clean sheets. Material incentives create business and the free market economy. If politicians try it the other way around with Democracy first, the Russian model is the result. Ninety percent of the Chinese are interested more in a better material life than in the right to vote.”

These words by a modern publisher advocating capitalism without democracy have no meaningful precedent in American journalism history. ...

So we’ve come to this: after struggling for centuries to remain free of government control and censorship public interest journalism now finds itself struggling with similar pressures from private ownership. Independent journalism may in the end be dissolved in the solvent of commercial communication and synergistic self-promotion. The real meaning of the First Amendment — that a free press means an independent press — is threatened for the first time in our history even without government meddling.

Civilization has produced one idea more powerful than any other, the notion that people can govern themselves. And it has created a largely unarticulated theory of information to sustain that idea called journalism. The two rise and fall together.

Our freedom in a digital century depends upon not forgetting the past, or the theory of news it produced, in a surge of faith in technological and corporate rebirth.

For, in the end, if the life and death of Elijah Parish Lovejoy teaches us anything, it teaches us that freedom and democracy do not depend upon technology or organization so much as they depend upon individuals who invest themselves in a belief in freedom and human dignity.

Kovach, chair of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, was curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.