A Reporter’s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times

By Scott Pelley

Our stories on the Great Recession for 60 Minutes helped motivate a generous nation. When we introduced the families living in cars in Florida, donations of more than $5 million came in checks, large and small, to organizations for the homeless. One couple bought a home for Arielle and Austin Metzger to get them out of their truck. You know the names of this couple, but they would rather not say. We reported that the collapse in home values meant the state of Nevada didn’t have enough tax revenue to sustain its only chemotherapy center for the poor. After our story, a philanthropist wrote a check to keep the clinic open. We profiled Remote Area Medical, which was founded to air-drop doctors into inaccessible parts of Africa. But in the Great Recession, RAM was setting up free clinics in America. The day after the story, a wealthy New Yorker bought RAM a new aircraft to replace its geriatric WWII cargo plane. Our stories about the struggle of Wilmington, Ohio, inspired Jon Bon Jovi to write his anthem of the Great Recession, “Work for the Working Man.” I have found, over decades, in disasters natural and manmade, all journalism has to do is investigate and report. Armed with reliable information, Americans always do their best.

(Pelley 2019, 147)

We always had a roof over our heads, cars in the driveway and plenty of food on the table. But much more than that was a reach. I learned something early in life that appeared to be magic, I could buy things simply by having a job. By the age of ten, I was selling garden seeds door to door in the spring, and Christmas cards in the fall. I lugged flyers to miles and miles of mailboxes announcing La H Pharmacy’s weekly specials. In middle school, I swept and mopped the local 7-Eleven store after closing. This was back when they were actually open from 7 am, to 11 pm. The manager paid me twenty-five cents a night. When I told my mother about my recently acquired custodial position, she pretended to be proud. In truth, she was furious. She marched down to the convenience store and excoriated the manager. The next day, I got fifty cents. I ran through the door of our home yelling, “Mother! I got a raise!” I was thirty years old before she confessed to exactly how I got that raise. I learned that a kid could add up a pretty good income if he could just string together enough jobs. Magic.

(Pelley 2019, 164-165)

At the end of the broadcast, I saluted America’s achievements in engineering and courage with these few words:

The shuttle had its critics. It was expensive. There were accidents. But there was nothing like it in the world and Americans conceived it. When tragedy struck, we pressed ahead without fear.

To a generation, man-in-space seemed as American as the constellation in our flag. But today marked the end of the heroic age of spaceflight when we all claimed ownership. The last shuttle left the Earth, drawing a bright, burning line in the sky—the signature of people who dare to dream.

After the broadcast, a black thunderstorm gathered over the fifty-two story Vehicle Assembly Building where shuttles and Apollo missions were made ready. The men and women who repaired and launched America’s spacecraft posed for final photos in front of the world’s largest American flag, two-hundred-nine feet tall, painted on the VAB in 1976 for the bicentennial celebration. Looking through the downpour toward the launch pad I wondered when in history had a nation abandoned the most advanced technology on Earth without advancing to the next step? How do we challenge young Americans to dare to dream?

(Pelley 2019, 209-210)

For me, the most chilling conclusion of the inspector general’s investigation is contained in paragraph 204 which notes, “Interviews of some of the key personnel involved in the case of Khalid Al-Masri, and review of some of the documentary evidence, indicate there were individuals in addition to al-Masri who were captured, detained, and rendered by the Agency based on the legally insufficient justification used in the Al-Masri case… it is unknown if all cases have been identified and acted on.”

The inspector general’s investigators believed they had found plenty of reason in the Al-Masri case to refer agency employees to the Department of Justice for prosecution. The US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to prosecute.

Al-Masri sued the US government in federal court. A district judge dismissed the case because there was a likelihood that state secrets would be exposed at trial. An appeals court concurred.The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear Al-Masri’s claim.

In the Rendition and Detention Program, the executive branch approved illegal acts, CIA officers exceeded the limits on those acts, Congress was kept in the dark, and the judiciary looked the other way. Today, you know what happened to the innocent victims because journalists fulfilled their constitutional role. When all three branches of government fail, journalism remains to act in the interests of the people.

(Pelley 2019, 395-396)

To write well, study writers. I would guide you to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and to Coming into the Country by John McPhee. McPhee is among the best who craft nonfiction in literary style. Lucky for all of u s, McPhee wrote his first book about writing in 2017. It’s called Draft No. 4. I’d say he’s lucky to get it in only four drafts, but McPhee is a vastly better writer than I am. Read for the rhythm in sentence structure in McPhee and Steinbeck. For example, in The Grapes, Steinbeck’s line “And her joy was nearly like sorrow” describes Ma’s reaction when her son, Tom, returns from prison. Now, make an innocuous change in the line. Notice how “And her joy was like sorrow” falls flat. The loss of the two syllables supplied by “nearly” are indispensable to the cadence. This is what Mark Twain meant when he wrote, “The difference between almost the right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”10 Steinbeck wrote The Grapes longhand, on a legal pad. His rhythm was timed to a washing machine he kept running in the background like a metronome. If you despair (and you will) that you were not cut out for writing, read the journal Steinbeck kept while he was writing The Grapes. This daily diary was published as Working Days. The journal exposes his self-doubt, the anxiety in his inability to realize the work he dreamed of. The Grapes, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize and helped Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Pelley 2019, 417)

I wrote earlier that there is no democracy without journalism. But there was a brief, dark moment in American history when Congress imposed government control over both Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. The Sedition Act of 1798—promoted by Alexander Hamilton no less—was among the great blunders of the US Congress. The Act read in part:

If any person shall write, print, utter or publish… any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or to bring them into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.”

Congress made it a crime for anyone to “utter” criticism of the House, Senate or the president. Not to put too fine a point on this, but consider, adjusted for inflation, $2,000 in 1798 equals more than $38,000 in 2019 and would have bankrupted a newspaper of those days. This repudiation of the First Amendment was passed by Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. There were numerous prosecutions of citizens, many went to jail. The Sedition Act was exactly the tyranny James Madison was determined to prevent when he wrote the First Amendment in our Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To see how Madison really felt about Freedom of the Press, look at how he described it in his original draft of the First Amendment:

The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.

The Sedition Act outraged Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Have a look at Madison’s rebuttal in his “Report on the Virginia Resolutions,” from 1800. Madison writes that Congress has assumed a power over a free press that is…

…expressly and positively forbidden by one of the constitutional] amendments thereto: a power, any other, ought to produce universal alarm; because it is leveled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.

The Sedition Act figured in Adams’s defeat by Jefferson in the next election. It expired, in 1801, on the last day of the Adams administration.

What Madison meant by “press” was every American and his or her right to say what they want to say, write what they want to write, read what they want to read. Don’t be misled. Any constraint on “the press” applies to every citizen’s voice. “Enemy of the American people,” in President Trump’s phrase? We are the American people. Journalists bring vitality to the national conversation. We bridge differences, serve public safety, expose corruption, constrain power and give voice to the voiceless. As Madison might say today, Freedom of the Press is the right that guarantees all the others.

The stakes are high.

(Pelley 2019, 418-420)

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References

Pelley, Scott. 2019. Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter’s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times. N.p.: Hanover Square Press.

ISBN 978-1-335-99914-6