Journalism as a Democratic Art

Selected Essays by Cole C. Campbell

Tony Wharton

• Publisher: Kettering Foundation
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781945577369
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Democrazia

Journalism as a Democratic Art is an edited collection of 16 essays by Cole Campbell (1954–2007), former newspaper editor, dean at the University of Nevada School of Journalism, and a colleague of the Kettering Foundation. These essays reflect Campbell's effort to rethink some of the underlying assumptions that he believed kept his craft at a distance from citizens. To Campbell, readers were not just consumers of information but citizens facing common problems.

Campbell believed that newsrooms too often sidelined the concerns of citizens by narrowly considering who was a newsmaker and what was newsworthy. In his essay "Journalism as a Democratic Art, " Campbell asks, "What if we reoriented our journalism away from the sources of news and toward the recipients of news?" He was concerned that market journalism, oriented to appeal to consumers rather than citizens, focused too much on transmitting knowledge from experts to a helpless citizenry. This model deeply conflicted with one of the main premises of Cole's work: "In a democracy, citizens are experts in their own lives and in their common aspirations, " and journalism should help promote those aspirations.

Included in this book is a partly completed "Dictionary for Journalists." In it he addresses the tendency of journalists to adopt overly technical language from their sources, and other problematic frames, sidelining the ways citizens discuss problems and their aspirations in the process. In all, Campbell's writings are a good example of the disconnect Kettering often highlights between citizens, communities, and professions. For other professionals, Campbell's essays offer many transportable questions to carefully tease out where and why misalignments occur.

In addition to Campbell's essays, the volume includes a foreword by Richard C. Harwood, and remembrances of Campbell by Catherine L. Werner, Tony Wharton, and Kettering Foundation president David Mathews.

CHAPTER ONE

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of
recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard
to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from
a blue sky. There have been as many plagues
as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars
take people equally by surprise.

Albert Camus
The Plague

ON A MID-SUMMER DAY in 1942, an Austrian Jew named Stekler sat alone on a bus parked alongside others in the market square of Le Chambon sur Lignon, a village in the mountains of southwest France. Stekler had been arrested by the Vichy government, collaborators with the Third Reich after the Germans overwhelmed the French on the battlefield in 1940. Now Vichy police were rounding up Jews for internment and deportation to “the East”—the Nazi death camps.

As Stekler sat in the bus, surrounded by gendarmes, 13-year-old Jean-Pierre Trocmé, the eldest son of Pastor André Trocmé, reached through the window to offer his last piece of rationed imitation chocolate. Other villagers approached to share gifts, mostly food from their depleted larders. The prisoner soon sat beside a pile nearly his own size. No matter the risk of reprisal for their public identification with this lone victim of repression, the villagers—the Chambonnais—would not turn their backs on Stekler. He was alone on the bus, but not alone in the world.¹

“The police remained in Le Chambon for three weeks,” reports Philip Hallie, chronicler of Le Chambon’s resistance, “firing up their motorcycles early in the morning, trying to surprise any Jews who might have tired of life in hiding and gone back to the homes that had been sheltering them. They found no more Jews.”²

During four years of German rule over France, Le Chambon and neighboring villages created and sustained a communal campaign to serve, shelter, and save the Jews who came knocking on their doors. “It was an unimaginable outburst of solidarity,” one of the rescued told filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, in his film Weapons of the Spirit.

Despite threats and reprisals by Nazi overlords and their Vichy collaborators, by war’s end the 5,000 people of Le Chambon and its environs had saved about 5,000 Jews.³

“In the beginning, a few Jews made their way to this tiny corner of the world,” Sauvage relates.

And the peasants and the villagers took in the Jews who came. And the Jews kept coming. And the people of Le Chambon kept taking them in. Individuals, couples, families. The children, the elderly, people of all ages. Those who could pay and those who couldn’t. Doctors and merchants and intellectuals and homemakers. From Paris and Warsaw and Vienna and Prague.⁴

Hallie writes:

The morning after a new refugee family came to town they would find on their front door a wreath with “Bienvenue!” painted on a piece of cardboard attached to the wreath.⁵ Nobody knew who had brought the wreath; in effect, the whole town had brought it.

The people of Le Chambon are poor, and the Huguenot faith to which they belong is a diminishing faith in Catholic and atheist France; but their capacity to act in unison against the victimizers who surrounded them was immense. They were more than a match for their own government and for the conquerors of France.⁶

Sauvage, who grew up in New York unaware of his religious heritage until age 18, was drawn to the story of Le Chambon because it is his story. His parents had sought refuge in the village in the fall of 1943. “My mother was pregnant, and on March 25, 1944, a Jewish baby had the good fortune to see the light of day in a place on Earth uniquely committed to his survival.”⁷

Hallie, a philosophy professor, faced Jew-bashing bullies as a seven-year-old in New Lenox, Illinois, and Hitler’s armies as an artillery soldier in World War II.⁸ The story of Le Chambon is, in a way, his story, too. He was drawn to the story, in particular, because it illuminates the contrasting elements of cruelty and goodness.

Why begin a book about journalism and democracy with a story of rescue from the Holocaust—a story in which journalists play no part? Beyond grappling with the Holocaust as “a foundational event of modern sensibility, forever afterward to be an essential consideration in reflections about the human condition,”⁹ I am drawn to the story of Le Chambon because it brings to life many of the ideas explored in these pages. This book examines what it takes for people to rule themselves well, to make timely and wise choices in adapting to an ever-more complex and challenging universe—and then considers the role that journalism does, and might, play in creating a shareable world.

As this prologue sets out below, the history of the century past and the circumstances of the century present demonstrate that we have much to learn about self-rule, choice, and sustaining a shareable world. We need to learn quickly, given the daunting disruptions we face and our mounting doubts about whether we can escape the iron laws of history.

The story of Le Chambon is an exemplary story about people ruling themselves and prevailing against disruptions, doubts, and the brutal forces of history. It’s a story of people “being in the world” by attending to what’s truly important. It’s a story of how a strong community can give birth to political agency, autonomy, and accountability.

To act in time

One evening during the fierce winter of 1940-1941, following the German occupation of France, Magda Trocmé, the pastor’s wife, was carefully measuring the fuel she was feeding the kitchen stove in the presbytery when she was startled by a knock at the door. She opened it.

There before her, only the front of her body protected from the cold, stood a woman shawled in pure snow. Under her shawl her clothes, though once thick, had been whipped thin by the wind and the snow of that terrible winter. But her face had been whipped even thinner by events; she was visibly frightened, and was half-ready to step back, trembling with fright and cold. The first thing that Magda Trocmé recalls seeing was the hunger in that face and in those dark eyes. Here was the first refugee from the Nazis to come to the presbytery door.¹⁰

When the woman asked if she could come in, Magda Trocmé reflexively responded, “Naturally, come in, and come in.”

From that moment forward, André and Magda Trocmé, their family, their congregation, and their community were fully committed to saving refugees by sheltering them and by helping them get to safety in neutral Switzerland. They carried out their rescue work spontaneously, relying on improvisation and good sense. As Hallie relates, “After Magda Trocmé’s first encounters with refugees, no Chambonnais ever turned away a refugee, and no Chambonnais ever denounced or betrayed a refugee.”¹¹

Speed was of the essence. From his experience as a soldier in the First World War, André Trocmé knew that choices “had to be made in time—not ‘in due time,’ not languorously, but in time, now, when the hot chain of events had not yet hardened.”¹² He helped Le Chambon prepare for this time through inspiring sermons and by small steps of resistance that began soon after the Germans conquered France. The Vichy government ordered all schools to begin the day by forming a circle of students and faculty around the French flag and saluting it with the palms-down, stiff-armed, fascist salute. At the Cevenol School that Trocmé founded before the war, only those who wanted to do so made the salute, and their numbers quickly dwindled to zero. The government ordered all French school employees to sign an oath of unconditional loyalty to Marshal Philippe Petain, the head of state. No one at Trocmé’s school signed. The government ordered all churches to toll their bells on the first anniversary of the Vichy regime’s installation. The bell in Trocmé’s church was silent.

“These refusals of blind obedience worked,” Hallie writes. “Vichy did not strike, and the people of Le Chambon found themselves discovering not only that the government of France was trying to steal their consciences under the mask of loyalty, but also that they themselves could prevent the theft without being smashed in reprisal.”¹³

Over time, the rescue network matured. Andre Trocmé met regularly with 13 responsables, young leaders of Bible study groups who also served as nodes in the network, fanning out into 13 parts of the parish. He worked with the American Friends Service Committee and the women’s rescue group Cimade, which smuggled refugees to Switzerland. The Cevenol School became a haven for both refugee students and faculty. Seven group homes, primarily for young refugees, were set up during the Occupation. Boardinghouses took in refugees, as did hosts of villagers, farmers, and peasants.¹⁴

The continuous and expanding operations did not go unnoticed, but the Chambonnais’ solidarity at times stymied the authorities. Vichy operatives considered Le Chambon a “nest of Jews.” In the summer of 1942, young Chambonnais confronted Petain’s visiting minister of youth about the recent roundup of 28,000 Jews in Paris, vowing never to cooperate with such an operation in their village. Two weeks later, Vichy police launched the raid that netted them only Stekler, who was eventually released as a half-Jew, and another woman whose fate is unknown. In February 1943, André Trocmé, his assistant pastor, and the principal of the public school were arrested and sent to an internment camp. They were released without explanation more than a month later, just days before the other inmates were shipped off to die in concentration camps in Poland and salt mines in Silesia. A Vichy informer came to Le Chambon and dispatched regular reports on suspicious activities until he was assassinated by the French Resistance. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1943, the Gestapo raided two group homes overseen by André Trocmé’s cousin, Daniel Trocmé, hauling him and the young people to the death camps. That same summer, André Trocmé and his assistant, Edward Theis, went into hiding when they learned that the Gestapo had placed a price on their heads.

Still Le Chambon protected its Jewish refugees until it was liberated by French troops in September 1944. The rest of France handed over 75,000 Jews—including 10,000 children—to be deporte...