Dear Progressive Reader,

On January 21, 1994, a commemorative U.S. postage stamp was issued to honor legendary radio and television reporter Edward R. Murrow. Murrow was the first-ever broadcaster to be honored with a commemorative stamp, and at the first-day-of-issue ceremony at his alma mater, Washington, State University in Pullman, a variety of speakers celebrated his illustrious career as a lesson in what journalism should be. “Today, broadcasters still credit Edward R. Murrow with charting the course, setting the standards for broadcast journalism.”

Murrow is perhaps best known today for his role in taking on U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his crusade against communism in the United States. That story was told in a 2005 film by directed by George Clooney titled Good Night, and Good Luck (after Murrow’s famous closing line). That film was turned into a Broadway play last year, starring Clooney and is now available for viewing on Netflix, with an ominous sequence of images in the final scene that bring the story right up to today’s political moment. While his takedown of McCarthy may have been his crowning moment, before that, Murrow was known to the world for his live broadcasts from London during the German bombing raids of the early 1940s known as the Blitz. Murrow truly transformed the way wartime news coverage was done and, as the poet Archibald MacLeish would say in 1941, “You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burnt it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead—were all men’s dead—were all mankind’s dead.”

Today, however, independent coverage wars and the military is becoming less and less possible. Last October, members of the Pentagon press corps walked out en masse rather than submit to government-required restrictions on their reporting. In addition, the decline of longtime independent news sources like Military.com (which was bought by a new owner last summer) and MilitaryTimes.com and its sister websites (which faced multiple rounds of staff cuts last year), have left a smaller press corps covering armed forces and defense industry news. Now, this past week, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes has announced that its independence appears to be under threat from the Trump Administration. On Thursday, a Pentagon spokesperson posted on social media that the paper needed to move away from “woke distractions,” following which, according to Business Insider, the paper’s editor wrote a memo to staff stating “The people who risk their lives in defense of the Constitution have earned the right to the press freedoms of the First Amendment. We will not compromise on serving them with accurate and balanced coverage, holding military officials to account when called for.”

The Stars and Stripes first began publishing during the Civil War, and has published a newspaper edition in its current form continuously since World War II. The paper receives about half of its funding from the Department of Defense (now labeled “Department of War”) but has been mandated by Congress to be independent. However, on Thursday, the Trump Administration published a new rule in the Federal Register eliminating the paper’s civilian editor and independent ombudsman. While the Stars and Stripes has never been a radical antiwar paper, like the GI underground press published and distributed to soldiers, often secretly, during the war in Vietnam, it’s potential loss of independence is one more dagger in the free and independent media landscape that is essential to a democracy.

This week on our website, Sarah Lahm reports from Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent and the protests that have followed; Yohuru Williams and Michael Lansing examine the police state emerging in Minnesota; Owen Schalk looks at the civil society groups in Venezuela opposing recent U.S. military actions; Jason Kerzinski speaks to Starbucks workers who continue to say “No Contract? No Coffee!” in Louisiana; and Ashana Bigard writes from New Orleans, Louisiana on how civil rights rollbacks in the South affect school children everywhere. Plus, Mike Ervin describes a new affront to accessibility in the White House; Devin A. Giordano opines on the need for judges to reconsider long sentences; and John and Matt Pascarella pen an oped on a landmark education law under threat.

Finally, Monday is the annual federal holiday honoring the birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As I wrote in The Progressive in 2018, the establishment of this holiday was a long time coming. Now that the Trump Administration is attacking history in so many areas, even this observance is under threat. Earlier this year, Trump pushed a change in the National Park Service calendar of “free days”—removing Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth from the list, and replacing them with his own birthday, June 14 (which also happens to be Flag Day—and Bob La Follette’s birthday!). As Yohuru Williams wrote in his 2021 essay for our website on why we need King’s message now more than ever, “The United States is not what it could be. But we have the power in this moment to reimagine and work toward a country that’s more consistent with our ideals than our historical practice.” 

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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