I don’t ever want my name as a journalist to be prefaced with the phrase “Pulitzer-prize winning reporter.” It’s not that I am against winning the Pulitzer Prize for my work someday, or that I think the Prize is the mark of a bourgeois journalist. There are simply too many people in the world doing too much great work that will likely never be recognized with a prize of any kind–let alone a Pulitzer.
Every week I see summarized stories of these journalists and writers in newsletters from Editor & Publisher, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders, and other organizations. They live in far-flung places like Pakistan, the Philippines, El Salvador, China, Brazil…Egypt.
The thing about these writers–whether they are bloggers or poets or investigative journalists or filmmakers–is that most of the time I hear their story only after it has a tragic twist to it. Yet they, and many, many others whom I will never hear of continue to do the work that they love and live by. Sometimes they die by it.
Last week I got an email from Editor & Publisher with a small snippet buried among other newsy items about the industry, noting that a reporter in Egypt had been beaten in the face with a steel bar.
According to an AFP report that quoted the reporter for BBC, Assad Sawey, journalists have been”deliberately” targeted by Cairo police in the recent unrest there. He recounted what happened to him during a BBC World television interview in Cairo.
“They took my camera away and when they arrested me they started beating me up with steel bars…like the ones used here for slaughtering animals,” he said. “They used electric bars to electrify me,” he said.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg as far as Egypt is concerned. RSF issued a release on Friday Jan. 28 with this ominous information:
It is hard to establish exactly how many journalists have been arrested or physically attacked by police officers in the past 48 hours. According to the latest information obtained by Reporters Without Borders, more than a dozen journalists have been arrested.
The interesting thing about the dangers that writers face is that most of the time they labor in relative anonymity. People in New York City might sit around and note the work of this or that columnist for the Washington Post, or a talented blogger for some well-known site. And in my mind, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that the writers whose names are so much less known, or only known after they have been tormented or killed for using their craft to speak the truth, are just as deserving of praise and support. Even if they never win a Pulitzer.
