Singing the Same Song

The lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful and determined Elizabeth Holiday recently introduced me to a nursery rhyme courtesy of YouTube, and its call and response is running on a loop in my head. “Johny, Johny, yes Papa. Eating sugar, no Papa. Telling lies, no Papa. Open your mouth, ha-ha-ha (or ah-ah-ah).” Just one of its on-line versions has 276 million hits – how did I ever miss this charming little ditty?

Elizabeth likes to add dramatic flourishes to her songs and stories, so when she assumes the role of Johny, she does her best to act the innocent. In her way of thinking, her lips and tongue may be stained blue by the dye in her ring pop, but no way is she admitting to eating candy. Rumored to be an English nursery rhyme, one blogger suggests that it’s “the worst of the worst, the mother lode of surrealist garbage,” while one of the videos shows a tooth-brushing visit after each “snack.” A few generations ago, an alternate response might have been: open your mouth so I can wash it out with soap for being so sassy. 

Our mouths can get us in trouble, whether through over-eating, lying, inciting trouble, or speaking ill of another. As the Turkish proverb reminds us: “A knife-wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.” I wonder what the proverbial wisdom might say about a twitter-wound?

When someone utters something untrue or malicious about another person, I cringe, aware of the power of words and the damage they cause. When those words come from a one-up position, such as from a parent to a child or from a teacher to a student, they carry an extra wallop of power. Repeated often enough, they begin to seep in, and those within hearing of the words begin to accept their message. Rather than being a mischievous toddler, a child who likes something sweet, Johny is labeled a liar, a bad child. Sing the same song long enough, and whether or not it’s true, it sticks.

That’s the dilemma facing journalists across the country. When the on-going work of journalism is deemed to be “fake news,” and journalists themselves are labeled an “Enemy of the American People,” at least some of those descriptions will stick, and that’s dangerous to us as a community and a country – and potentially to individual journalists as well. 

The brush is broad. When the press is painted as the “Enemy of the American People,” that includes the cub reporter who shows up at the local school board meetings, the editor who loses sleep attempting to keep the presses rolling, and the weekly columnist who does her best to bring insight to current events and community happenings every Saturday morning. I’ve been called a variety of names over the years, but this is a new one for me. 

On Thursday, the Times-Gazette joined newspapers across the country to express concern with the language being used to describe their work by the President of the United States. It was an important and courageous step, but it felt a bit like Johny trying to defend himself. The analogy isn’t perfect, but as long as Papa is painting him as a liar, the seeds of doubt are planted. 

Historical precedence points to the use of the word Lugenpresse (lying press) in the early 1900s, and the embrace of that term in the 1930s by rising German leadership became a blatant – and successful – attempt to silence the press. As a Supreme Court justice in the 1940s as well as the United States’ prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, Robert H. Jackson warned that “those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. . .  the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.” 

We can’t avoid these beginnings, as seeds of mistrust and accusation towards journalists of all sorts are already being sown. Are we as a community, as the American people, willing to let those seeds grow unimpeded? Or will we stand together on the foundation of the First Amendment to support the press as essential to a continued democracy? Stay tuned . . .