One war after another seems to be the new global reality: Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, Minneapolis, D.C.; the list seems almost as endless as the conflicts themselves.
But make no mistake, in my view the most important battle and the greatest existential threat facing the United States and the world is the war against truth. And journalists are the guardians at the gates in this one.
What is truth? What are lies?
Is President Donald Trump disingenuous when he denies any ties to Jeffrey Epstein, when he claims former Attorney General James Comey is a criminal and forces the Justice Department to pursue false allegations against him, when he claims to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability, or when he spins out an endless list of other flimsy or untrue assertions? Is Pope Leo XIV disingenuous when he advocates for peace and justice atop the throne of an organization that defended and hid hundreds of pedophile priests? Was former President Bill Clinton obfuscating when he said, “I did not have sex with” Monica Lewinsky? Is the stock market lying as its slipper boys on the floor of the major exchanges pump the gas as most average Americans burn? Are bots telling the truth? Is the latest reel on your Instagram true or some contrivance of artificial intelligence?
You can answer these questions for yourselves, consistent with whatever mantra you chant as you lay awake at night sleepless over what to believe in a world where George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984 comes to life before our very eyes.
I am no exception, except my mantra is one I know to be true because I lived it and continue to do so as a lifetime journalist. My faith resides with journalism and journalists, the real ones, the ones in the trenches at The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Reuters, the Dallas Morning News, and yes, Big Bend Sentinel and Marfa Public Radio, to name a few. They are not muckrakers, a profoundly myopic charge I hear often from readers who yearn for “happy news.” They are simply holding up the mirror of history.
Community newspapers are the foot soldiers, the grunts, in hand-to-hand combat with the “spinners” and slingers of half-truths lurking behind every Tweet, or Trump’s personal propaganda funnel, Truth Social. What a name, Truth Social; the ultimate oxymoron.
Let’s talk about community journalism, in particular Big Bend Sentinel and Marfa Public Radio, the leading media outlets in Far West Texas, where news, important news, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally intersect. And let’s talk about the existential threat to our way of life in Big Bend as the Trump administration schemes to destroy for all intents and purposes Big Bend National Park and State Park, among the crown jewels of far West Texas, in pursuit of the lie that hordes of Mexicans cross it every day to kill us, rape us, and steal from us. Every day the federal government’s story, and the online map depicting enforcement tactics, changes depending on the political winds.
Where would we be on this issue without the brave, relentless reporting of Big Bend Sentinel’s Sam Karas and Rob D’Amico, or Marfa Public Radio’s Travis Bubenik, Mary Cantrell, and Zoe Kurland. We’d certainly be the ones being duped, and not by some illusory Mexican migrant. They are the ones holding truth to power, and we should all be grateful.
I have always tried to hold truth to power in my reporting, much of it overseas covering wars and other types of conflict. One case was the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serb forces were detaining Bosnian-Muslim men, women and children and subjecting them to unspeakable war crimes in an ethnic cleansing campaign. Dangerous times, and many of us reporters spent our days dodging sniper fire in the capital Sarajevo and trying to decipher the truth from the lies. But like our local reporters here in Far West Texas, I knew I had an obligation to the world and to my professional principles to be that eyewitness to history, so I made the dangerous journey to the northwestern Prijedor region and saw for myself the horror of concentration camps like Omarska.
I teach journalism at Sul Ross State University and advise the award-winning Skyline student newspaper. In doing so, as I did with the staffs I supervised at United Press International, I feel as if I am planting the seeds of the most important principle of democracy enshrined in the Constitution. It is not always easy during this era of fungible truth, but they get it. Even with all the flotsam and jetsam bobbing around the Internet, they get it. Yes, jetsam, like the truth today in the United States, an item deliberately thrown overboard in the wrong-headed belief that it will save a ship in distress.
Let’s talk about some of today’s jetsam these students and all of us must try to decipher, for example former Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem’s asinine allegation that Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good deserved to be gunned down in the streets of Minneapolis by federal immigration agents because they were domestic terrorists. Or Russian President Vladimir Putin justifying his illegal invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” to eliminate neo-Nazis.
Nevertheless, in the final analysis I am optimistic that our republic will endure and prosper, not because of its current leadership, but despite it. And the “Fourth Estate,” journalism, along with our judiciary will be the institutions holding the line.
Sidney Balman Jr. is a Pulitzer-nominated war correspondent, writer in residence at Sul Ross State University, and author of the recently released novel The Mural, based on the 2022 Uvalde school shooting. Sidbalman.com