I didn't realize Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution was literally started by a noble lie. A journalist and dissident leader who helped spread the lie calls it a "professional lapse" but says he's glad he did it.
This is the sort of thing for which you are supposed to be drummed out of journalism, but Urban's still working. Should he get a free pass just because he helped bring down an odious regime?
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Given the state of political journalism in this country I find this post entirely hilarious.
The answer to your question is yes.
Drummed out of journalism?
Megan, I think you've taken this out of context. As the regimes were crumbling, it became possible for courageous and committed journalists to start to report and publish stories that lacked the sanction of the regime. Newsgathering in these states was still in its infancy. The basic methodologies and apparati of journalism that we take as givens didn't exist. Almost no sources dared to be quoted by name. Public officials who denied a rumor might be telling the truth, but if it was an inconvenient rumor, they might also be lying. Discriminating fact from fiction in such circumstances was not only difficult, it was dangerous.
There's a good account of what actually happened here, which makes clear that the authorities deliberately faked the death of a student, perhaps to intimidate protesters. Jan Urban was stringing for VOA and the BBC, and picked up the report of the death from Reuters. It was not a deliberate lie; he simply got the story wrong, in an atmosphere of justifiable suspicion. Urban was apparently expressing regret that he had gotten the story wrong, and reflecting on the irony that getting it wrong led to incalculable good. It was a 'professional lapse' insofar as he should have verified it; he didn't go out and deliberately lie to incite protest.
Take a look at his life since then. He helped lead the Velvet Revolution, then resigned the day after it was successful instead of reaping the rewards of political power, and has devoted himself to reporting from and studying post-conflict states. Personally, I find him admirable.
I've got no quarrel with your ideals, Megan, and have done some journalism myself. But in the universe of journalistic malfeasance, this is about the most defensible "crime" I've ever seen. And practically speaking, it seems to take Jayson Blair-type lies to get drummed out of the business, even temporarily.
The article says he believed it at the time. It would be fine and justifiable to drum him out of the profession, if he knew it was a lie when he published it -- journalists are what they are, after all. It's to his credit, though, that he was a human being and a Czech before he was a journalist.
'a noble lie ... is the sort of thing for which you are supposed to be drummed out of journalism"
If that was true, America would be full of former journalists.
In reality, the truth has very little to do with professional journalism.
Was that tongue-in-cheek? Or are you really asking this question?
Inane question! Of course; anything done to bring down an odious regime is OK in my book. Besides, the impulse to bring down tyranny is one that should be celebrated.
Why would you have to ask, geesh.
Anything?
Would you stage a massacre and attribute it to the regime in hopes of getting this reaction?
He believed it true when he spread it, and I would say that the burden of proof is on those who say it was an unreasonable belief.
Let me respond to your question with one of my own: Was Dan Rather fired for his (ignoble) lie, or was he kept on for another year in the hope the scandal would blow over? Was he considered a disgrace by his colleagues, or was he given awards when he finally stepped down?
And thus the worker's utopia was tragically destroyed by the lies of the greedy capitalists.
I was actually friends with one of Vaclav's nieces in college. Cute girl, lots of fun. Utterly blase about the whole bringing down Communism thing.
As one who was a student in Prague when the Soviet tanks came in, I say that if we really credit him with the Velvet Revolution then we retroactively grant him the Nobel prizes that the Norwegians gave to (... looking at the list ...} Obama, Gore, Carter, Koffi Annan & the U.N., Arafat, the U.N Peace Keeping Forces, Kissinger & Le Duc Tho, the Intenational Labor Organization, UNICEF, Pauling (the one he got for doing real stuff was enough), at least one if not both given to the Office Of The U.N. High Commissioner For Refugees, The Quakers, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy "Big Stick" Roosevelt.
Plus give him a pile of gold as high and wide as he is tall.
Then tear up his journalist's credentials and union membership card if we must.
Flat-out: saying it was a noble lie is a lie.
He reported a rumor that he believed. He is guilty of sloppy journalism for not confirming it, but he didn't lie.
To me, a question like this just works as top cover for leftist journalists lying to advance their political agenda.
How should he have confirmed it? Asked the police?
Under chaotic situations like this, you report as best you can.
Yes.
Most of the time an incomplete report on time is worth far more than a complete report too late.
I agree differing circumstances create differing standards of acceptability.
But I still think:
- It wasn't great journalism, but
- It also wasn't a lie.
Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for your choices, even sub-optimal choices. He had no way to verify, that doesn't mean it wasn't sloppy journalism. It was. Sometimes sloppy is the best you can do.
But it still wasn't a lie, so accepting a journalist lying in service of some personal judgment of greater good is an utter failure of integrity and betrayal of trust.
(which, I hasten to reiterate, is not what this journalist did)
Should he get a free pass just because he helped bring down an odious regime?
Yes. Next question.
He didn't know it was a lie when he said it, so he gets off for that alone. But still, given what happened, I'd give him a free pass even if he'd fabricated the whole thing himself. Knocking over a Communist regime is worth faking a death.
The purpose of the article was to claim that socialism would not have fallen but for the insidious lies of capitalist journalists.
It is typical NYT Soviet apologism. Apparently some of the remaining fellow travelers still think its a fight worth fighting.
Funny I never heard of that lie. I think Urban is imply trying to talk up his role in the revolution; "remembering with advantages" what he actually did at the time.
Prague in spring 1990 was an extraordinary place. The stories told of what happened during the revolution were simple and consistent. Students who had been on the march the police attacked said how they had been beaten by the police (fairly lightly by totalitarian standards). It was their parents and older relatives who made up the mass of the people who gathered in Wenceslas Square in reaction. By consensus, the students mostly stayed away. The parents who went to the meeting expected the police to attack them. So did an organiser of the event that I talked with. But when he had a long struggle through the crowd to reach the speakers at Wenceslas' statue, he knew the protesters had won.
In that spring nearly 20 years ago, the economic idiocies of the Communist regime were still very visible. Nobody fished in the river Moldava for a hundred kilometres below Prague. The engineers running the Prague waterworks still had not got the administration to change the crazy way they were paid - they could only earn a living wage if the quantity of water processed exceeded the Plan. So they were compelled to pump so much water through Prague's leaking system that it swamped the sewage processing at the other end; and the overflow killed most life in the river. The city stank of the brown coal used to heat it; and the square miles of lunar landscape where the brown coal had been extracted showed the unthinking results of that arbitrary choice of fuel. Ordinany shops were still virtually empty of goods. The old special shops for the Party aparatchiks were closed, some with stocks of better goods still in them. And so on.
But what impressed me more deeply was the social carry-over from the old order. You automatically identified many of the old aparatchiks because they were socially different - from their assumptions about how other people would behave right through to their hair styles. They stood out like ci-devant aristos after the French Revolution. The formerly reserved spas and hotels were supposed to be open to the public, but taxi drivers refused to take you there out of a combination of contempt and wariness. Fear suddenly surged on May Day morning - the day of the former Communist grand celebration; to evaporate at the sight of a couple of groups of students in their old - too small - Young Pioneer outfits making fun of the old regime. The Govenment officals did not have the remotest idea of the conduct of orderly, non-arbitrary official business. The urge to get back to being normal Europeans was tremendous: the railway station clerk smiled with delight when we simply turned up at the ticket window to buy rail tickets to London via Berlin. He could now simply sell those tickets without asking for a mountain of papers first and the world was a brighter place for it. But I cautioned my Czech friends that it would take at least a generation to really get back to where the country might have been without Communism.
If he is correct that he believed the story at the time, then the appropriate "punishment" is a retraction. If all the "journalists" who have been the cause of retractins were drummed out of the profession, the newspaper salary problems would be much smaller.