The Obligations of Capacity

Be fiery cold ones
So that heat can come
—Rumi¹

Yesterday, I had an interesting time at the State Department, trying to get a question in.

I didn’t get one in in the end, but I exposed more of their duplicity and the myriad of ways that they go to avoid calling on me. Details about this will be forthcoming as Press Freedom Day is coming up.

One obvious way they try to hinder journalism in general and me in particular is that they now have assigned seating and placed me way in the back and by the door, presumably so they could not just try to marginalize me, but possibly carry me out of there more easily in the future as Decensored News notes:

After Thursday’s news conference, I walked out of the building with another journalist. She expressed her admiration for what I’ve done but basically told me she thought it was all useless, the US officials will just lie and do what they want.

I responded that I don’t know what will happen.

That’s God’s job. That’s humanity’s job. That’s everyone else’s responsibility. It’s providence.

My job is to live up to my capacities, to question and challenge and expose as rigorously and faithfully and clearly as I can.

I then found myself saying something I’d not said out loud before: “I didn’t want to go to Blinken’s last news conference. But I had the capacity and that gave me an obligation to go and do all I could.”

Many journalists are “access” journalists. They trade on their proximity to powerful government officials. They offer up easy or tepid questions so they assure they will maintain said access so they keep their position and prominence.²

I don’t do that.

I work and research and take risks and come up with clever ways of getting access and capacity.

That creates a moral imperative to use that access in the most ethical way possible.

It’s the obligation of capacity.

If you have capacity, you must use it for good.

And if you have some success, that might get you further capacity — which you must use for good.

That goes for me, or anyone else whatever their current circumstance.

1. Here’s a video of a recitation of “The Lost Camel” (from 5:30 to 13:13) with that line toward the end, recited by Duncan Mackintosh and recorded by Morris. Apparently, it’s part of Rumi’s epic poem, Masnavi.

2. I actually think this is an understatement about how insidious contemporary journalism is. Consider: If a great, just leader were miraculously elected president, would the establishment media and big tech platforms suddenly cozy up to them? I suspect that most would viciously attack them on behalf of corrupt power. It just appears that major media now cozy up to officialdom because they are part of the same general corrupt system, though of course that sometimes takes the form of logrolling, see my piece “The Trump-Media Logrolling” from 2018.