Today, this
morning, my calendar had penciled in a window of personal and professional goal
setting. Today was a day to plan my future year ahead, but I find myself
instead opening my computer to the horrors of the news coming in from Paris this
morning. Ten journalists at the offices of Charlie
Hebdo magazine in Paris, France now have no future. I am numbed by the
headlines, tweets, posts and images of the massacre of the journalists, including four political cartoonists, along with the injuring of 20 other
staff in the office on the publication’s team and sadly two police officers
defending the threatened press members, are also dead.
When global
terrorism strikes in my industry it hits home hard. I’ve sat there in a weekly
editorial meeting many times over in my career (no gunman ever walked in the
door shooting). The sharing of ideas, the editorial line up planning and creative
brainstorming, the layout and advertising team all gelling together to deliver
a print product worthy of readership press day after press day. Staying
current, edgy, articulate, news worthy (enjoying freedom of speech, freedom of
press). The creative team at a publication truly becomes a tight work-family as
it takes all the pieces (10 lifeless creator bodies in the board room and 20 staff
contributors all shot today around the office at Charlie Hebdo in Paris) to
bring the ideas, flush them out, make them readable, paper eye candy and
sellable at the same time. A small village produces a publication in a
challenging creative dance each issue.
I remember back
to my publisher chair on a weekly in Calgary when a few of the key staff,
myself included, received disturbing and personally threatening letters one
day. As an alternative weekly our content was not always for the
middle-of-the-road reader (Charlie Hebdo magazine satirically challenged the
status quo). We did not always please all of the readers all of the time and
nor was that a publication goal. We did however offer a space to a popular
columnist, Dan Savage,
who has a great habit of pushing the morality-envelope every chance he gets to
great brand success both humorous and insightful. The reader who sent the outright
hate-mail blamed the staff for the lack of morality in the world, branding each
guilty by association via publishing Savage
Love weekly. Although ahead of the 911 attacks on all freedoms, the letters
were disturbing enough to bring in the police. The envelopes were checked for
contaminants, the staff were counseled, felt violated, personally attacked and very
threatened for that which was printed in the pages of our paper. It was an
alarming time. Our small and for the most part unnoticed alternative weekly
experienced personal threats for doing our jobs and we each questioned our roles
and our individual willingness to deliver on the underlying realities of the
bigger picture of freedom of the press and free speech. A small scale incomparable
story based on today’s Paris publication loss but one I can relate to on some
level. I will never forget that September day, less than a month later, walking
into the office to find the newspaper staff, my press-family, huddled around a
tiny black and white TV screen in the break room. Stunned in dead silence as
the images of the plane hitting the towers in New York seemed frozen on the
static grainy screen. The world changed. Our freedoms changed. Freedom of the
press changed forever.
One did not
have to work on the leading edge of a CNN or CBC news team to feel the crush.
Post 911 many writer colleagues across the country, and the globe, in all types
of publications, questioned their roles. Delivering the truth was getting
harder and harder, sadder and sadder, and yes riskier and riskier. To be part
of an industry that brings the news and commentary to the world, good, bad or
alternative, truthful, satirical or truthiness as Steven Colbert has
dubbed it, all now runs with a grave risk. The Poynter.org
reports that Reporters Without Borders’ annual “roundup of
violence against journalists” recently released shows that globally in 2014
alone there were alarmingly 66 journalists killed, 119 kidnapped and 853
arrested.
Today in
Paris that risk became a harsh reality. Many of those, ten, who came to work
today at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, working at a publication which defended
the freedom of words, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, are now
tragically gone. Violently obliterated from humanity and existence by those intolerant
to freedoms. Those who did not like what
this particular alternative satirical publication had to deliver walked in and
gunned down the staff injuring 20 of them and killing 10 along with 2 police
officers.
We all lost
a little more freedom today. While I write this I am being intimidated on
twitter from an account retweeting my sharing of some of the global journalist
stories unfolding. The suspect account tagging my tweets (@mur_candemir
#Muslims) is full of vitriol and hateful threats for the French. Even myself, a
non-politically-influential writer in rural nowhere a world away has been personally
retweeted perhaps in some sort of fear tactic by this rogue account. Very
unsettling. Life has escalated today beyond what many can comprehend, myself
included.
Our
humanity is in grave danger of obliterating each other over words. That makes
the writer in me broken.
click this quote to read an amazing piece today by former Onion editor:
"Freedom of speech cannot be killed"
"Freedom of speech cannot be killed"
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