Mourning a Scourge of the Comfortable
By Dana Milbank
WashPost
Sunday, June 7, 2009
After Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Wilke died last month, his family didn't hold his memorial service in a church. They held it at the Newseum. It was a perfect choice to honor a man for whom newspapering was a civic religion.
His father was a United Church of Christ minister and a nationally known activist for the disabled. His brother is a minister, too, and he officiated at John's service last week. John, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 54, wasn't much of a churchgoer. But as I sat and listened for two hours to the stories of his too-short life, I learned that the same instinct that drove his father and brother to the cloth made journalism sacred for John. As one childhood friend put it: "John, too, was a man who had a moral mission, but without the clerical collar."
John's brother, the Rev. Kit Wilke, tried to explain it to us ink-stained heathens in the room. "There's something about what has been called the most secular, the most skeptical, the most cynical of professions," he began. "You journalists love the truth. . . . You also know that truth is elusive, that it must be gone after, sought. It doesn't come easily. No one owns it and dispenses it. In fact, what you usually spend your time going after are those who think they have it."
That's where the moral mission comes in. "You journalists seem to me to believe that knowing the truth, or at least seeking the truth, is far better than accepting the fables that this town and so many other places pass off as the truth," Kit went on. "That elusive truth that you as journalists, as scientists and poets, seek is the One we religious types still insist knows our pain and in some way echoes through this universe."
(More here.)
WashPost
Sunday, June 7, 2009
After Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Wilke died last month, his family didn't hold his memorial service in a church. They held it at the Newseum. It was a perfect choice to honor a man for whom newspapering was a civic religion.
His father was a United Church of Christ minister and a nationally known activist for the disabled. His brother is a minister, too, and he officiated at John's service last week. John, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 54, wasn't much of a churchgoer. But as I sat and listened for two hours to the stories of his too-short life, I learned that the same instinct that drove his father and brother to the cloth made journalism sacred for John. As one childhood friend put it: "John, too, was a man who had a moral mission, but without the clerical collar."
John's brother, the Rev. Kit Wilke, tried to explain it to us ink-stained heathens in the room. "There's something about what has been called the most secular, the most skeptical, the most cynical of professions," he began. "You journalists love the truth. . . . You also know that truth is elusive, that it must be gone after, sought. It doesn't come easily. No one owns it and dispenses it. In fact, what you usually spend your time going after are those who think they have it."
That's where the moral mission comes in. "You journalists seem to me to believe that knowing the truth, or at least seeking the truth, is far better than accepting the fables that this town and so many other places pass off as the truth," Kit went on. "That elusive truth that you as journalists, as scientists and poets, seek is the One we religious types still insist knows our pain and in some way echoes through this universe."
(More here.)
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