I’m sorry Jerry Finch is not here. He was my boss at the News Leader – yes, in addition to my other talents, I’m an orphan – and wrote about me recently that I was one of the few journalists he knew who could run a Ludlow. The Ludlow is a machine from the hot-metal, Linotype days of printing that was used to create headlines and other big type. I literally wrote most of the hedes for the News Leader and Times-Dispatch during the printers’ strike in the early ‘70s. He sorta implied, in classic Finch wry humor, that being a Ludlow operator was my major claim to journalistic competence. When I referred to that comment, he responded that I was confused: It was not Ludlow, but Luddite,. 

When I told him nearly 30 years ago that Washington and Lee had offered me a job teaching journalism rather than doing it, I was of course expecting he’d urge me to stay at the newspaper. No. I should take it, he said. I’m glad I did. I’ve been saved from total paper purgatory by having been lucky enough to play journalist on the copy desk of the Philadelphia Inquirer for something like 20 years. 

As a teacher, I have learned far more about what journalists do – or should do – than I did as a practitioner. Teaching gives you time to think, and to read – and the job description includes the expectation that you say things that sound profound. So, in a scope broader than, say, reporting on an issue before City Council, I’ve had to try to grasp and then explain what is so special about the job we do – to persuade students and critics that a free society depends on a vigorously free press, that the public cannot possibly assess the institutions of society without our independent reporting. 

It was in Moscow that I was getting the hang of explaining this – or at least I like to think so. It was 1992. The Berlin Wall had just come down; the Soviet Union had disintegrated; Russia was toying with a responsible public and a responsive government – neither of which had Russia ever had before – and maybe doesn’t even yet. I was on a Fulbright lectureship in the journalism faculty at Moscow State University. My Russian students could mouth the First Amendment quicker than my American students, but they had not the slightest idea of its implications. Write critically of government? Oh, I couldn’t do that!, they’d say. 

Russia taught me the necessity of establishing overarching ideals or goals and then seeing how we might reach them. What is the goal of a free society? What are the responsibilities of a representative government? Of the public to be informed? Of the press to accurately, fairly, aggressively report and write about how well the world works? I learned that important things really are very important, and that details are only that. The world got a lot simpler – a few big things, and a huge pile of relatively insignificant matters handled without much debate once the major issues – the really important goals – are understood. 

No. It’s not always that easy. I was in Baku, Azerbaijan, to talk to journalists there shortly after the government was trying to intimidate the opposition press by having goons beat up aggressive reporters. And in one case, a high-ranking official stabbed a reporter in the eye with a pencil – blinding the reporter for a story the government didn’t like. We agreed that a journalist’s first responsibility was to write stories so they could expect to live to write another one.

 Another benefit of teaching is it’s easy to pretend immortality. Students are a teacher’s immortality. The Dick Amhrines. The Rob Hedelts – don’t blame me for his spelling, though. The Irina Dmitrievas, a student at Moscow State University, now a media lawyer in Chicago. The Marc Santoras, at age 25 or so, writing elegantly and compassionately from Iraq for the New York Times. The Mike Allens – when someone tells me about a Washington Post story that really eviscerates the administration on some embarrassing issue, I know exactly who wrote it before seeing the paper.

 The ideals of George Mason are among those few concepts that we journalists honor every day – I hope – in our work. His declaration of rights, approved June 12, 1776, was humankind’s first authoritative formulation of the doctrine of inalienable rights. Thomas Jefferson was strongly influenced by Mason’s ideals, and the Declaration of Independence clearly reflects Mason’s principles and perspectives. He condemned slavery “disgraceful to mankind.” 

Mason’s enumeration of rights is the first article in the Virginia constitution, not amendments tacked on at some later date.

 His first section deals with Equality and rights of men. “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, … they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity.”

 His second declares people are the bearers of value in a free society: “That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people, that magistrates are their trustees and servants.” 

And his third, “That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people … and, whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it.”

 In Section 12 he deals with the fundamental role that free speech and press play in society: “That the freedoms of speech and of the press are among the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained except by despotic governments.”

 You can see, I am certain, why I am so profoundly grateful to be honored by an award named for this man. And another thing: It is my understanding that a cabal of former students conspired in my nomination. To Mr. Potter and his co-conspirators, may I say, there is no higher honor than to be remembered in this way by one’s former students and, now, friends.