DOUG MENDENHALL

I went for a long, hot walk past the White House

Doug Mendenhall

Greetings from the nation’s capital, where I’ve been attending a meeting of the Association of Educators of Enemies of the American People. All the journalism professors are here, talking about nerdy stuff such as accreditation reports and the best way to use Twitter as a reporting tool.

I took off one day from all the meetings to play tourist with an ACU journalism student who is attending as my co-author on a paper about levels of civility on Christian websites. I told you it was nerdy.

Lani Ford and I walked a muggy mile to the White House on Tuesday morning. It looked just like it looks on TV, but you had to cross to the far side of the street as you went by, because guys with flak jackets and weapons said so.

From that far away I couldn’t see if anybody was home. At any rate, since the man who lives there recently said journalists are “enemies of the American people,” it’s not like he was going to invite us in.

So, we walked on to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and several other markers of what makes America great.

It was getting hotter, but the lines of tourists were long outside places such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. A little farther up, on Pennsylvania Avenue, we did find a museum where we could walk right into the air-conditioned lobby and get tickets with no waiting.

It was the Newseum, dedicated to increasing people’s understanding of why we need a free press and how our society is infused by the First Amendment’s side-by-side guarantees of freedom of religion and of expression.

It’s a six-floor experience, and I told my student lots of nerdy details above and beyond the exhibits.

But what really made an impression on me, toward the end, was the wall displaying photographs of hundreds of journalists who have been killed on the job. It’s not surprising that reporters die in places such as Burma and Bosnia, but off to the side is an easel displaying five recent additions, gunned down while at a newspaper office in Maryland.

There’s plenty of room to add those five to the wall, plus hundreds more if the world stays so deadly to journalists.

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I’ll be back in Abilene by the time you read this, but I hope the man who lives in the White House gets a chance to walk over and see the Newseum, or at least that wall.

I also hope that my fellow Christians who live far from the museum will pause and think about the parallels between freedom of religion and freedom of the press.

Throughout the Old Testament, men were raised up by God to speak truth to powerful leaders. Prophets, we call them. Some died because of their troubling messages. Jesus was raised up in the New Testament, and he died too, at the hands of powerful leaders who resented his message.

The First Amendment insists that powerful leaders must leave the rest of us alone to practice our faith as we feel led, and must leave the press alone to follow truth wherever it leads.

It would be nice if those who love the religious freedom promised by the First Amendment would put an arm around those who pursue the press freedom it promises just a few words later.

Email Dr. Doug Mendenhall, who teaches journalism at Abilene Christian University, at doug.mendenhall@acu.edu.