Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader, has been gunned down by assassins on motorcycles. Steve Coll has published a long, extraordinary statement from Wickramatunga in anticipation of his own death:
The free media serve as a mirror in which the public can see itself sans mascara and styling gel. From us you learn the state of your nation, and especially its management by the people you elected to give your children a better future. Sometimes the image you see in that mirror is not a pleasant one. But while you may grumble in the privacy of your armchair, the journalists who hold the mirror up to you do so publicly and at great risk to themselves. That is our calling, and we do not shirk it.
Read this and then think of the detestable Joe the Plumber, who has traveled to Israel not just to weigh in on a conflict of which he has no knowledge, but to declare that journalists should not be permitted to cover war. “You [journalists] make a big deal out of it,” he whines. Just think about that: Wickramatunga goes to his grave open-eyed to fight for the right that Wurzelbacher, a man with no credentials of any kind, mocks while enjoying the privilege of speaking on camera, on a topic he can teach no one anything about.
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