Steven S. Greenhouse '73, P'08 Remarks
I’m deeply honored to receive this award, and not just because I loved McConaughy Dining Hall and the intense conversations we used to have there over dinner as the sun set over the cemetery on Vine Street. I am honored that the Wesleyan community is recognizing the work I have done in my decades as a journalist. I’ve tried to make my professors proud.
I am of course thrilled that my daughter, Emily, is also receiving this award. People sometimes flatter me and say my brilliant daughter takes after me. I say, “No, she takes after my mother,” a poor girl from the Bronx who, after graduating from NYU, was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Unfortunately, her myopic mother said, “Oy, I’m not going to let my daughter go to the other end of the earth, to the cornfields of Iowa.” My mother became a social worker and not a writer or editor. I feel that my daughter took the baton from my mother, her grandmother, and is pursuing her grandmother’s dreams.
A confession: I was not a stellar student at Wesleyan. I treated Wesleyan as a continuation of high school—playing soccer, playing clarinet in the orchestra, working at the school newspaper. In the year I was the Argus’s editor-in-chief, I probably devoted 40 hours a week to the paper: so dear Wesleyan Professors, please belatedly forgive me for sometimes not devoting enough time to my studies.
Another confession: I read only one-fifth of Don Quixote’s 1,000-plus pages for one of my Wesleyan seminars. Nowadays I think what a fool I was not to have read Cervantes’ great novel when I had the chance.
One of my most fateful moments at Wesleyan came sophomore year when I got a paper back from Philosophy Professor Philip Hallie. On one page in the right-hand margin, he wrote, “turgid.” I had to look up that word to double-check the meaning. One definition, and I quote was “(of language or style) tediously pompous or bombastic.” I henceforth tried my darnedest never to be tediously pompous or bombastic and to make sure that my writing was clear, smooth, and accessible. I want to belatedly thank Professor Hallie for giving me the kick in the derriere I so badly needed to improve my writing.
My four years at Wesleyan taught me two extremely important things that prepared me for life after college: how to write and how to analyze—whether a Balzac novel or a Supreme Court decision. Those two abilities—how to write (and explain) and how to analyze have served me well in my years in journalism. I should mention one other thing my Wesleyan professors emphasized in course after course– the importance of searching for truth, defending the truth and speaking the truth.
I just mentioned Don Quixote. As a journalist, I felt that I, too, was at times tilting at windmills when I sought to persuade some people to accept the truth rather than absurd conspiracy theories and QAnon lunacies. I am forever flabbergasted by how hard it is to get many people to accept straightforward facts and truths. As my daughter and wife will attest, I spend too much time on Twitter. I have sometimes replied to people on Twitter, saying, “Sorry, what you posted is inaccurate.” Their response often was, “You [expletive deleted] worked at the communist, propagandistic New York Times. Why in the world should I believe anything you say? You wouldn’t recognize a fact if it hit you in the face.”
As someone who spent 31 years writing for a newspaper that has millions of readers, I quickly learned that if I got the slightest fact wrong, my editors and I quickly heard from irate readers. I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, tense as hell, because deep somewhere in my unconscious, I realized I had made a mistake in the story I wrote that day—perhaps writing that the minimum wage in a state was $9 an hour when it was $8 an hour. I have zero patience for the wing nuts who lecture me that I, as a Times journalist, couldn’t care less about facts and just made stuff up. It’s deeply troubling to realize that propaganda organizations like Fox News and Breitbart have used a succession of lies to sway millions of Americans to believe that Fox and Breitbart are infinitely fairer and more factual than the New York Times or Washington Post.
Like my Times colleagues, I felt that I was working for truth. I felt my role, our role, was to dig out the truth and report the truth, to inform readers about what was important. This may sound corny, but I felt that we journalists promoted and strengthened our democracy by seeking to ensure that the nation had an informed citizenry.
This, too, may sound corny: I felt that my years at Wesleyan, that my liberal arts education, that my double major in the College of Letters and Government prepared my very well to be a newspaper reporter, whether as the Times European economics correspondent based in Paris for five years or as the Times’ labor and workplace reporter for 19 years.
When I became the Times’ labor and workplace reporter in 1995, I took that role very seriously. I thought, I’m the sole labor reporter at one of the world’s greatest newspapers and in that role, I need to explain to readers not just what’s happening with the nation’s more than 130 million workers, but what’s happening with sweatshops in Bangladesh, China and Central America. I felt my role was to tell readers who made $250,000 or $2.5 million a year what it’s like for workers struggling to get by on $25,000 a year.
As the NYT’s labor reporter, I wrote about the struggles of living on the minimum wage, about the disproportionate number of Hispanic workers who died on the job, about 12-year-old farmworkers in Delaware and Virginia, about retail store managers illegally erasing hours from workers’ timecards. I wrote about the 117 workers who died in the Tazreen garment factory fire in Bangladesh, and why all the factory inspectors hired by Walmart and other companies had failed to uncover the grave hazards that made that factory a fire trap.
When I began covering labor, 15 or so other newspapers had labor reporters, but after a dozen years of newspapers downsizing their staffs, I discovered that I was the nation’s last full-time labor reporter at a daily newspaper. I felt like a brontosaurus on the brink of extinction, I also felt like a proud survivor desperate to preserve and protect his turf. I felt a profound responsibility—I was the lone daily journalist devoted to telling the nation what was happening with America’s workers. Eventually I earned the title, “Dean of America’s labor reporters.” That sounded better than “Dinosaur of America’s labor reporters.”
As a Times reporter, I took fairness, balance and truth VERY seriously. Back in 1997, I covered what was the largest strike in decades—a 15-day walkout by 185,000 UPS workers. I tried to be scrupulously balanced because I knew that if my stories favored one side over the other, the next day UPS or the union would complain to my editors that Greenhouse was biased. Each day, after I finished writing my story about the strike—most of those stories ran on the front page, which was great for my considerable ego—I would painstakingly count how many paragraphs could be considered pro-union and how many pro-UPS. I’d try to make sure the number was equal. That type of “balanced” journalism is now often derided as both-sidesism.
Years ago I gave a speech at Wesleyan about the conflicts that journalists sometimes encounter between balance and truth. What happens if you’re a journalist covering a labor dispute or political campaign and you interview both sides and you know that one side is lying to you. You might not want to quote that person in your story, but if you fail to quote both sides, your editor will probably be upset with you for not being even-handed. But if you quote both sides while knowing that one side is lying, you are helping propagate a lie to your readers. You, the journalist, are serving as a conveyer belt for falsehoods.
What is a reporter to do? Back then, when both-sidesism reigned, we generally resigned ourselves to quoting both sides AND felt somewhat ashamed to quote the side that was lying.
That has changed somewhat, largely because of Donald Trump, who, by the way, is allergic to telling the truth. In recent years if a journalist was doing a Biden-versus-Trump article, the journalist might quote a Trump lie and then follow that quotation with a paragraph laying out the facts to correct Trump’s falsehoods. Some people say that journalist is being biased and anti-Trump. I submit that that journalist is trying to convey the truth to readers.
Back in 1969, when my class entered Wesleyan, the Vietnam War was raging. Truth and government lies became a huge issue for us. Nixon and Kissinger were carrying out a horrific war that killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans, all while the White House and Pentagon kept saying that victory was around the corner. We saw through the lies. We joined a nationwide campus strike in May 1970 to protest the Vietnam war and America’s bombing of Cambodia. The campus-wide strike at Wesleyan was hugely exciting. It was also an exercise in questioning, in critical thinking, in peeling away the government’s lies to get to the truth.
During my years at Wesleyan, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia became my gospel, my favorite book. I embraced Orwell because he was a fierce advocate for truth and a fierce opponent of fascism nd also because he cared about workers and the poor—AND also because his writing wasn’t at all turgid.
In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell writes about when he bravely volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco’s fascists. Orwell joined an anarchist brigade—the anarchists were working with the Communists to beat back Franco’s efforts to topple Spain’s democratic government. Long story short, the Communists—angry that their anarchist allies didn’t submit to their wishes—loosed a hugely dishonest flood of propaganda against the anarchists. At a time when many anarchists were dying fighting the fascists, the Communist propaganda machine was denouncing the anarchists as a fascist fifth column.
Orwell, man of principle, grew outraged and disgusted with those lies. The outrage he felt in Spain, the Communist lies and propaganda he saw there, inspired him to write 1984 and Animal Farm.
In Homage to Catalonia, one sees Orwell struggling to sift through all the stinking lies and propaganda in an effort to ascertain the truth. “It is like diving into a cesspool,” he wrote. “But it is necessary to try and establish the truth, so far it is possible.”
Orwell added, “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.” That’s a motto we should all live by in our current era when so many politicians and so-called news networks are constantly warring against the truth. (I should note that some historians later explained that Orwell—as a volunteer soldier on the ground—couldn’t and didn’t see the whole picture and got some of his facts wrong.)
One summer I was so inspired by Orwell that I read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the way that totalitarian regimes wage a constant war against truth. She wrote, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we [citizens] take our bearings in the real world… is being destroyed.”
Today—I fear—many Americans have been so inundated with lies that they have lost their bearings. The airwaves and Internet are so flooded with lies that it has undermined our democracy. Think of all the liars who assert that human-caused climate change is a hoax. How can we hold fair elections, how can we maintain our democracy when so many Americans are continually fed and continually swallow falsehoods?
There is a war going on, and those of us who believe in truth, who respect truth need to join in and fight—not just now, but for years to come.
Forgive me. I’ve been remiss about something important. I need to thank the many Wesleyan professors who inspired me, who inspired us, to question everything, a la Socrates, and to probe more deeply to reach for the truth. There are so many people I want to thank: Paul Schwaber, Richard Vann, Jeremy Zwelling, Joe Reed, David Adamany, Jack Paton. I am so indebted to them and to many more.
At a time when truth is under siege and facts under attack, we need universities more than ever. We need places like Wesleyan to teach students—as Wesleyan taught me—about the vital importance of pursuing truth and the importance of speaking the truth and defending the truth. I thank Wesleyan for this award and for teaching me, from first year Humanities on, to search for truth and speak up for truth.