This week, I typed in "journalist shot" on Google News and found the following: "Iraqi journalist dead by sniper."
"Zimbabwean shot and wounded in South Africa."
"Young journalist shot dead in northern Sri Lanka."
At the top of list, however, was a story from a wire service in the Philippines that read: "U.S. journalist shot dead as he walked to work." This is how the tragic murder of Oakland Post editor, Chauncey Bailey, has been reported internationally.
In what is proving to be a black eye for the city of Oakland and country at large, Bailey's murder could suggests a closer relationship to barbarism than our deeply held democratic values acknowledge.
Publications as diverse as The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian in the United Kingdom along with France's Le Monde have reported on this story. I have received emails nationally and internationally asking whether or not I knew Chauncey Bailey. I did.
In one brazen moment Oakland was besieged by the twin demons of irony and absurdity. Absurdity because Bailey's 13-year-old son has joined the unfortunate fraternity that plagues too many young African-American males on the cusp of adolescence, who for various reasons, must tread this unpredictable path without their father.
It is tragically ironic because U.S. journalist are not assassinated, at least not on American soil, especially downtown during the morning commute. It has been over 30 years since America has witnessed a domestic assassination of a journalist.
Conversely, when Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered earlier this year -- many believe because of her strong criticism of the war in Chechnya -- it marked the 43rd journalist killed in Russia since 1993.
We have little trouble believing such things could happen in Russia, who ranks third behind Iraq and Algeria as the deadliest places for journalists to work. The fate that befell Bailey was not reserved for Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who by comparison worked on a story of profound national importance.
Furthering the irony is Bailey's death implies the strangest sort of complement that could be bestowed upon the work any news organization. It indicates that he, along with the Oakland Post, were in pursuit of a truth that left them impervious to the risks for their own safety.
As the world's oldest democracy it doesn't require much reading of the Bill of Rights to realize the importance of free press. In this context, Bailey's murder becomes the most barbaric of sorts because it is an attack on the very ideals that the country was founded. It is to believe that truth can indeed be suppressed.
Neil Henry, acting interim dean at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, issued a statement calling Bailey's murder "not only an act of brutality and immorality, but an assault on civic institutions we cherish."
Should it require a journalist's death in the line of duty to serve as the barometer for an organization's commitment to uncovering the truth?
I would like to think such questions are ridiculous, but perhaps not so from the public's standpoint where justified cynicism abounds? In a profession that makes room for the diversity of Bill O'Reilly, Jayson Blair, Walter Cronkite, and Tom Wicker it might be harder to distinguish the journalistic difference than one may realize.
The decline of newspapers across the country is accompanied by the reduction of investigative reporters who are on the ground, sometimes risking their lives, to uncover the truth. Without them, columnists, bloggers, pundits, etc. would be at a loss for offering any worthy commentary.
The final irony is Bailey's death accomplished nothing -- rendering it senseless indeed. If anything, it was a cowardly act that may have sped up the inevitable.
For all of the implications of truth, irony, absurdity, and democracy, Bailey's death appears to be but another in the long running series known as black on black crime. Sadly, this is a series that has no end in sight.
Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist.
E-mail him at byron@byronspeaks.com or leave a message at (510) 208-6417