Last month, I heard Seymour Hersh, who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam 36 years ago and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse more recently, at a fundraiser for journalistic freedom. He began by saying he would be offering no hope for the course that his nation, the U.S., is on, especially in Iraq. He didn’t try to be eloquent or even structured. He rambled from grim insight to grim insight.

For instance: An Israeli he knows, who admits hating Palestinians and willingly mistreats them but also knows that eventually he and they must learn to live together, said he’d never act toward his enemies as U.S. troops have in Iraq, because the hostility created might never be overcome. That was the tone. After 45 minutes, Seymour Hersh just ended and sat down to worshipful applause from Canadian journalists. There’s a refreshing quality to honest gloom and to people who don’t try to boost you just to be nice. But is there also something occupational in his despair?

British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, in his new book, The Great War for Civilization, says in his 30 years there he has become “an ever more infuriated bystander.” He used to think a reporter’s job was to witness, but he quotes Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who has chosen to live among Palestinians in occupied territory: “Our job is to monitor the centres of power.” He calls that “the best definition of journalism I have heard,” and he is a great hearer; it’s what so enlivens his writing. And yet, on whose behalf does he monitor those centres, and why even bother?

I mean it. If you find only and endlessly what he calls the “arrogance of power,” then it will lead to unrelieved despair and dashed hopes for a better future. Robert Fisk has a keen sense of history, which he imparts in a charming, gossipy way and which he says he shares with Osama bin Laden, whom he’s interviewed three times.

As he watched U.S. tanks roll toward Baghdad, he recalled Rome’s legions, the British in 1919 etc. “How to correct history, that’s the thing,” he frets. But he has no answer and concludes his book: “Never had the Middle East been so fearful a place in which to live.”

Perhaps — and I say this tentatively — gloom spreads among journalists because the potential sources of hope tend to fly under their radar. Those sources are found among the non-powerful, in popular, often local movements for change, to which the media are unattuned. They turn to Bono or the Gateses, Time‘s persons of the year, when searching for hope.

At times, popular movements do erupt into the news, like the 2002 uprising that restored Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to power after a coup; or last week’s Bolivian election of an indigenous president. But mostly they exist outside the categories of what counts as news.

In the past, journalists have sometimes explored such movements: John Reed’s coverage of the Russian Revolution or Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, but even then they stressed the emergence onto history’s grand stage of mass struggles. They didn’t focus on regular people’s roles. And it’s certainly true that popular movements can get grungy, too, especially as they develop their own leaderships and elites. But, at bottom, it is ordinary people, without ambitious personal agendas, who almost always remain a source of inspiration about human possibility, and tend to be responsible for whatever victories over arrogant power are won.

“What makes things better,” says Noam Chomsky, surely the most prominent dissident intellectual in the world, though not a journalist, “is popular movements. . . . That’s how we’ve gained the freedoms we have.” He cites women’s rights, freedom of speech, the vote, and the recent Iraqi election, among other victories.

Robert Fisk will certainly soldier on: “Through the veil of Iraqi tears, I will draw more portraits of suffering and pain and greed and occasional courage.” Note that only the courage in his list appears as occasional. The rest — suffering, pain, greed — are constants and far more typical of what journalists such as he, Seymour Hersh and Amira Hass usually explore. It’s not an easy lot. I wish him, them and you a happier, more hopeful new year.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.