The view of freedom from where it wasn't

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Ex-patriot journalists can get very patriotic. They can see no reason to hide it for someone else's imagined allegiance to objectivity over allegiance to country. Try teaching the tenets of western journalism to students from throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, their countries still thawing out from the Cold War and the frigid embrace of Stalinism. Look at the faces of Kosovo refugees, of Albanians worried about home and family, of ethnic minorities in a time of ethnic cleansing.The American University in Bulgaria held classes in an old communist headquarters. The idea was to spread free thinking where none had been allowed. Yet the region was not very much advanced from the time of the gulag. Bulgaria had still locked political rebels away in secret places even after Russia had stopped. American journalists-turned-teachers built a distressing reputation for themselves when first allowed into Eastern European classrooms. Students had them pegged as preachers of do-as-we-do, who would go back home after giving no real, pragmatic advice for coping with governments that had no sense of our First Amendment. There can be no American-style press without basic press freedom. So it's useless to tell new journalists to copy us. That reality travelled with me to American University as a Fulbright professor in the secondary city of Blagoevgrad, named for the founder of the Bulgarian communist movement. I looked out on my multi-ethnic, multi-national class in a setting that made 1958 look modern. And I said to the students' relief, "All right, let's figure out how you can do the best journalism you can without getting killed. Even if you merely get thrown into jail, you're still not going to be able to publish the closest approximation to truth all journalists seek." The students loved my American practicality. And I had a renewed appreciation for the press freedom they lacked and we take for granted in the United States. The final exam consisted of 9/11, which occurred during my Bulgarian semester, 2001. Weeping Muslim and Christian and the pro-American and the nominally anti-American students and people embraced my family and me. My students in particular felt an evil blow fell on a people who understood freedom better than any. An ex-pat looking homeward at a time of tragedy from a vantage of the freedom-deprived can see patriotism quite clearly. It's a foolish journalist who pretends not to be affected by feelings for country, whose Constitution makes our profession possible.