NEW BEDFORD, Mass. – Sunday Sept 26, 2010 – The Friend of the New Bedford Fisherman award was presented to Richard Gaines and the Gloucester Daily Times at the Working Waterfront Festival in New Bedford. The following is Mr. Gaines' acceptance speech, delivered on behalf of himself and Gloucester Times editor Ray Lamont, at State Fish Pier, New Bedford.
Jim (Kendall), Mayor Lang, Attorney General Coakley, municipal officials, friends and all the good folks of New Bedford and the Ocean Nation. You have welcomed us, trusted us to tell your stories honestly, and now you have given us a bouquet of honor.
I consider this award the highest and most gratifying in my 42 years of scribbling, trying to decipher what’s happening to our civilization and give readers a series of stories that can be read as a narrative to help them decide what to do about it.
I learned a little about your industry and culture in the two years the Gloucester Daily Times, to which I will be forever grateful, has allowed me to devote all my energies to fishing. On the other hand, over my life, I learned quite a little about newspapers.
I won’t waste your time and talk about fishing – something you know a lot more about than I. But I’d like to give you a few thoughts about the press.
Newspapering and fishing have some things in common, other than that they are both endangered ways of life, each a synthesis of values and required commitments that the rest of society doesn’t share, understand or value much any more.
Of course, and needless to say, the great difference is danger. Newspapering does not require the embrace of mortal danger, and that distinction overwhelms all else, and makes fishing very special all by itself.
But fishing and newspapering are both deadline driven production line businesses. Either you get the product to market on time or you fail.
Both are professional crafts, with unwritten ethical codes employed by members of the guild who need no degree of any kind to be admitted and prosper or fail based on their talent effort and luck.
Both are hunter-gatherer industries…and demand a perpetual contest with the unknown, with the risk of crushing disappointment to match the elation of being in the right place at the right time.
As I said, both are endangered. But the impending tragedy of the decline of the fishing fleet is much greater than the loss of newspapers. For while the fishing industry has been struggling to survive, the death of newspapers is mostly self-inflicted.
Newspapers die when they stop doing the essential work only they can do. What that is was put well by Walter Lippmann, one of the 20th century’s great journalists.
Lippmann asserted that a newspaper’s job is to report the “truth,” and truth-seeking he defined as the effort to “bring to light the hidden facts, to put them in relation with one another and to create a picture of reality on which man can act.”
That’s what the Gloucester Daily Times and your own Standard Times have been trying to do, belatedly for both newspapers, but still, now, perhaps not too belatedly to help inform the rest of the people of the shameful tale … of how the federal government and false altruists wrapped in green and blue camouflage have been trying to elbow the fishermen out of the way so that investment capital can begin exploiting the vast array of riches in the sea.
These include but are not limited to the fish themselves. Despite what the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and other elite, privileged papers insist on writing and perpetuating, the fish are returned.
And the descendants of America’s original industry should be allowed to work to keep their culture alive.
The decision of those papers to give tacit approval to the federal government’s plan to displace and dispossess the fishermen is nothing less than collaboration.
The Globe warrants special contempt. Unlike The New York Times and the Washington Post, the Globe‘s market includes all of New England’s fishing communities.
It’s performance exposes an elitist ignorance and cowardice. It allowed itself to be duped by the federal fisheries police and enlisted in the effort to destroy the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction.
And when its role was exposed, instead of fessing up and trying to fix the harm it caused with a burst of truthful reporting, The Globe continued its willing blindness to the story.
Shame on the Globe.
In promulgating these lies, these powerful newspapers have insulted the inspiration of Lippmann and Jefferson who predicted accurately that without a free and courageous press, democracy would whither and disappear.
We row as best we can against that tide. And inspired by Gloucester’s great fisherman Howard Blackburn, we will row until the oars rot away, then we'll paddle with our hands.
This is my Pulitzer Prize, and I will cherish it always.
Thank you.