Defending Our Colleagues: The Birth of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Mission to Central America

This seminar presentation tells the story of the birth of the Committee to Protect Journalists—a global nonprofit that advocates for journalists’ safety around the world. In the presentation, Dr. Lindsay Palmer will ​discuss the precarious events in South and Central America that led two young journalists to create the CPJ, in hopes that they could use their self-perceived privilege as members of the “free” US press to champion the rights of journalists in “less enlightened” places. Inspiring famous reporters like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather to join their cause, the founders of the CPJ decided the Committee’s first mission would be to visit El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, where competing ideologies and varying levels of US government support led to risky environments for journalists. The presentation will ultimately raise questions about the CPJ’s efforts at exporting a deeply “American” definition of press freedom at a time when that concept was under intense scrutiny in Central America, as well as at UNESCO.

Lindsay Palmer is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW–Madison. She studies global journalism from a humanist perspective, especially focusing on two primary questions: 1) What challenges inform the labor of international news reporting and documentary production in the digital age, and 2) how do international news reports and documentaries represent cultural difference, particularly when addressing human rights violations? Palmer’s first book is called Becoming the Story: War Correspondents since 9/11 (University of Illinois Press 2018). Her second book is called The Fixers: Local News Workers and the Underground Labor of International Reporting (Oxford University Press 2019). Palmer is currently working on two new book projects: one of these conducts a cultural history of the Committee to Protect Journalists. The other book project looks at gender and press freedom in the digital age.